As gamers, we idolize the past and we worship the future. It’s the present that we tend to treat shabbily.

And this is the weird dynamic that shapes our view of E3. We expect the show to sell us a better future, one where games are more fun, better looking, more imaginative. We are not content for E3 to merely provide more access to games that look a lot like the ones we've already played.

Lacking any real new hardware announcements, and at the very end of a long hardware generation, E3 2012 failed to open up the door into a brighter future. It merely escorted us along the corridors of the present.

And while there are some things to like about the present, it’s also true that everything is extremely familiar.

When we did catch glimpses of the future here in Los Angeles, we all went a little bonkers. According to conventional wisdom, Ubisoft “won” E3 by showing us a wholly unexpected game that looks amazing and points to deeper gameplay mechanics and the stronger characters of the future. In his preview of Watch Dogs Rich George celebrates a "visually stunning open world game, with the clever hook of exploiting the vast network of technology that permeates our lives". It has new ideas. It has depth and character. It is of tomorrow, although which specific part of tomorrow we have yet to be told.

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Epic was at the show with a big piece of next-generation technology, Unreal Engine 4, which will be used to power many games of the future. IGN has seen this tech, is appropriately wowed and will be bringing you a full preview soon.

Square Enix's next generation Agni's Philosophy demo was a welcome treat. Running on the next-generation Luminous Studio engine, this is the same cutting-edge game technology that will be found in PlayStation 4 and the next-generation Xbox. John Carmack also turned up with some virtual reality tech running Doom 3: BFG Edition that makes virtual reality actually seem kinda cool.

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We have been badly spoiled by recent E3s, because there's always some kind of new piece of hardware to talk about, whether that be Vita or 3DS or Kinect. This year we have Wii U, which was already shown last year. But the prevailing impression is that Nintendo has a lot of work to do in exciting us about its new console, and in bringing more and better games to launch.

Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime is, as always, confident in the decisions that Nintendo has made. In an interview with IGN, he said, "We're about to launch a tremendously powerful system. A system that pushes out great graphics, a system that has an opportunity to do a lot of things. What I've heard the fan community say is, I want my Mario, I want my Zelda, and I want the best of third-party. And that's what we're looking to bring to consumers."

Many great Nintendo franchises will be present at the launch of Wii U later this year, but not everyone agrees that a party-compendium like Nintendo Land is a compelling enough reason to buy what will likely be an expensive new console. New Super Mario Bros. U and Pikmin 3 did impress us, but E3 was not a huge win for Nintendo or for Wii U. Many left the company's conference expressing amazement that the company wasted such an easy opportunity to really impress its many fans. It took a third-party game, Rayman Legends, to really give us hope that Wii U will ultimately deliver.

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In terms of the games that we will be playing in the next year, on the games machines that we already own, this really was a strong E3. There are maybe 20 games here at E3 that will be well-worth playing when they arrive, and every platform has its stellar offerings, even if platform-exclusives are rare.

E3 may seem like a big show that tries to impress us about the state of games, but that's not its function. It's worth remembering that this show is still all about selling boxes to retailers. Square Enix U.S boss Mike Fisher told me that, every year, he wonders if E3 is worth the huge investment publishers make. And every year he is convinced to come because he knows that retailer buyers will "spend an hour playing our games, and will watch the media's reactions to our games very closely".

And it was Square Enix that impressed the hell out of everyone with Tomb Raider, an origin story of one of gaming's most enduring characters. It's a third-person action game of the sort that is very familiar to us all. But it's beautiful, tightly scripted and it gives us a central character that we can really care about, one with emotional depth.

In his preview, Casey Lynch describes as Lara learns to survive on a dangerous island. "Lara as Hunter is sympathetic. She’s isolated, alone and hungry, unsure of herself but resolved to survive. The deer doesn’t understand what’s about to happen. Neither does Lara, at least not fully. After downing the animal, she apologizes thoughtfully."

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This is gaming in the present, really good-looking games that offer big stories and increasingly convincing stories, more emotionally engaging than the games of the recent past. It's not their fault that they aren't as good as the games of our hopeful imagination, the new franchises that we'll see at E3 2013, the ones that will come in 2014 and 2015.

Few games companies are willing to risk introducing new franchises at the tail end of a console generation. They all have new ideas, they're just holding onto them for when the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft are actually announced.

It is to Sony's credit that the company is giving PlayStation 3 owners two brand new games that won't be available anywhere else. Quantic Dream's Beyond: Two Souls is visually amazing and offers a female character of stunning depth. It promises to be one of the great playable stories.

The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic story of survival starring a grizzled man (Joel) and an innocent girl (Ellie). In his preview, Greg Miller put a sword to suggestions that this is just more of the same from Uncharted developer Naughty Dog. "The team wants us to share the emotions of Joel and Ellie, and from the brief demo I saw -- filled with scavenging for bullets, a segmented health bar, and other humans being a larger threat than any monster -- it's working in a way Uncharted never did." Signs are there that gaming does progress and does offer newness, even at the end of a console-cycle.