The dust is starting to settle on the 2013 edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3, and we’re starting to gear up for the five-month run to the launch of Microsoft and Sony’s next-gen consoles.

Normally, you’d get a winners and losers of E3 column but all except the most delusional of fan boys can agree that Sony was the big winner, Microsoft was the big loser and Nintendo didn’t win but they didn’t lose any of their growing positive momentum.

Instead, I’m going to look at E3 2013 and score the goings on at the big show with Levels Up or Levels Down. Yeah, it’s not an original gimmick but what is nowadays on the internet.

Level Up: Jack Tretton

The President of SCEA didn’t just have a mic drop moment on Monday night. It wasn’t even mic drop moments. What he did was take his mic and beat Microsoft over the head with it until the Xbox division was a bloody and brutalized mess. I’m not sure it this was closer to Game of Thrones or Office Space because it was a bloody massacre but it was also pretty damn funny.

Now, as the top dog at SCEA and the front man for Sony’s E3 press conference, he’s going to get a lot of credit for what happened. Similarly, Don Mattrick is going to get a lot of the blame for Microsoft’s problems. Their crews have a lot to do with the final policies and prices that the consoles have but the captain is ultimately responsible for the actions of their crew. In Jack’s case, that’s a good thing. In Don’s case… Well, we’ll get to him in a little bit.

Level Down: Spike TV and GameTrailers TV

So the Xbox One press event was shown live on cable TV in the US on Spike on what you could call a special edition of GameTrailers TV. EA’s presser was also shown live on Spike. Monday’s other two briefings were shuffled off of cable television for an online stream instead.

Geoff Keighley said on Twitter that GT and Spike weren’t paid by anyone to do this but it was just the nature of primetime television. At 6:00 PM EDT, when the Ubisoft press event was on, Spike was showing back-to-back repeats of Tattoo Nightmares. At 9:00 PM EDT, when Sony was due to take the main stage, Spike aired the second-consecutive showing of Dodgeball.

I love Dodgeball as much as the next guy but there’s no way that a sane person could want to watch Dodgeball two consecutive times in a four-hour span. I’m not accusing Microsoft, Spike or GT of anything untoward, even if Doritogate happened, but that doesn’t seem like smart programming. A look at Spike’s schedule on their website showed that next time they showed coverage from E3 or a GTTV show was… I’ll get back to you when GT TV is back on Spike. Sure wasn’t this week, though.

I’m not suggesting that we should take Spike TV seriously as a gaming journalism outlet but for Spike in conjunction with a supposedly impartial gaming media outlet like GameTrailers to only show the press conferences of Microsoft and their best friend in the publishing world doesn’t seem on the up and up.

Level Up: Metal Gear Solid V

The Microsoft press conference started off in the biggest way possible with Kojima and the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain trailer. Apart from maybe Titanfall and Project Spark, the MGS5 trailer was the high point of the Microsoft presser.

Innovation and change are all too rare in gaming and for Kojima to go open-world with MGS5 is a big risk. However, the game looks fantastic and as long as the open-world stealth isn’t a frustrating failure, he’ll have a hit on his hands. Of course, we won’t know how the game will actually be until we see some proper gameplay videos but it’s shaping up pretty well right now.

Level Down: Kojima’s Casting

As amazing as MGS5 looks, there is one problems that long-time MGS fans will have. The voice of Snake for the last 15 years, David Hayter, is being replaced by Kiefer Sutherland. It’s not Sutherland’s fault that he’s been called into the iconic role. It’s Kojima’s fault. He’s running the show on MGS5 so he bears the brunt of the blame.

Kojima’s reasoning for switching from Hayter to Sutherland was that he wanted an actor who could perform the role through facial movements and tone of voice. I guess a voice actor like Hayter can’t change his voice or move his face when doing lines unlike a proper actor like Sutherland.

Kojima also said, “We needed someone who could genuinely convey the facial and vocal qualities of a man in his late 40s.” I guess that 44-year-old Hayter just can’t play a middle-aged man like 46-year-old Sutherland.

Basically, Kojima is talking out his arse about why he dropped Hayter. What he should have said is that he saw big names getting into the industry and wanted the credibility of having a big name actor in his game. We wouldn’t like his reasons but respected his honesty if he phrased it that way. Instead, we get a load of PR BS.

Level Up: Mechs!

Who doesn’t love a good mech? Everybody loves mechs! Except gamers because properly good mech games don’t come around nearly often enough. Sure there are some on the free-to-play market like MechWarrior Online and Hawken but properly good console releases are few and far between.

In comes the Xbox One to save the day. Shit, I can’t believe I just wrote that. The Xbone will have two games that include mechs. The Xbox and PC game Titanfall looks like a pretty awesome game that includes mech and jetpacks which are two things everyone loves. The demo for Project Spark on the Xbox One had a rock mech which is probably cooler than a regular mech. To make up a corny phrase that Microsoft can pay me for later, Microsoft brought the mother-meching noise to E3.

If Nintendo is more your speed, Monolith Soft’s in-development X has things that look like Gundam suits but that’s a copyrighted term so they very well could end up being called mechs in the final product. I’d much rather a Monolith-developed RPG with mechs than an FPS with mechs anyway.

Level Down: Design Teams

I can appreciate that the PlayStation 2 was the best-selling video game console of all-time but that doesn’t mean that we should copy its design. While how a console looks doesn’t make a difference because it should be about the game it plays, the design teams and Microsoft and Sony should all be reassigned to the VCR department.

The PS2 was a rectangular plastic box. So is the Xbox One. At least the PlayStation 4 is made with something other than right angles, even if it is another quadrilateral-shaped box.  The likes of the PS3, 360 and Wii are all box-shaped but at least there are some curves and life to the design. Shouldn’t these things get better looking over time instead of worse?

Level Up: Indies

If you weren’t impressed with the same old offerings from EA or Activision, the independent developers were getting a lot of love at E3. All you had to do was watch the parade of independent games that Sony brought on-stage for their press conference on Monday.

With the likes of Cliffy B complaining about the cost of making triple-A games and how hard it is to make up those costs, the little guys are picking up the slack in underserved genres and succeeding as a result on a fraction of the budget that the big dogs have. Just look at the likes of Journey and The Walking Dead who took home a host of big awards last season despite being indie games. That’s not mentioning the numerous commercial successes of the indie games industry.

Now indie games aren’t being treated as a genre for the video game enthusiast or for those who live to game. Indie games are part of the core gamer consciousness. Some of these games, like Minecraft, are mainstream hits. More indie games are going to blow up into the mainstream and the attention that they’re getting at E3 is evidence of that.

All The Levels Down: Don Mattrick

“We have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity; it’s called Xbox 360. If you have zero access to the Internet, that is an offline device.”

That says it all about Microsoft’s attitude when it comes to the Xbox One. We’ve built this console and if you don’t like what we’re doing with it, there’s the door.

The only problem is, Don, that the door people are taking isn’t leading them back to the Xbox 360. They’re all flowing out the door marked PlayStation 4. So how much can the  President of Interactive Entertainment collect in unemployment checks when the Xbox One is a failure to launch?