Every year there are several major gaming shows and events, and the gaming population is always rightfully excited for them. After all these shows are where we hear about exciting new game announcements, or build up hype for something that will see release in the coming weeks or months.

Sometimes, though, it becomes easy to lose track of certain within the avalanche of games every year. If you take a second to stop and think about it, certain games can easily come to mind and make you ask: “What haven’t I heard anything about Game X lately? Was it cancelled? Was the dev team kidnapped and sold off to a Chinese MMO gold-farming team?”

These are the games that you can currently substitute for X.

Final Fantasy Versus XIII

The idea for this article has been swimming in my head for a little while now, but last week’s news that Final Fantasy Versus XIII wouldn’t be shown at next month’s Tokyo Game Show pushed me over the edge.

Above: Someday, probably.

The game is but one part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy lineup, which also includes Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Final Fantasy Type-0. Despite being announced at the same time as FFXIII, Versus manages to keep being pushed into the backburner. FFXIII released 17 months ago and has a sequel coming in about 5 more, with Type-0 releasing in Japan within two months.

Since Square Enix have invested heavily in each of the titles in their latest pretentiously-titled series of Final Fantasy games, you can bet that Versus will eventually make its way onto store shelves. My question is, will we ever see it at a major game show before that happens? Will it pull a Sega Saturn and just show up at retailers unannounced one day? It sure feels that way.

Agent

After rattling off one classic game after another, the folks at Rockstar have earned themselves quite a bit of clout. Their influence isn’t just great within the industry — what they do permeates into mainstream popular culture, while gathering the good (and bad) attention that comes with it.

Obviously, this means that each of their games is a huge deal. Whenever they announce a new game, excitement reaches a fever pitch, but lately there’s been a problem with that — the timing for these announcements is always terrible. Red Dead Redemption was first shown in 2005 before finally releasing last year, and L.A. Noire was announced a year before  RDR and released a year later. While both ended up being fine games, did we really need to hear about them so long before they saw the light of day?

Above: Literally all that anyone’s got.

As for Agent, it was first announced by Sony as a PS3 exclusive in 2007, and we didn’t hear anything else about it until E3 2009 when Sony showed us a logo for the game … and literally nothing else. We’ve heard from Rockstar that the game takes place during the Cold War, but very little else. On top of the fact that we still don’t have any other visual assets besides the logo, we’re not even sure about the game’s exclusivity anymore. Sheesh.

In the meantime, we can always stare wistfully at the game’s official site, like gullible children waiting for their deadbeat dad to come home from the store with his cigarettes.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising

Ah, the tale of Raiden. After a woeful appearance as the surprise main character in Metal Gear Solid 2, MGS4 saw him transform into the greatest cyborg-ninja-killing-machine-that-wasn’t-Gray Fox that the series has ever seen. However, that begged the question: Just how the hell did that happen?

Above: Please tell us how this became a possibility.

The answer came at Microsoft’s 2009 E3 presentation, when they lifted the curtain on MGS: Rising. This takes place between the events of MGS2 and 4, and the core gameplay mechanic revolves around slicing anything and everything with ease. To top it off, the tagline “Lightning Bolt Action” replaces the tried-and-true “Tactical Espionage Action,” and Rising becomes a very intriguing concept indeed.

Yet the game went completely dark for an entire year, until a little bit more was shown at Microsoft’s E3 presser in 2010. This time, we got a new trailer, while also driving home the fact that, yes, you can slice anything and everything. This time, that also included watermelon. Great, I guess?

The game then went dark again, only this time it was absent from E3 altogether. Maybe it has to do with the fact that this is the first time that a new Metal Gear Solid game is being developed simultaneously on multiple platforms, that it’s running on a brand-new engine, that Hideo Kojima is far less involved as he’s been with previous MGS games, or some combination of the three.

Whatever the case, this game has been a long time coming, and very little has been shown. Either the game was revealed way, way too early, or the devs aren’t very confident in what they have so far.