PSA: This year’s confusing, virtual E3, condensed in a single handy site

  • The full trailer-sorting interface, found at e3recap.com’s 2020 interface.
    e3recap.com
  • Click on any of the boxes to reveal a small amount of useful information (as seen here at the top-right for Gloomwood.
  • Watch a trailer from within the interface without having to leave the site. Then you can go back afterward and click “mark as seen” to remove it from the site’s clutter.
  • It includes archives of shows past…
  • …and a reminder of events still to come.

In recent years, the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo has left gaming fans reeling with an abundance of trailers and announcements. We usually like to help Ars readers make sense of the noisy deluge by flying to California and going hands-on with E3-timed game previews, but that obviously didn’t happen this year. Without that kind of access, we, too, are scrambling.

Thus, on a weekend full of smaller-than-Sony game reveals, we wanted to turn your attention to e3recap.com, a site that has spent six years streamlining and interpreting a deluge of YouTube trailers. Right now, its 2020 landing page contains over 250 individual game trailers, and they’re organized in a clean, neat way that blows away other options.

Instead of having to jump from one live-streamed archive to the next or seek out individual game publishers, e3recap.com lets you scan through each revealed game in a tidy series of clickable boxes. By default, they’re sorted in a reverse-chronological order of reveals, so everything shown during this weekend’s events (Guerrilla Collective, PC Gamer Show, Future Games Show) appears in the order of those streams. This site doesn’t go to the trouble of copying-and-pasting each game’s sales pitch; instead, you’ll see simple facts like expected platforms and release dates.

As a bonus, this sorting system will let you expressly filter out any games by platform—so if you only want to know what’s been announced for PC, instead of being teased and disappointed by “console-exclusive” fine print, this site has your back. Though, obviously, details like platforms and release windows are subject to change, and this is a completely unofficial site, so caveats about accuracy and timeliness apply.

Still, we’re leaning on e3recap.com’s interface to keep track of every “E3-like” stream and reveal this summer, and it includes the archived reveals of games from recent Xbox and PlayStation events—along with a handy calendar to remind you of other events to come, including those from EA, Ubisoft, and CD Projekt Red. Some intriguing indie games we’ve seen this weekend, to help you pick through the noise, include the metal-infused rhythm-FPS Metal Hellsinger, the Thief-with-guns sneaking of Gloomwood (its free playable demo is live), and the gothic pencil-art tactics of Inkulinati.

Listing image by e3recap.com

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1683716