Microsoft kicks off E3 with their conference. Phil Spencer walks on stage, dressed to the nines in a fancy suit. He talks about how thrilled he is to be here and is ready to give gamers exactly what they want from the Xbox One. But first, he disrobes. Underneath his suit jacket and graphics tee is a Battletoads shirt. That’s right, y’all, it’s a brand new Battletoads remake.
Fans everywhere start clapping as a CG trailer starts off. It’s a beautiful swampland, filled to the brim with frogs. Then the frogs become riddled with bullets, dead at the hands of a rogue CIA agent. One of the surviving frogs grabs a gun of his own. The frog, voiced by Troy Baker (le duh), leaps into battle at the same time the CIA agent does. Cut to black. The Battletoads logo pops up on screen, covered in dirt and grime.
Battl3toads is a first-person shooter set in Saudi Arabia with tactical elements and stealth takedowns. Players will be able to play it at E3 and get a look at the 8-person multiplayer. “We’re giving Battletoads fans the true, hardcore experience they’ve been clamoring for, only on the Xbox One!” says Spencer, completely unaware of the shocked silence from the press. The game will still be extremely difficult, he assures. Every time you die, you’ll get punched in the stomach and told to get good, scrub. Die five times in a row, and the Kinect will just steal your wallet.
Once the “applause” has died down, and after a particularly painful Kinect demonstration that ends with a musical number from Peter Molyneaux that’s insultingly disappointing at the end, Hideo Kojima steps up on stage. Everyone is at the edge of their seats for what this could mean. Silent Hills on Xbox One?!
Nope. Kojima proceeds to just spend the next 13 minutes ranting about how great Mad Max is before being politely asked to get off the stage.
Okay, now it’s time for actual Xbox One games. First up is Scalebound from Hideki Kamiya of Bayonetta fame. Scalebound actually does look fun and you do indeed ride dragons like that last trailer suggested. But halfway through the demo, the lead character speaks, and he’s voiced by Jay Baruchel. It turns out that Scalebound is actually How to Train Your Dragon 3, hitting the Xbox One for a full year before it hits theaters. Right after that, there’s also a short trailer for Rise of the Tomb Raider, wherein a woman dressed like Lara Croft comes on stage and flips off a PS4 for three minutes.
Next, we get a look at Halo 5: Guardians. Our demo takes place about halfway through the campaign, with Master Chief and his team of Spartans stuck inside a Forerunner temple. The temple activates and Forerunner corpses shamble out of the walls. Chief and his team are able to fight off the horde, mainly because Chief just keeps kicking his teammates into their biting range and taking a coffee break. Unfortunately, one of the corpses slices his helmet in half. In slow motion, we finally see the Master Chief’s face, and it’s none other than… Dwayne Johnson!
Chief prepares to speak, but the screen cuts to black and shows a release date. This isn’t Halo 5 we’re seeing, this is the Halo movie that’s long been in development hell. Starring The Rock and directed by Brett Ratner, we’ll learn Master Chief’s new origins this September, just in time for the game. Sadly, this preview is when the Microsoft conference ends because, as Halo 5 is running on Master Chief Collection code, an error message popped up and wiped out pretty much everything else Microsoft planned to show.
But before they go, they do want to mention that Crackdown and Gears of War are coming back! Y’know, sometime in the future. Gears of W4r is set a decade after the third game. Marcus Fenix has now taken up gardening after his bromance with Dom sadly ended. Zombies start rising out of the ground, natch, so Marcus has to take up his old Lancer and carve them up while making sure the blood doesn’t get on the roses you’ll be sending to Grandma Fenix. She kind of hates that. Pre-ordering it will get you the beta for Bulletstorm 2 and Unreal Tournament 4. But that’ll have to wait until after Blinx the Time Sweeper 3, of course, the real reason people bought an Xbox One.
[Editor’s Note: This is an entirely satirical article… but, like, what if any of this actually happens? Man, we’d be so freaked out.]
