E3 2014 Cuphead - BY GOLLY!

Continuing the vague trend of everything at Microsoft's conference looked like a futuristic version of a Mega Drive game was the delightful Cuphead. Question! Would I like to play an Alien Soldier style run and gunner that looks exactly like a Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoon? Yes. Yes I would. Thank you Studio MDHR.

E3 2014 Sunset Overdrive - SHABAAM!

Open world superhero games are becoming as ubiquitous as first person shooty shoot, so it's a good job Sunset Overdrive dev Insomniac Games remembered to pack some charm. This Xbox One exclusive stays looking like the Sega Dreamcast as a video game genre. Jet Set Radio mechanics with Crazy Taxi colours and, hang on. What was a decent third-person carnage game on Dreamcast? Blue Stinger? That was shite. Spawn: In the Demon's Hand? No. That wasn't much better. Okay, this is where my analogy falls apart. Sorry. SUNSET OVERDRIVE WOOO! Genuinely has me considered an Xbox purchase.

E3 2014 Inside - PLAY DEAD

Another coup for Xbox was Play Dead's Limbo follow-up, Inside. Although, judging by the garbled language used to boast about the exclusive, Inside should make it to other consoles eventually. Like its forebear, Inside looks like a depressing trudge through an incredibly dangerous environment in which absolutely everything wants to tear you apart. Excellent! Can't wait.

E3 2014 Halo: The Master Chief Collection

Positioned in a heavily brand conscious trailer as a historical document, Halo: The Master Chief Collection offers up an Xbox One reskin of Halo 2 and 1080p 60fps conversions of the other three Chief games. While on-message guff has spoken about the live action TV series and how in-game actions can unlock details about new leading man Agent Locke, the real meat here is an exhaustive multiplayer suite featuring over 100 maps and dedicated servers. Halo fans must feel like pigs in shit.

E3 2014 Ori and the Blind Forest - SAD PANDA

Moon Studios' beautiful Ori and the Blind Forest stood out during a Microsoft conference front-heavy with dudes and bros. There's almost zero information floating around at the minute, but on a basic level it looks like a modern Rayman game with Limbo style boss encounters, trying to tug on your heartstrings.

E3 2014 Assassin's Creed Unity - STAB STAB

Controlling some sulky white dude play-acting as a ninja whilst working for religious extremists sounds kind of dull (I've done that like twenty times now). That said, shoving your way through a bloodthirsty French crowd in a minutely detailed revolution Paris does look fun. That's the Assassin's Creed games in a nutshell for me. The series has evolved into Ubisoft's umbrella brand for period carnage, an interactive horrible history lumbered with a disinteresting, arguably counter-intuitive, storyline. Assassin's Creed Unity looks no different.

E3 2014 Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - IN THE INTEREST OF TIME...

Looks like Call of Duty is a full-on science fiction franchise now. Judging by E3's Advanced Warfare footage, Sledgehammer Games have the classic Infinity Ward formula down - teams of grunts stumble through a series of sustained setpieces. It might not sound like very exciting - "Wow! A third studio can follow a recipe!" - but it's worth noting that even the modern Infinity Ward have had trouble getting their ingredients right. We're further into the near future than Ghosts or Black Ops II, using a gun that looks like it takes ammo replenishes from a 3D printer cartridge. Can't wait to be stuck rummaging around the computing isle in a supermarket looking for a compatible reload!

E3 2014 Steve Moore - Power Shuffle

E3 2014 TOFU

I'm the easiest Capcom mark in the world, so this spot for (deep breath) Super Ultra Dead Rising 3' Arcade Remix Hyper Edition EX Plus Alpha had me reassessing if I needed an Xbox One in my life. It looks like Capcom Vancouver got hold of a copy of Capcom Design Works, stuffed it in a blender with a load of penny sweets, then sprinkled the resultant gunk all over their grimey threequel.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

The X-Men series has stuck around so long it's become part of the blockbuster landscape, an old-hand with an established audience that studios are willing to bet tentpole money on. Like the Fast & Furious franchise, X-Men has shouldered genuine upsets, surviving, and eventually thriving. So while X-Men: Days of Future Past may be the series' equivalent of The Avengers, the path these films have taken hasn't been quite so homogeneous.

The Marvel branded superhero films are obsessed with continuity. Everything feeds into the next instalment. It's a model inherited from on-going comics and it's proving to be equally unsatisfying. Not that anyone seems to care. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a respectable action film with a few good car crashes, was recently held up as some sort of cinematic high-water mark. Most bizarrely of all the film was discussed in terms of damage, as if Cobie Smulders working as a spy for Tony Stark was any different from her working as a spy for SHIELD. Who gives a shit?

Permanent harm would have been Nick Fury staying dead, or having Washington DC atomised. That's universe altering. Regardless of plaudits, all the Marvel films are doing is efficiently churning out product. The directors are becoming increasingly bland and interchangeable, the writers working from corporate bullet points. Enthusiasm for this endless stream of phases seems to have more to do with brand recognition than anything else. You know what you're getting. Hero overcomes. A couple of good pops. Stinger for the next one in the credits. Three stars.

