E3 2010: Mircosoft Impressions

Seems like it wasn't that long ago that I was blogging about E3 2009. Okay it was a little over a year ago but damn that year went by pretty damn quick. Microsoft started off the event as usual and...to be honest, I couldn't really care less. In the past year, the X-box 360 has really fallen out of favor with me. I haven't played a new game on the system since Prototype, which was last summer, and The only games I go back to the system to play are the X-Box Live Arcade versions of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie. This press conference didn't offer any real new announcements or surprises, just clarification on stuff we already knew about. This really was the worst showing Microsoft had in years...

Call Of Duty: Black Ops: The show kicked off with the yearly offering from the Call Of Duty series. Now, I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I don't care too much for shooters anymore, largely because the 360 has run that genre into the ground. And I'm only bringing this up now to cover up the fact that there is nothing to really talk about for this game, the demo they showed was incredibly standard and boring and since this is one of those odd numbered bland Call of Duty games coming from Treyarch and not Infinity Ward, who work on the more notable entries in the series, only makes this game even more uninteresting. Like all the other games, this one will be released in November.

Metal Gear Rising: Well, they have actual footage (roughly 8 seconds of actual gameplay) from the game this year and it looks like fun. I'm still hold to my previous comment that I'm going to get this for PS3 instead as that platform the franchise was designed for. Oh, yeah and precision cutting on watermelons is awesome.

Gears of War 3: From this point on, Microsoft made it obnoxiously clear that every game was going to be exclusive to the X-Box brand. Gears of War 3 follows Halo 3's path by adding four player co-op to the mix and probably new weapons and other stuff. I actually did play Gears 2 around the time it came out and found it to be a pretty enjoyable outing, certainly more deserving of its praise than Halo ever was. If there's one exclusive game for the system I'm gonna play its going to this one.

Fable III: Never did get around to playing the second one like I said I would, but this still looks pretty interesting. Peter Molyneaux pretty much said most of same things he used to described the other two games, but the only real difference is that this takes place several decades after the second. I'll have to more into it, but only other thing I know about the game right now is that its going to be released on October 26.

Halo Reach: Bungie continues to crush people's hope that they'll work on a new franchise by showing more from a game that we've already heard too much about. Nothing that was shown in the demo looked new to the series, but I'm probably wrong. Anyway this game comes out sometime in September and I'm sure I'll end up playing it when one of my friends end up getting it. I will give Microsoft credit though, they actually got all their big name franchises out of the way in the first half of the show and left the rest of the showings to somewhat new faces.

ESPN on X-box: I understand that this is a big deal, but did they really need to spent 7 or 8 minutes going on about this, They didn't really do anything with this feature that we couldn't have figured out on our owns and did they really need to get those guys from Sporstcenter to show up. Great for sports fans and great move for Microsoft, but the whole thing was just an extended demo for my next subject...

Kinect: Kinect is new name for Project Natal and is what the remaining 40 or so minutes of the conference focused on. Its an impressive piece of hardware but its a shame that they spent the rest of the show covering it because apart from the actual games, they didn't really show anything new from last year so my opinion of it hasn't changed from last year: The voice interaction is pure awesome sauce, but the full body motion control aspect only seems to be a little better than the Playstation Eyetoy that was released several years ago and given that what the eyetoy brought to the gaming table wasn't much, I doubt that Natal's implementation in games will be too much to gush over. Its use to enhance movie watching and chatting with friends is cool, but the games...not so much, which brings me to...

Kinect Launch Games: Okay, so there are 6 of these and none of them are really noteworthy. Kinectimals is basically a mix of the Milo demo they showed last year and Nintendogs. Its kinda cool and cute and I could have an actual interest in playing this if I didn't already have a dog to take care of. Kinect Sports is just Wii Sports...that's it...oh, and its made by Rare, the same people who gave us Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country, and Goldeneye. It only showcases how far they've fallen as a game company. Kinect Joy Ride is just a kart racer that looks really generic, Kinect Adventures actually looks like its fun to play with friends but like most casual Wii games won't gain much interest. Your Shape Fitness Evolved is just those wii fitness games they made on the Wii and Dance Central is the same thing as that Just Dance game for the Wii. All of this and Kinect itself will be available November 4th.

Star Wars Kinect: Our first look at how Kinect could be used in a more traditional game and it seems kinda lame. Yeah, it was only about 30 seconds of gameplay that mostly involved moving forward and swinging the lightsaber, but it seemed really underwhelming. Its due out next year.

Turbo 10 (or just "10"): I couldn't tell what the title was but this looks like Forza Motorsports with Kinect thrown in. All it really did was show how a controller is probably easier for games like this. I mean, you actually have to walk around and do specific motions just check out your car, when you do it a few seconds with a controller.

Slimer X-Box 360: So the conference ended with a pretty big shocker, not the redesign of the console itself, but the fact that its available right now (though I kinda saw it coming when they playfully asked when we thought it was going to be released.) Other than that it comes with a 250GB HDD, built-in Wi-Fi, a shiny new coat of glossy black paint. Also everyone that attended the conference got one for free in what felt like an homage to Oprah's "free car" moment. It was a nice way to end the conference.

So yeah, this was probably the worst year for Microsoft...ever...