In recent years, E3 has succeeded in blowing away the cobwebs of my jaded cynicism, but this year there's a real sense of ennui. We're at the arse-end of the current generation, and all the major games industry players seems to be holding their breath.

There have been big game announcements, but you've had to cherry-pick them from amid the detritus of DLC, mission packs, remakes, and spin-offs. It feels like we're treading water. 

"Cloud gaming" is being whispered as being the next big thing, but there's such resistance to it among traditional audiences that everyone appears genuinely fearful of what might come next. 

Gaming, it seems, is having its own Trump/Brexit moment; the future has suddenly become very unpredictable. 

Here are some more of the biggest stories to come out from E3 so far. 

UbiSoft's E3 presentation kicked off in earnest with a symphonic performance of the Assassin's Creed Odyssey score, previewing an upcoming musical tour. I mean, it was very nice and all that, but not really what anybody was there for. 

Along the way there was an embarrassing dance sequence to mark the tenth anniversary of Just Dance - you could feel the rictus grins even on this side of a YouTube stream - and an unexpected appearance by a man from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

​He was there to promote his upcoming Apple Plus TV show, Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet... in which he plays the creative director of a fantasy video game. 

Yes: UbiSoft is getting into film and TV production. Because... why not?

In spite of all these distractions, UbiSoft still managed to show off some games, even if it was a more muted, perfunctory, presentation than it has put on in recent years.

Here are the big boiz you ought to know about.

Biffo and Gannon try out Tiger's handheld LCD Virtua Cop light gun game, and see if it's possible to play pinball by sense of smell alone...

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Something I'll give Bethesda credit for: the people they wheeled out onto their E3 stage were at least somewhat more relaxed than almost everyone at Microsoft's presentation.

There was a lot of being humble; admitting that the criticism they've received in the wake of Fallout 76 was "well-deserved"... there was a lot of thanking the fans, a lot of giving them credit for everything, and a lot of talking about their amazing global communities.

They couldn't exactly ignore the reception suffered by Fallout 76, so all credit to them for acknowledging it, even if they did try to put a positive spin on it. The big news? Human NPCs are coming back to Fallout 76.

Thanks for that, everyone!!!! You're all so amazing, and it's all down to you!!!!!!?!!!!

<WHOOPING, CHEERING, FOAMING AT THE MOUTH, ROCKING BACK AND FORTH>

Here are the other big Bethesda announcements.

It didn't help that, for me, Microsoft's E3 presentation suffered a weird lag, which made everyone who walked out on stage appear drunk. If anything, however, that actually improved matters, and lent a surreal, soporific, dream-like quality to an event that otherwise felt far too familiar with its blend of familiar game genres and PR-speak.

Admittedly, lessons have - to a point - long been learnt from previous years, and the focus was firmly on games. This didn't stop the stifled autocue reading, or Phil Spencer's self-satisfied swagger, or the number of games that were showcased with scarcely any actual gameplay shown. It didn't stop there being an enormous amount of hyperbole about the next Xbox console, and very little in the way of actual detail.

But we'll get to that. 

Here are the main things I took away from Microsoft at E3; from Keanu Reeves to how much Phil Spencer reminds me of a corrupt prison guard.

There have been several eras in gaming history which I regard as transitional.

In short; a generation where the host hardware couldn't quite keep up with the imagination of the games' creators. Don't get me wrong; the early-80s of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 is my era - it's when I fell in love with games. Nonetheless, when I go back to play many of those games now, it's like trying to squash a duvet into a walnut.

I actually find the likes of Pong, and many earlier Atari 2600 games, far more playable than the vast majority of Speccy games - and I say that as somebody whose fondest gaming memories are all of that era. 

When the NES and Master System took off, and the Atari ST and Amiga were released, it was the start of a golden era when games revelled in their 2D-ness, improving all the time across the 16-bit console era. Then CD-ROM happened, and it all went a bit wrong again. Developers experimented with interactive movies, and struggled to understand the best way to make 3D polygons work.

Go back and play something like Night Trap and it's horrible. Worse still, the original Tomb Raider simply doesn't hold up outside of the context of its era. Likewise Nintendo's Starfox.

It's why so many indie games default to that 16-bit golden age, with the flat pixels; the games of that time still hold up today, when so many either side do not.

And that is why it's so brave of Back In 1995 to evoke the spirit of the first PlayStation, a system which - for all its importance in the history of gaming - played host to some incredibly ugly games.  

Biffo attempts to play Ultrawings on the Oculus Quest, but even getting his plane off the ground proves more than he's capable of doing... With guest hysterics from Larry Bundy Jr and Paul Gannon!

Social media: good thing or bad thing? It's a question that will likely never have a definitive answer, given that the engine of social media is humanity, with all its mix of good and bad.

My take? So long as you can remain one step removed from it, and don't let it become a replacement for a real life, social media shows us another side of who we are, filtered through tweets and Instagram posts. But... it's just one side - we're never going to get the whole picture of a person from their online persona. 

Oddly, it's something I've really become aware of in the past few years. There are people I've met - YouTubers and their ilk - who are completely different in real life to how I perceived them from their public profile. We're complicated, multifaceted, beings, and just because someone might one day act a bit dickish online doesn't mean they are a dick. 

We're not any one thing; who we are is a mix of our inner and outer selves, and... well... this is all getting a bit wanky. 

Biffo and Larry Bundy Jr compare bootleg games for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Boy, while Biffo gets chocolate on his face.