It’s E3 time again. This year promised to be a ‘back to basics’ or maybe I should say ‘back to grandiose pomp & circumstance E3′. Last year everyone decided to cheap and try to save some money, leading to some incredibly unappealing conferences. My clearest memory is the unintentional comedy coming from Microsoft’s You’re in the Movies and Nintendo’s Wii Music and the fanboy tears resulting from the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360, and not of any announcements that legitimately excited me as a gamer. For some reason - probably ‘What Would Obama Do’ braided wristbands - the companies have decided to go all out on expensive booths and big announcements this year, in spite of evidence that the recession is starting to hit the games industry.

Whatever the reason, there are supposed to be a lot of big announcements this year, which has gotten me pretty excited this year. E3 is a lot like Christmas for gamers. The problem I’ve had with Christmas is that as I’ve gotten older, I pretty much know exactly what to expect for almost all of my presents and so the most interesting things are the odd surprises. E3 is the same way this year. A lot of the biggest announcements have been ‘leaked’ (i.e. intentionally released to the public in a covert way in an effort to trick them into being more interested) so it may be tough to make a huge splash at the conferences.

First up is Microsoft. Over the past two years they’ve been criticized for only showing products that are already known about and not giving any glimpses about future products that are further from release. This has led to a perception that Microsoft has nothing good in store for the future, so this year, I expect them to tease some stuff for 2010.

OK, the conference is now starting with a few minutes of video on Rockband: Beatles. I personally don’t care that much about the Beatles, but I expect them to go on as if everyone watching is absolutely enthralled at the most trivial details. What a smug, arrogant band. Bigger than Jesus indeed. This guy on stage is suggesting that the Beatles were somehow responsible for color television, stereo sound, and other technological advances despite the fact that I can’t think of another band whose management has been dragged so kicking and screaming into the technological era. Let me tell you, after 3-4 years of this, it’s not getting any more interesting to watch random schmoes do a 4-minute Rock Band/Karaoke at the Microsoft Press Conference. Enthusiastic cheers from the in-game audience and about 5 claps from the press follow. The trailer from the game looks pretty good for Beatles fans; I’m trying to calculate if I have enough time to make a sandwich before this is done. Not surprisingly, the game will only have 40-some songs, but there will be downloadable albums (naturally exorbitantly priced) available RIGHT AWAY AT LAUNCH so you know that you’re being screwed by them not being on the disc. Oh god, they’re bringing out Yoko Ono and George Harrison’s widows.

Well, they kicked it up a notch by actually having Paul and Ringo come on stage. It might be a little more charming without the smarmy introduction where the guy says how honored he was to be on the planet at the same time as them…. Anyway, they were extremely awkward on stage. Do you really come all the way out to a press conference and can’t even prepare 30 seconds of comments. Lousy Beatles.

OK, the real Conference is finally starting. Tony Hawk is coming on stage with that ludicrous skateboard controller for Tony Hawk’s Ride. To be honest, I kind of think it seems like a fun controller, but I don’t blame people for pushing back against another expensive plastic peripheral. At least Tony Hawk comes off like a cool guy, not like those prima donna Beatles.

I ended up missing the Ride trailer due to IGN’s feed crapping out. Now I’m watching some sort of game where you climb a wall of ice in first person for like two minutes. Not making this up. Oh boy there was another wall of ice after the first wall! They actually cut away from the video and came back to a different scene because there was so much ice climbing. It’s some sort of first-person shooter. With lots of snow. Lots and lots of snow. I thought I saw some bullets, but it was actually just snow. If you like snow, this is the game for you. Oh, OK, it’s Modern Warfare 2. The guy is seriously shooting people while riding a snowmobile now. Graphics look pretty slick though.

Oh boy, the Final Fantasy XIII guys are coming on stage now. I guess they weren’t scared away by Swine Flu after all. Over 20 years since Final Fantasy was released, nearly as many years as FFXIII has been in development. The game seems to be running on XBox 360 hardware, which is something of a relief, but this is still just the same area that was in the PS3 demo. Either way, it seems that what they said at last year’s E3 about waiting until after the game was released in Japan to start porting to 360 was not true. Spring 2010 release, so only one…more…year…

Epic is on stage announcing a new game, but the dude’s mic is not working but nobody seems to be doing anything about it. This game looks like some sort of Metroidvania shooter! I swear that map is almost identical to symphony of the night. This must be a Live Arcade game.

Now Microsoft is demoing another ’space marine’-looking game. It’s Crackdown 2. Ugh, another game with zombies (why are all zombies called ‘infected’ now instead of zombies? Does George Romero own a copyright?). Aha, they followed it with yet another zombie game - Left 4 Dead 2. Isn’t it a little early for a sequel? I’m really pretty sick of zombies at this point. Now some ridiculously dressed French guys are coming on stage to show off Splinter Cell. I swear, these guys are wearing jeans, t-shirt, and Chucks topped off with immaculate dinner jackets replete with crisp pocket handkerchiefs. I know Microsoft kind of started this stupid trend when J Allard debuted the 360 wearing a suit jacket over a hoodie, but it’s time to stop. I also just noticed that the main Microsoft presenter is wearing a suit jacket over a V-neck….

