Truth be told, Ars Technica walked into this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) with pretty low expectations. Before the doors opened, Nintendo and Sony had already confirmed that they wouldn't show off any brand-new consoles, and companies like Activision and EA excused themselves from the proceedings. But we still wound up discovering a ton of great stuff, mostly in the form of new games—so many, in fact, that we made our own War of 1812 out of it.

On E3's second day, Ars UK's Mark Walton proposed that I square off against him in a battle of international tastes with our camera crew in tow, and I obliged him. The premise was simple: which Ars nation could find cooler stuff on the E3 show floor? Spoiler alert: we both did fine, at least in terms of parsing the quality stuff from the hype.

The results included a few games from our "ten best of E3" feature, but if you would like more information on the others, here you go.

The video highlights a few quality indies. The biggest one, Cuphead, has received prior Ars coverage, but its latest build included a lot more clever level design to match the amazing aesthetic. Meanwhile, Inversus, Overland, and Loot Rascals had their E3 debuts this year, and they're all impressive in their own right. Overland offers a pretty incredible twist on the idea of Oregon Trail, now built with an engaging turn-based survival-battling system, and Loot Rascals combines a trippy '70s cartoon aesthetic with an expertly distilled idea of how to collect and manage loot in a quest game.

(We didn't get video footage of some other amazing indies we discovered, but while I'm on the subject, you would be a fool not to check out the following: Final Station, a top-notch zombie-survival 2D game that rises above that generic-sounding description; Brigador, an XGA-throwback mech-battle game that forces you to juggle your mech suit's powers and some very interesting battle environments; and Pyre, the next game from the makers of Bastion, which combines a beautiful, hand-painted quest with one of the most clever "digital sports" concepts I've ever seen.)

In terms of this video's "triple-A" games, Sea of Thieves and Gravity Rush 2 each made surprisingly solid showings at this year's conference, with the former offering a fun shout-with-friends experience and the latter finally fulfilling the promise of the original gravity-bending PlayStation Vita platformer. We've already talked at length about other major games in the video, including Final Fantasy XV and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and we still have more to come on other big-name games at this year's show, including Detroit: Become Human and Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Listing image by Loot Rascals / Hollow Ponds