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GameSpot Asia Beat Ep.3: E3 2012 Aftermath

For this week's show, we talk shop about what we liked and reviled about this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Hello again, fellow game enthusiasts in Asia. After all is said and done, this year's E3 was filled with many theatrics by way of press conferences and a boatload of games that may or may not be out on their intended dates of release. In fact, some of them like Star Wars 1313 and Watchdogs are suspected to be so good-looking and rife with fidelity that they could be on future platforms.

We also wonder if the press conferences of the Big Three were purposely catered towards the mainstream, or whether they have no idea who they're aiming these showings of software and products to. There's also that funky Final Fantasy tech demo with the terrorists, dragons, and old guys with incredibly detailed wrinkly skin. Way too much detail, if you ask me.

What does this all mean? Why, this is all for us game journalists and writers to speculate and talk smack about, of course! Joining me in this multilevel adventure into conversation are special guests RazorTV's Bryan de Silva and SG Cafe's Sim Cheng Kai. Again, these guys have been around the block for a long while, so you can expect a cerebral-challenging ride which will start as soon as you hit the play button on the SoundCloud player below.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories E3 2012 Official Trailer

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Hitman: Absolution: The Accidental Assassin Visits Hope

Lethal accidents and lazy disguises come to Cougar country.

At E3, there's nary a sex nun to be found in the Hitman: Absolution gameplay demonstration. The repellent E3 trailer itself is conspicuously absent, the presentation prefaced instead with a cinematic montage of other bits from IO Interactive's assassination title.

Either the original nun video was hastily swapped out for something less controversial and more representative or, more likely, it was only ever a cynical attention grab, incongruous to Hitman: Absolution's actual showing at 2012's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Welcome to Cougar Town.

It's a showing that takes Agent 47 to Hope, a small, sun-dappled town in South Dakota where the '50s never ended. The town is run by the Cougars, a gang of greasers fond of baseball jackets, American classic cars, and old-timey barbershops. The Cougars are led by Lenny, who is 47's prime target in this ninth chapter of the game. Before his execution, though, come those of his henchmen.

Like Hitman: Blood Money before it, Hitman: Absolution rewards you for arranging your hits to look like lethal accidents. The score counter is boosted with a Target Accident Bonus as Agent 47 crushes a Cougar mechanic beneath a car lift, first luring him under there with the clattering sound of a lobbed wrench. When 47 uses C4 to remotely detonate a leaky gas pipe, disguising the death of another Cougar target as a bit of explosive bad luck, the score counter likewise surges upwards--then drains back down again as a series of secondary blasts take out a cluster of innocent onlookers.

The town of Hope is a bigger map than we've seen previously for Absolution, with more sandboxy style than the cramped, concentratedChinatown level. There's space enough for a convenience store, in which 47 dodges past a distracted store clerk to garrote one victim in a backroom and bundle his corpse into a wardrobe, and a junkyard, in which 47 placates a barking guard dog with a bone before non-lethally subduing a yard worker and nicking his overalls.

Disguises and social stealth (that is, blending in) work as we've seen before: a disguise will fool a stranger but not someone who would recognise the original owner of 47's new duds, even with 47's sly blending manoeuvre (rubbing the back of his head to conceal his barcode tattoo). So although a cop hanging around in the junkyard doesn't give 47 a second look, another yard labourer is suspicious of his new, bald colleague.

Agent 47's prime target, gang leader Lenny, is less cautious than the lowly yard worker. The demo's final disguise is lifted from a barber when 47 sneaks into the Cougar clubhouse, through a Cougar party, and into the adjacent Cougar barbershop. There, Lenny chatters away in a barber chair, heedless of the hairless new hairdresser looming over him with a cutthroat razor. So ends the demo: a pretty slice of Americana-flavoured assassination and, here's hoping, a truer account of Hitman: Absolution's character than leering at brutalised sex nuns.