So day one of E3 is over everybody! How about those press conferences eh....? Yeah, I know. Well, at least there were some silver linings. Let's dive in and see what we've got. Also, if you weren't with us for the AIM chat, you need to join us tomorrow for Nintendo's E3 conference. It's a blast.
Microsoft:
Microsoft started off well enough. They had Modern Warfare 3 which was to be expected. It wasn't anything exciting to me personally. A lot of people on the chat were really excited about it.
The game after that was Tomb Raider. I was actually looking forward to what the game was going to look like in action. The trailer was really cool, but in game is always how people should judge a game. Overall I rather enjoyed it. The game looks gritty and bloody and resembles Uncharted in a good way. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on this game.
After that things sort of devolved into a mess of nothingness. It's all a bit of a blur, but I'll relay the highlights. They had Gears 3, which again isn't all that exciting to me. They announced a ton of Kinect games that no one cares about (especially Star Wars) and had some awful demos to go along with them. Also with Kinect they had a demo of Mass Effect 3 which included "voice support" which basically allowed you to read about the line choice for Shepard. It looked highly embarrassing and even more so, useless.
Fable Journeys and Ryse both became jokes to the chat as the excitement for both quickly became horror as they were revealed to be on rails games. It's a sad thing because the whole Codename Kingdoms thing from Crytek looked really interested. Alas, Kinect has taken over them.
Along with games that mattered to people, Forza 4 was present. Ghost Recon had a weird presentation involving Kinect (sensing a pattern yet?). Minecraft will be launching on Xbox in fall with Kinect support. That would be huge news if it were already immensely popular on PC. They also had the Halo 1 HD Remake that everyone knew was coming. This was the big one for me, and I'm really annoyed it's not on PC, but hey that's Microsoft these days.
There was a lot of Kinect and Xbox Live stuff that I don't remember. Something involving Bing and finger tracking? Either way the entire chat was bored out of their mind.
And lastly, they had Halo 4. Cool? 343 is developing it, not Bungie so it will be interesting to see what they do. Again not too excited, but I get why other people might be.
Grade: C - Overall I only got excited about one game over the entire conference. That being said, I understand the significance of some of these announcements. The Halo stuff is a big deal and that's great. Unfortunately those were the only two announcements and a lot of time was spent on Kinect and Xbox Live Entertainment (like TV and movies). Fluff essentially that hardcore gamers couldn't really care about.
Sony:
Jack Trenton came out on stage at the beginning of the conference. We all knew what was coming in the beginning of the conference, but the question was how they would go about it. Trenton quickly addressed the PSN outage with a sincere apology and quickly moved into the best part of the conference.
Uncharted 3 was the first game they brought out. The co-presidents of Naughty Dog gave a really good demo set in a sinking ship. The best part came from the trailer afterwords though. Both Elena and Chloe are back and the action looks even better. The graphics look amazing. This is easily one of my most anticipated games of the year and one of my favorites from E3.
From there they moved on to Resistance 3. To be honest the demo was really short and kind of boring. There's a good chance that I'm going to ignore this game in order to make way for bigger and better games. Sony then continued to talk about 3D and all that jazz. They announced a cool bundle including a 24" 3D HDTV, an HDMI cable, 3D glasses, and Resistance 3 for $450. Surprisingly cheap all things considered, but uninterested to pretty much everyone.
They touched inFamous again, which was a bad choice. The game comes out tomorrow, so focus on stuff that comes out later in the year or even further into the future. On the plus side, Sly Cooper 4 was announced. I'm still playing through the Sly Collection, and I'm enjoying those games a lot so I'm excited for the newest game.
Things took a weird turn from there on. The section on the third parties was nice, aside from the PS Move focused areas. Those were embarrassing as per usual (especially the 2K Sports demo). The one highlight thought was Ken Levine and Bioshock Infinite. Thankfully they spared us a Move demo, but the new trailer for Infinite has me just as excited for Uncharted 3.
Dust 514 was shown at the conference as well. For those who don't know, Dust 514 is a PS3 exclusive shooter that's directly connected to the MMO EVE Online. People on EVE Online can hire the PS3 players as their personal armies to attack planets and the like. The Dust soldiers then fight those battles using support from the EVE Online players in space. It's a very interesting concept that I'll be watching closely to see how it works out.
The last 45 minutes to an hour of the show focused on the NGP or really the PS Vita. Is it a name worse then Wii? I'm not sure, but if not it's definitely got second place. The price is surprising considering Sony's craziness involving pricing tech. The wi-fi model is $250 and the 3G model is $300. Solid pricing in my opinion. The games unfortunately were really boring. With the exception of Uncharted, Street Fighter vs. Tekken, and the reveal of a Bioshock game on the NGP, the last hour was a real bore and hard to get through. I understand why Sony had to do it, but that didn't mean I had to enjoy it.
There was also a lack of Kevin Butler. This was sad, but understandable. You only want to use him every once in awhile. There were a few nice jokes during the conference. Jack even went as far to poke at Kaz about his Ridge Racer line. These were nice touches that capped off an otherwise boring back half of the conference.
Overall Grade: B - While Sony made many of the same mistakes Microsoft did - too much motion focus, terrible demos - I believe they pulled ahead with great games such as Uncharted 3, Bioshock Infinite, and Dust 514. While the name "Vita" leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth there are games worth paying attention to. Uncharted, SFxT, and Bioshock are a promising start to what will hopefully be a successful handheld.
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Tomorrow is Nintendo's conference! I can't wait! I really hope they don't screw this up!
Alright, you're free to hate on my for what I said about Microsoft and refer to me as a Sony fanboy for being more interested in Uncharted 3 and Bioshock than Halo and Halo.
Enjoy the rest of the show!
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