E3 is Upon Us! Yaaaaywwwwn!

As some of you probably already know, next week is the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in L.A. The single biggest video game technology show in the world. The place where megaton announcements are made, earth-shattering technology is shown, and mind-blowing presentations and previews are proudly displayed to the masses.

But, by all accounts, absolutely nothing special is going to happen this year. That's it. Let's all go home.

The first problem was brought up by a user on NeoGAF, who asked the simple question "Will there actually be any surprises this year?" He wasn't asking just a general question, though, he was reacting to all of the "pre-E3 announcements" that were made. Pretty much every game company has stated exactly what they'll be displaying at E3 this year, and in many cases, have already shown some of that content in the form of various teasers and images and the like.

So we know Ubisoft is going to show off Assassin's Creed III. EA is going to show off Crysis 3 and SimCity. Sony is going to show off The Last of Us. Microsoft is going to show off Halo 4 and a bunch of Kinect crap that no one wants to see.

So... what's the point of the conference again? There really are no surprises.. we know what we're going to see, and in many cases we've already seen it.

It might be something moderately special for the press that's going to be there, but what about the millions of users who won't be there? All we're going to see are videos and trailers and screenshots from the show, most of which won't be posted until after the show is over. And how is that any different from what we see already? I can go to IGN or GameTrailers, or even just YouTube, and see plenty of videos for every last thing that anyone's planning on showing off. They should save a lot of money and just not have E3 at all, just release a bunch of trailers and screenshots online. That's all those of us at home are going to get out of this conference anyway, so what's the point?

With any luck, we'll all be surprised by last-minute announcements of the next generation of console hardware from Microsoft and Sony, but that's looking less and less likely as we gear up for the show. We would have heard something by now.

So E3 this year looks entirely pointless. I'll probably watch the Microsoft and Sony conferences just to see what's what, but otherwise I really couldn't care less.