Boy did Microsoft’s E3 presentation bore me. Here were the highlights:
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– Disney movies coming to Xbox Live
– Short trailers for some good games including Resident Evil 5, Lost Odyssey, GTA4 and the new Call of Duty
– Sales spin – the 360 is expanding the video game market by leaps and bounds
– G4 cutting away during important moments and generally confirming they are actually a local college station
– Many new Live Arcade games
– Scene It, the boring board game, now coming to the 360 complete with easy to use controller for grandma
– Jeff Bell proving there is no God simply by existing
– New grayish green 360 to celebrate Halo 3
– Speech on how awesome MSs third party support is that ignored that Japan largely ignores MS
– Gears of War coming to the PC
– OMFG Disney movies!!!11
I think that while Microsoft’s conference was uninteresting, we also expect too much. The idea behind the new toned down E3 was partly to prevent companies from stockpiling secrets in order to unveil all of them in a single day. We all want enormous announcements at E3 but it’s just not going to happen like it used to. The conference was also too long. Next year I hope each console company gets 30 minutes to fill with games and not 90 minutes to fill with charts, lecture, marketing and trash talk.
This conference was pretty useless for me. There wasn’t one thing that excited me. Halo 3 didn’t look that great, especially when compared to Gears of War, but I’m sure it will be fun. Everything else was a wash. Expect for Assassin’s Creed, but I already knew it was going to be bad-ass. And the demo was too short for it. It was cool to see Msoft give Nintendo the props when saying they’re both in a close race with units sold. That’s actually surprising for a company like Msoft.