The Forza 3 guys are really laying down the gauntlet. They’ve called it “the definitive racing game of this generation” about 6 times so far and have said that they deliver thrills that games on other consoles can’t - thinly veiled dig at Gran Turismo 5 on PS3. Seems like the game has licensed music from Los Campesinos. If only I cared an iota about racing sims.

Bungie is up now with a new Halo 3-based game. Thus I have successfully won the bet I made in my lab that there would be a new game from Epic and another Halo game revealed and that it would be a prequel. I really should have asked for a monetary bet. You know, I thought that Bungie left Microsoft because they were tired of constantly doing Halo games over and over, and yet their first game reveal is that they are still working on Halo (and still working on Halo 3!). Now Bungie is revealing another game….and it’s another Halo! And another prequel! I double won the bet….and yet it feels so empty.

We are one hour in to the conference so far, and Microsoft has shown off 3 games that are not shooters or racing.

Remedy is now on stage, to finally show off Alan Wake, which has been mysteriously missing in action for several years. The game has a first person narration, which seems pretty cool for a horror/thriller game. It seems like the monster-type things in this game are damaged by light, so the player is subduing them with his flashlight. I’ve always felt like flashlights are a great idea in horror games and that Doom 3 caught too much flak for it. Alan seems to be capable of holding a flashlight and gun at the same time, so maybe people will be more forgiving. Ahh, but the game is still not coming out this year. Spring 2010.

They are bringing on the additions to Xbox Live. If only they would announce the abolition of Live Gold. last.fm is on XBL. Seems like a good idea and complements Netflix. But it’s only available for Gold users. You bastards. Well, it’s really a moot point for me since there’s no reason I would use it on 360 rather than PC, but it’s annoying to see Microsoft always artificially screwing over Silver users. Microsoft is now claiming that you will be able to instantly start watching 1080p movies with no wait for buffering. I’m highly skeptical. Oh good god, Microsoft has a Facebook partnership. Do not want. Even if this doesn’t involve me in any way, it shouldn’t exist. Oh no, a Twitter partnership. I guess this makes sense from a business standpoint, but if you had probably asked me to name the two most inane possible announcements Microsoft could make, it would be those two. At least Microsoft is targeting teenagers this year, rather than pre-schoolers like last year.

VP Don Mattrick is now on stage and he’s bringing on Hideo Kojima. But he’s not announcing a port of MGS4, but rather a new game called MGS: Rising. I thought Kojima said that he was done making MGS games, but who knows. This game features everyone’s least favorite character from the series, Raiden. Instead of “Tactical Espionage Action” this game is “Lightning Bolt Action”.

It looks like Microsoft’s camera add-on is coming soon. Would have been a lot more exciting if this hadn’t leaked ages ago, but we haven’t seen the tech in action yet. This trailer looks exactly like the trailers for the unveiling of the Wii, except replace the Japanese family with an American family and replace the Wiimote with empty space. According to this trailer, you can have the camera ’scan’ images of items and place them in the game, though the case shown in the trailer is clearly fake, since the ’scan’ was able to capture images of a skateboard that were obscured. It also claims facial and voice recognition. The camera is called Natal? What a terrible name. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be post-pre-natal, because you use it in your life, am I right? Steven Spielberg is now up on stage evangelizing the camera, so it looks like he will be making games to take advantage of it. Spielberg at least is more excited about the camera than the Wiimote.

The camera recognizes your face and automatically signs into your account - kind of cool. You can navigate through menus by flailing your arms wildly rather than simply pressing a button your d-pad. They have a dodgeball-esque tech demo which is really pretty cool looking, going far beyond the sort of stuff I’ve seen from the Wii, even with Motion Plus. The next demo has someone splatter-painting on a virtual canvas. I’m pretty impressed by the tech and the quality of the presentation for this device. I would not have thought in advance that I would be interested in a camera add-on, but this is pretty neat. So far everything has been minigames, though. Peter Molyneux is coming up to talk now. Will he have a real game product to show off. This demo shows a person talking with a game character. I don’t think I actually believe this one. It’s a pre-recorded video, so it may be entirely scripted. Now Molyneux says that if you think it’s fake, they’ll actually be showing the real demo to ’select people behind closed doors’. If it really worked as advertised, why not show it on stage?

Conference is now over.

Stuff that was missing:
Any talk about digital distribution for non-XBLA games.
Anything related to the ZuneHD’s gaming features or potential for integration with Xbox Live.
Prices for things like Rockband: Beatles, Tony Hawk’s plastic skateboard, or Natal.
XBLA games in general - they only showed two games, and one of them is only for Gold users. This is pretty disappointing as I would say that I’ve gotten more value out of XBLA than retail Xbox games.

Natal was the most interesting thing of the conference. The tech looks really exciting, but after the Wii, I think people are going to be a lot more hesitant to trust tech demos. Let’s see how the thing works in the average person’s living room. Also they mentioned that the development kits for the camera were just being delivered to developers today. That means that any sort of significant game using the tech is probably a long way off. Even Microsoft themselves did not have a fully fleshed-out game to show off. Finally we don’t know the price or release date (at least from the conference materials).

The games shown were not too exciting. As usual, there were many many shooters and not a whole lot of anything else. I’ll buy FFXIII, but that’s still a year off. I might check out Epic’s XBLA game, but that’s about it from this conference. There really is almost nothing coming out for 360 this year that I’m interested in. Maybe Nintendo and Sony will announce some cool games for the systems I don’t own tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.