Nintendo Project Café
What We Know Already: After months of speculation, Nintendo announced that their next home hardware console–codenamed Project Café–would make its public debut at this year’s E3. Scheduled for a 2012 release, Project Café’s supposedly been making the rounds in the game development community for the last few months. Nintendo apparently just confirmed whisperings that the system would sport touchscreen controllers that also have buttons.
The Big Mystery: Um, everything? Rumors abound about what exactly the system’s capabilities will be, including reports of Blu-ray support, a built-in projector and a three-core IBM PowerPC chipset paired with new GPU by ATI.
What We’ll Probably Find Out: How it plays. E3 attendees will get hands-on time with the new system, assessing its motion-sensing capabilities and whatever other differentiators lie under its hood as well as various launch games. Nintendo didn’t make games from their bigger franchises available for the debut of the 3DS, but it’s unlikely the Zelda, Mario or Metroid franchises will be AWOL for such an important new product debut.
(More on TIME.com: Nintendo Confirms Successor to Wii in 2012, More Powerful than Xbox 360 or PS3?)
Deus Ex: Human Evolution
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What We Know Already: Human Evolution serves as a prequel to the storied 2000 Deus Ex game designed by Warren Spector and Harvey Smith. Players control private security specialist Adam Jensen, made into a bionic man after an attack on a cybernetic research company. The gameplay’s a blend of action and role-playing elements with a first-person perspective in a cyberpunk world deeply influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
The Big Mystery: Will Human Evolution be tightly bound to the original Deus Ex? The first game dealt with a secret conspiracy that kept a select few in power, so it stands to reason that this new adventure will show us how the world wound up that way.
What We’ll Probably Find Out: Info on alternate endings. All the Deus Ex titles have featured open-ended designs where players can choose different paths and strategies to meet various objectives. The game world would react to your choices and the final sequence of events came about as a direct result of your actions. It’d be a shame if Adam Jensen’s story doesn’t have the same kind of endgame, but hopefully that won’t be the case.
(More on TIME.com: Fauxnonymous Strikes Again? Eidos Site Hacked, User Info Snatched)