With the met­ric ton of of video game announce­ments and show­ings at this year’s E3  it was pretty dif­fi­cult to sort the wheat from the chaff. But I’ve man­aged to whit­tle down a list of favourites to the fol­low­ing titles:

Mod­ern War­fare 2

This is the the sixth in the Call of Duty series, but for some bizarre rea­son (prob­a­bly related to the ter­ri­ble, odd-numbered CoD games) they’ve dropped the CoD prefix.

Strangely enough what I’m most excited about in Mod­ern War­fare 2 is the ice climb­ing. Finally a gam­ing mechanic that’s not com­pletely tapped out.

From the game­play video below it looks like Mod­ern War­fare 2 is build­ing on the qual­ity set by it’s pre­de­ces­sor. And it’s good to see Soap still kick­ing around.

The Last Guardian

ICO and Shadow of the Col­los­sus are two of the most mem­o­rable games I’ve ever played. ICO for the emo­tional res­o­nance with ICO and Yorda; and Shadow of the Col­los­sus for hav­ing me make the hard­est deci­sion ever — choose between falling into a crush­ing depres­sion by killing the enor­mous, but beneva­lent Col­lossi or put the game away and miss out on the gam­ing expe­ri­ence of the decade. I haven’t opened that damn case in two years.

While I really want to play this game. I’m in com­plete agree­ment with the Penny Arcade guys. There really is only two ways that this game can end. I don’t think I can han­dle either of them.

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Brü­tal Legend

I’d been fol­low­ing the devel­op­ment of Brü­tal Leg­end for quite a while, so this year’s E3 footage held no real sur­prises for me. What it did do is reaf­firm just how much I’m look­ing for­ward to play­ing the shit out of it come October.

Jack Black, rock and roll, left of field comedics and wacky adven­tur­ing. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

Assassin’s Creed 2

I’ve only just started play­ing the first game but the pos­si­bil­ity of more medieval killing sprees has me crazy excited.

The addi­tion of dou­ble assas­si­na­tions, swim­ming(!) and that fly­ing machine from Hud­son Hawk is just icing on a very sharp and pointy cake.