E3, a show in which the future of gaming pretends to be in the present, is in the past. Those demos that may or may not represent the final quality of the games they preview? All locked up. The previews and round-ups by writers who hit reasonable deadlines? Published.

And then there's me, straggling along. I did see some games. I'd like to tell you about them, OK?

Dying Light 2 takes parkour zombie slaying to a new city, and there's a reason for that. Where the first game, released in 2015, was about dealing with a viral outbreak in real time, the second will deal with the aftermath years later.

As with most games shown at E3 a couple of weeks ago, it's too soon to say if Concrete Genie will be what its demo hints that it can be. But it's clear that it will be an easy game to root for.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is pretty long name for a game with a straightforward pitch: What if XCOM but with animorphs?

While it's based off of a pen and paper role-playing game popular in Sweden during the '80s, developer The Bearded Ladies have made it their own by injecting the inspiration's DNA into a turn-based tactical game. After close to an hour with Mutant Year Zero, I came away excited to play more, and not just because one of the characters I got to control was a duck in a top hat sporting a crossbow.

I'm back from E3, and I've brought a truckload of video game impressions with me. You can hear them all on this week's Kotaku Splitscreen, or read some of them right here.

I would like to tell you about a mortifying encounter I recently had with a very well-known figure in video games. It's a better story if you don't know who it is until the end.

Sometimes you go into a game demo, and it's just absolutely not what you were expecting.

This was the first E3 I've attended IRL, and I spent most of it interviewing producers of games like Splatoon 2, Jump Force and SoulCalibur 6.

Between learning tidbits about whether Splatoon 2's squid kids eat squid and why SoulCalibur 6's women still look like pin-ups, I managed to play a few upcoming games that I'm really, really excited about.

The developers at Croteam, the studio that makes the Serious Sam games, are looking to do the unthinkable with the fourth numbered instalment in the series: render 100,000 enemies on screen at the same time. Watching a hands-off demo of the game behind closed doors at E3, I was excited to see that feat in action, and for a second it looked like I might.

While the titular Sam was driving around in a combine harvester, Gnaars and Kamikazes began flooding over a hill in the distance. First it was just a few dozen, but moments later it had become a horde too numerous to count. Then the screen faded to black.

For those of us who didn't get a chance to visit Los Angeles for this year's Electronic 3 Two-Zero-One-Eight, Tim and our wonderful video team on the US West Coast have been hard at work providing us with an inside look.

In an room in need of air conditioning in the Los Angeles Convention Center last week, game developer Nate Fox held out his left hand palm down, paused, and then slapped the top of it with his right. "Do you know - *slap* - that?" he asked.

I managed to survive E3 2018, my first one in fact, and I can even remember most of the games I saw and played. There's too many to name them all, but below are the most notable ones I got a chance to check out. I've written about some of them already on Kotaku, but there is also a handful of others I haven't yet had the chance to talk about.

Splatoon 2's face is all inky rainbows and cutesy cephalopods. It would be an adorable, idyllic wonderland, if not for the fact that controlling all of those snuggable urchins are real-life humans, who are often bad.

At an E3 where Nintendo and its partners largely played it safe with big Smash Bros. and Pokémon sequels, the company tucked a clever new Switch development in a trailer for a new Mario Party. Blink and you'd miss it: the sight of two Nintendo Switch screens connected into one oddly-shaped game board.

So, E3's done and dusted for another year. What'd you think?

The standard Xbox controller makes a lot of assumptions. It assumes you have two hands to hold it. It assumes you have two thumbs. It assumes you have a fluid range of motion to get to all of the buttons, that you have the reach to get to bumpers and triggers, and that you have the endurance to hold it.

And if you can't do any of that, there's a barrier that means you may not be able to play the games you'd love to play. That's why Xbox created the Xbox Adaptive Controller.

There were rumours of a PlayStation 5 and news on the next generation of Xbox, but this E3 was ultimately pretty light on the cool hardware. We knew that was the case given the sheer amount of VR accessories most of us can't or won't use any time soon.

Splatoon 2 is a game about squid-kids waging war with neon ink. It isn't an easy one to explain to grandma. And it takes place in a freaky world that raises a lot of questions. What did squid kids evolve from? How do they get so much ink in those little ink guns? Where are these kids' parents?

Prior to her interview at E3 this week with Splatoon 2 producer Hisashi Nogami, Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio asked me if there was anything I wanted to know.