Compared to this, Future Past seems deeply personal - Bryan Singer's $200 million atonement for X-Men: The Last Stand. Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (working from a story attributed to Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman) get to work, using a time travel caper to thoroughly unravel the lasting effects of Brett Ratner's film. It isn't just resurrecting lost friends for potential sequels, it's about using Last Stand's false notes to power character arcs, pulling them apart along the way. Singer and Kinberg are attempting to heal their franchise.

After a dignified showing in the first couple of films, X3 recontextualised Professor X as a patriarchal control freak that used his abilities to psychically suppress a woman under his charge. Future Past addresses this failing in how Xavier relates to his adopted sister Mystique. With Magneto locked up deep underground, Mystique has taken over his mutant Mossad role, travelling the globe to liberate her brothers and sisters from vivisection. Mystique and Xavier's paths hinge on him accepting her as an equal capable of making her own decisions. Xavier also has to stop blaming Magneto for corrupting his little sister, she has specifically chosen this path in life. It's Xavier who must change - Mystique only has to modify her methods.

What's interesting is that our view of Mystique hardly ever aligns with Xavier's. Broadly, Mystique is the hero of the film. She's self-reliant, ruthlessly driven, and incredibly capable. She's James Bond investigating the latest plutocrat (Peter Dinklage's Bolivar Trask) with a hard-on for carnage. Like 007, Mystique comes to a reasonable conclusion - this fucker's got to go. In the unmolested timeline Mystique's wet-work and subsequent capture allows a terrible future to come to pass, complete with neon concentration camps and invincible, sadistic androids. Future Mutants don't disappear in a hail of anonymous plasma fire, they're cornered and brutally torn apart. In that sense, Future Past does a better job of handling a remorseless future full of unfeeling things than the last two Terminator films.

Mac DeMarco - Let Her Go / IJQI's Black Ops 2 Feed Greed

Perturbator - She Is Young, She Is Beautiful, She Is Next

The Killers - Jenny Was a Friend of Mine / All These Things That I've Done

ANTI-SOCIAL

Matthew Vaughn follows up X-Men: First Class with Kingsman: The Secret Service, another opportunity to play around with violent globetrotting. Adapted from a Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons comic that was essentially a slightly watered down version of Millar's earlier violent power fantasy Wanted - the hero isn't a rapist this time! Kingsman details the adventures of a street urchin inducted into the British secret service. Vaughn and writing partner Jane Goldman have priors ironing out the nasty in Millar projects. They previously managed to transform Kick-Ass from a tone deaf Frank Miller homage into a teen friendly summer blockbuster.

Yang by Daigo Ikeno

Yun by Daigo Ikeno

Call of Duty: Ghosts - AC-130 ABOVE!

One of the many things wrong with Call of Duty: Ghosts is its miserly feedback loops. Killstreaks are built dull to emphasise gun-on-gun gameplay. Nothing you can earn is particularly useful, in my experience at least, and it's hell to even get them with every corner stuffed with stationary 12 year-olds looking to pad their kill/death ratio. Ghosts just isn't fun. It's all build, no release. Maybe that's why Infinity Ward have taken to importing ever more ludicrous care package rewards? The latest DLC contains ghost pirates, Egyptian curses, hyper-caffeinated El Mariachi modes and Modern Warfare 2's omnipotent gunship.

FATALITY

Phew! For a minute there I thought NetherRealm Studios might be tied up delivering nothing but DC superhero fighters for the foreseeable future. If this Mortal Kombat X tease is to believed, players can snatch up background elements to pound their opponents with. How's that for next-gen?

X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is the first film in the series to even attempt to capture the joyful exuberance of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original comics. In the 1960s Marvel was issuing beautiful pop-art masterpieces that crossed archetypal superheroics with the naturalistic hesitancy of romance comics. First Class broadly adapts the key incidents of The X-Men #1 - Professor X trains his mutant students while Magneto experiments with his ability to control missiles.

While the Bryan Singer films heave with misunderstood loners deigning to interact, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn serve up two heroes that strive to teach. I had an idea from a half-remembered cinema screening that First Class' children got in the way, clogging up airtime that rightly should have been apportioned to Magneto's one-man Mossad routine. This isn't the case. The school environment that drives the second act allows us a deeper, more personal understanding of First Class' two leads.

We get to see James McAvoy's Xavier, a character usually presented as a pat patriarch, earn his position. This Xavier is basically a super positive youth worker, keen to create a stable setting that'll allow his children to excel. He doesn't needle or manipulate his X-Men, he challenges and praises them, daring them to do better. Michael Fassbender's Magneto tempers this exuberance with a calm, pro-mutant militancy, any cool guy posturing counterbalanced by his quiet sincerity. He's basically a dapper art teacher who'll share a ciggy with the kids.

