The most compelling E3 games and announcements

By Phil Hornshaw

Each year, June sees the most compelling conference in all of video games: the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. It’s at E3 that developers show off all their biggest upcoming games, announce new ones, speak with the press and generally each try to have the coolest, most compelling show. It’s like the Super Bowl of video games, and it lasts for three days.

This year’s E3 was especially thrilling for video game fans. With the newly announced next-generation consoles, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, got plenty of stage time. Many of the big publishers rolled out new, unannounced titles to take advantage of all that hardware. There are some very cool things on the horizon.

New consoles, new games

New consoles are pretty much great news to everyone in the video gaming community, whether you play on a PlayStation, an Xbox or a PC. Microsoft and Sony’s new consoles will be available later this year, and pre-orders are available for them at stores such as Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart (with the latter pair offering 2.5 percent Cash Back).

A bunch of new games were announced for the new consoles and for PC, taking advantage of the next generation hardware. Among the most exciting was Titanfall from Electronic Arts, a multiplayer game in which players can pilot giant mechanized bipedal tanks called Titans. And The Division, a multiplayer shooter-slash-role-playing game from Ubisoft. Both will leverage the next generation of consoles with connected experiences that emphasize the ability of players to frag each other in huge environments and in interesting new ways.

Old favorites make a big splash

Also big on the floor were major sequels to beloved franchises. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag takes the storied stealth series to the Caribbean and puts players in the role of eighteenth-century pirates, Metal Gear Solid comes back and features the voice of Kiefer Sutherland in Metal Gear Solid V, and Call of Duty: Ghosts brings a new graphical engine to step up the biggest franchise in gaming’s graphical look. And you won’t need a next-gen console to enjoy all those titles, which are also coming to the current generation of machines, too.

You can pre-order all those games at the retailers listed above, as well as at GameStop, which also offers 2.5 percent Cash Back. With new games and new consoles coming later this year, we’ve only scratched the surface of the great titles we can expect throughout 2013 and into 2014.