Hey there, everyone! Former GameCola staff writer Michael Gray here. GameCola’s Editor in Chief, Paul Franzen, wants me to come out of retirement—if you can consider copy/pasting articles from my blog as “not writing for GameCola”—and report on this year’s biggest videogame convention: E3.

E3 is being held on June 7 through June 9 this year. To prepare for E3, I watched the E3 Preview episode of Game Trailers with Geoff Keighley. Here are my thorough notes on the episode:

E3 Preview

• The Tomb Raider series is being rebooted again. This time, Lara is going to Japan to solve some mysteries. And…Square Enix is producing it, so now Lara looks like a Final Fantasy character. Will this game star Justin Bieber? We’ll have to find out. The preview shows her inside a submarine that has sprung a leak, but she gets out just in time.
• Soul Calibur Five is coming out in 2012. It stars characters I don’t know, who are fighting with big swords. And they’re on a ship. Like most fighting games, the characters say various things when they land blows, such as “Ha!” and “Take that!” and “You can’t beat me!” Unless I’m mistaken, one of the characters doesn’t want to fight, because she keeps saying things like “Sorry!” and “I don’t want to hurt you!”. I am definitely going to pick that character if I ever play this game.
• Back to the Future: The Game: Episode Five: Marty McFly and the Order of the Phoenix is being released this month. The new episode will have Michael J. Fox voice a character. The brief preview shows that he is a random truck driver. Looks like the GameCola Facebook Crew was wrong for once about Telltale’s big announcement.

• Spider-Man: Edge of Time is a cause-and-effect action game. I have no idea what that means. It takes place in 2099, and the villain will be Auntie Venom. This villain appears to be greenish, and she is built like a truck. There appear to be two Spider-Men in this game.
• Geoff talks about things I don’t understand.
• The two big sports games this year are SSX and FIFA 2012. Both games follow the proud tradition of not using lower-case letters in game titles. The preview for FIFA looked absolutely nothing like a real soccer match, because the players were taking shots, instead of pretending to be injured every three seconds. The SSX preview showed off their fancy scenery, instead of gameplay.
• Prey 2 is the sequel to 2006’s Prey. This time, you’re fighting aliens as a bounty hunter named Samus Ar—I mean, Annakin Skywalker. It sort of looks like the start of Star Wars: Episode 2, except everyone is running instead of using spaceships.

• Dark Souls is an RPG, and it is the spiritual successor to the PS3 game Demon Souls. It’s made by Namco. The preview shows a dungeon with people locked in jail cells. Then, we see a dude fighting huge bosses. And that’s basically it. There are about ten shots of this guy fighting bosses. Also, there are zombies and fire. The slogan is Prepare to Die. No typical RPG things were shown.
• Then, they showed mock-ups of what the various E3 booths will look like. I fast-forwarded through this.
• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has more people with big swords fighting each other. That makes about five previews in a row starring swordfights. They should make a game called Buff Dudes With Gigantic Swords Bash Bad Guys. It would be a bestseller, for sure.
• They waited until the end of the episode to show off their biggest game: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. It has gameplay set in Syria, and my DVR cut off right before they showed the preview. Thanks a lot, Comcast!

That’s all they had on the TV show, but I couldn’t help but notice they forgot to mention the three big companies: Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. That’s mainly because these companies are keeping their presentations a secret, but there is no lack of speculation on what they will do at E3.

E3 Rumors

• Nintendo is expected to debut their upcoming system, the Super Wii. Rumors say its hardware is about as powerful as the Xbox 360, which is sort of a funny feature to brag about. I can see the ad campaign now: “Buy the Super Wii! It’s almost as good as a last-gen system!” Everyone is excited about the controller, which is rumored to have a six-inch touchscreen, complete with built-in camera, two analog sticks and eight buttons.
• Sony is expected to show off the PlayStation Move, and analysts predict that the Move will be a bust if they don’t provide strong support for it. Also, Sony is expected to talk a lot about the NGP. We’re expecting to hear a release date, a release price, and hopefully, a much better name for the system.
• Microsoft is expected to show off a new Halo game. It’ll be a remake of the original game, and they’ll call it “The Tenth Anniversary Edition.” Microsoft is also expected to announce a price cut for the Xbox 360.

Somehow, GameCola forgot to report the news that they are making a Phoenix Wright movie.

OK, so that should be enough E3 Preview material to keep you all satisfied for now. Tune in to GameCola on Tuesday, when E3 starts, for more videogame news!