Xavier's Atomic Age Hogwarts is framed by a socio-political milieu that takes in international brainwashing conspiracies and the Cuban missile crisis. Unusually, neither side is presented as particularly aggressive, both nations lumbered with warmongering generals being puppeteered by Kevin Bacon's ex-Nazi, Sebastian Shaw. The leader of a shadowy cabal called The Hellfire Club, Shaw plots to set the world ablaze in the hope that the radioactive fallout will genetically alter the survivors. First Class aligns mutants with those other mainstays of Cold War sci-fi, the American big bugs and Japanese kaiju. All children of the atom.

Goldman and Vaughn also steer the film away from specifically discussing X-Men as a metaphor for the civil rights movement. Perhaps they recognised that mapping two white fellows onto Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X was, at the very least, incredibly disingenuous? Ideas about individual agency do drive character arcs but they're more about self-reliance and personal pride than creating a way in which handsome white characters can feign minority status. Instead, Xavier and Magneto enjoy dilemmas keyed to their own backgrounds. The moneyed, educated Xavier purposes his wealth, using it to train an egalitarian special forces unit. Magneto is the State of Israel, getting strapped and refusing to be a victim ever again.

BAD TOUCH

This close to release you'd expect The Evil Within to look a little more polished. Waste ammo shooting a jittery cyber ghost and you at least expect something dynamic to happen when he finally backs you into a corner. Maybe Tango Gameworks are intentionally holding back on the death animations? I can't imagine the game will ship with that obscured explosion touch. I hope not anyway. Elsewhere we get a tease of the game's shape - rapid environmental changes, quick think death traps, and roaming around searching for keys. For a fan of Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil entries, that's very exciting.

DINO CRISIS

A couple of TV spots for Transformers: Age of Extinction lifted from Michael Bay's vimeo. Highlights include a liquid metal Decepticon and gigantic robot dinosaurs - all your childhood favourites - stomping along, flanked by Hot Wheels coloured sportscars.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The first entry in a prequel series that went absolutely nowhere, X-Men Origins: Wolverine decides to fill in the blanks on Logan's already disclosed past. Working from a script by Skip Woods and Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff, director Gavin Hood dumps us in pre-Canada Canada for an inciting incident involving powdered wigs, saucy gamekeepers, and unwelcome erections. After some brief howling we spend the opening credits tracking through glimpses of a far more exciting film involving Wolverine and half-bro Sabretooth as they take part in every major American armed conflict. It's basically Nick Cave's unfilmable Gladiator 2 script with Marvel action figures; the deathless idealism of a Civil War Yankee slowly degrading into the unrestrained bloodlust of Full Metal Jacket's 'get some!' chanting chopper gunner.

Origins is full of this kind of trickery. It proposes something great like immortal war men, or a superhero entry with the shape and hue of Mr Majestyk, then cruelly snatches it away to mess about with histrionic, and not terribly impressive computer effects. The usual Marvel franchise break between talking scenes and action interludes is hilariously pronounced in this film then. Hood and Cinematographer Donald McAlpine (not to mention, allegedly, director Richard Donner) ground the film in a lumberjacking location shot like Vilmos Zsigmond working his magic during his 1970s heyday. But, mood established and actors glowing with a sheen of greasy sweat, they hand over production to at least seventeen different special effects companies who, judged on this piece, all specialise in absolute fucking nonsense. Origins wants to walk tall, testing the limits of cornered masculinity with an always reliable Hugh Jackman but, unfortunately, it's trapped having to be the latest instalment in Fox's billion dollar X-Men investment.

X-Men: The Last Stand

Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand is full of coke writing. By that I mean that the film's characters are twisted in antithetical, arrogant ways solely to serve the next plot progression. It's easy to imagine Steven E de Souza, or similar, cooking up a draft in-between lines; Genesis blaring in the background. Long-running characters shed any previously established nuance, mutating into ciphers who act only to facilitate the next action scene. This kind of approach can work - witness Schwarzenegger - but only if the script also engages with something resembling a sense of humour. X3 does not. Professor X is especially mangled by this shorthand. A previously regal figure is reduced to a creepy stepfather who has spent decades psychically abusing his young charge, Famke Janssen's Jean Grey, in an effort to squash that which she, confidently, expresses as her sexuality. In X3, Xavier has specifically infantilised Grey, building layer upon layer of false personalities into her brain in an attempt to stop her assuming her ashen super-state. When Grey does finally ascend she's violent and capricious, a malformed identity apparently stunted by Xavier's interference and suppression. Grey wasn't allowed to naturally grow into her great responsibility; her self-appointed Daddy was too busy making sure she stayed pretty. This strange paternalism, bleeding in from Patrick Stewart's usually dignified source, leaves a sour taste, as does the sudden predilection for the casual use of the word 'bitch'. These missteps make you appreciate the inclusivity Bryan Singer brought to the series. The director may well prove to be a predatory rapist, but at least he didn't make it obvious that he loathes women.

Gill by Daigo Ikeno

Charlie Wilson (and DJ Sosinful) - I Know You're Tired of Loving