This week, the Electronic Wireless Show podcast remembers the recently deceased E3 games show. Unfortunately, all that we can really recall is the occasional watch party, and maybe Keanu Reeves was there at one point? Was mostly just trailers, let’s be honest. Thus we also consider the events that replace it (with a side-chat on this year’s Game Awards), and how we’d design our own glittering showcase o' games.

We also share what we’ve been playing this week, make a single non-PC game recommendation (that also represents the strangest coincidence in EWS history), and take another look at the Lenovo Legion Go. Last time I talk about the Lenovo Legion Go for a while, promise.

You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat.

Read more

Video game openings have always been a source of fascination for me. As a player, you're excited by the prospect of the game to come - the sights you'll see, the challenges you'll face - and first impressions can make or break your entire perception of what a game is versus the one you had stored in your head before switching it on. For video game creators, however, a new beginning is often racked with questions. What, exactly, do you choose to show players first? How will you introduce them to something they've never seen before? And if that game is successful, how do you keep reinventing that first impression across what could be several decades?

In revisiting every mainline Doom game to celebrate its 30th anniversary this month, it's clear that even id's iconic shooter has wrestled with how to answer these question, and the ways it's tried to reinvent itself over the years paints a captivating portrait of a series trying to move with the times. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening levels. Played in close succession, crushing 30 years into not even quite three hours, what emerges isn't just the evolution of one of the all-time great PC games, but also a potted history of the FPS. So join me as we chart Doom's rise, fall and rebirth through the lens of its first stages.

Read more

We're over halfway through this year's RPS Advent Calendar now, and spoilers, but you can't leave now without seeing it through to the end. We've walled up the Treehouse and everything so you can't escape.

Read more

Confession time, readers. Before a couple of weeks ago, I had never played the original Doom. As a child, my family didn't have much money and I didn't get my first laptop until I was 16. Thus, I missed out on a lot of what are now considered PC staples. With dread, I'm often met with the accursed exclamation, "You've not played insert game> before?" followed by a good dose of judgment. But what do you do when you need to play through a backlog of games all while keeping up-to-date with new releases for work? With games now stretching out at 100+ hours apiece, where is the time for old classics like Doom?

For me, approaching Doom was cathartic. Playing a game that's older than myself was certainly an experience, but I was shocked at how well it holds up.

Read more

Fallout 4’s “next-gen update”, announced just over a year ago as part of the series’ 25th anniversary celebrations, has seen its release date pushed back into next year - meaning it will arrive close to a decade after the last major entry in the franchise.

Read more

Last time, you decided that ricochet attacks are better than blue shadows on dodges and dashes. I expected this outcome but am still glad to see a good quarter of you favoured cool essence over cool effort. We continue. This week, in honour of Doom's 30th birthday (we've already written about John Romero's memories, motion sickness, and inviting monsters to a birthday party, with more to come), I ask perhaps an impossible question. How could anyone ask you to pick between two iconic tools of ultraviolence. What kind of monster would. Yet we must. What's better: Doom's shotgun or Doom 2's super shotgun?

Read more

Back in May when I first played Ubisoft's new Metroid-like Prince Of Persia game, The Lost Crown, ahead of its reveal at this year's Summer Game Fest, I got to sample several hours' worth of some of the early areas inside its cursed mountaintop citadel of Mount Qaf. Some of protagonist Sargon's powers had been unlocked early to give us a taste of his abilities, and on the whole, I had an exceedingly good time with it. One thing was missing though, and that was any kind of narrative framing for why Sargon was here in the first place. Sure, we'd been told ahead of time that Sargon's main mission in The Lost Crown is tracking down and saving the eponymous Prince of this game, but I didn't actually see any of this in action. Anything with the slightest whiff of story about it had been expertly excised from that initial demo build, and I was left none the wiser about how those opening hours of The Lost Crown would really play out in the final game.

Now, I've been able to play the game from the beginning, with all the story bits slotted back in and Sargon's powers unlocked in the correct order. You may have got a glimpse of some of that stuff in the new trailer released during last week's Game Awards. In the space of two minutes, it sets the scene for Sargon's rescue mission by first introducing all of his fellow warrior mates, and then seconds later showing how they're all at each other's throats as they get increasingly turned around in Mount Qaf's labyrinth. And oh my, I can practically feel all the inevitable backstabbing from here. It's going to be delicious, I can tell, and I can't wait to slice them all six ways to Sunday when The Lost Crown comes out in January.

Read more

For an informed, insightful take on E3's end, please go and read Alice0's piece on why she misses it because it only lasted a week, not months. Here, you'll find markedly less insight, but a more personal take on why my E3s lay, largely, with others. More than anything, I'll miss E3 because I liked watching the original Gametrailers crew react to it live. And I liked watching them form Easy Allies once GT closed and continue the tradition, suiting up and completely losing it to the big reveals.

Read more

It's no surprise to hear that E3 is officially dead. The games industry's annual mega-marketing event had been suffering for years, then skipping 2020 due to covid without an online alternative left space for its killers to aggressively expand and make clear quite how redundant E3 had become. On one hand, E3 was a week of misleading marketing, dubious claims, expensive stunts, and empty hype. On the other, the 317 assorted online events replacing E3 are just as bad, and now they sprawl across months. I miss E3. Bring back E3. I'm sorry, E3. I didn't know how good we had it. Please, bring back E3.

Read more

What's that I hear behind today's Advent Calendar door? A sweet guitar riff and a sick drum beat that makes me want to snap my fingers forevermore? Man, I'm tapping my toes just thinking about it!

Read more