As your eyes and ears for the gaming world, we spent our morning today watching the E3 event. Some of us are at the event in Los Angeles, some of us are everywhere else. But, lucky for you, we bring our experience and critical eye to all things gaming. Below is a short list of the announcements during the Microsoft Keynote E3 Event, followed by our thoughts and analysis.
- Call of Duty Black Ops – cave dwellers
- Metal Gear Rising – sword-y action
- Gears of War 3 – Cliffy B – Four player Co Op, female Gears
- Fable III – Revolution? Right.
- Codename Kingdoms – Crytek
- Halo: Reach – yawn
- Kinect – easy, controller free sign in and gaming
- Kinect Adventures – more fun than a raft full of women
- Kinectimals – adopt 40 of your favorite animals, 30 unique activities
- Kinect Sports – WiiSports, on your XBox now
- Kinect JoyRide – MarioKart on your XBox. without, you know, Mario.
- ESPN exclusive partnership with XBox
- Video Chat – friends, family, skeleton tracking.
- Your Shape: Fitness Evolved – Ubisoft
- Harmonix – Dance Central
- LucasArts and Kinect – Force Unleashed? 2011
- Turn 10 – Forza controller free.
- New Xbox 360 – 250 G HD, Built In WiFi 802.11n, no need for separate power supply for Kinect- same price, shipping today, Arcade Drops to $149, Pro to $249.
Chris – While I think the new 360 would be awesome, I will wait and see how the RROD fares with this one. Not having a jet engine in my living room might get me playing my 360 once again. Then again, I may just run out and get one so I can resume playing games with my friends. No word on how to transfer games from one 360 to the other though. Hmm.
Overall I was not so thrilled here. Most of the stuff we saw here was already on the net. While Kinect has potential I noted some response lag on a few games. This will be
a killer on the gaming front. I’m holding out final thoughts till I see this in action.
Most of the Natal….errr Kinect games looked horribly ripped off from the big N. These games will need to step it up for me to be convinced that this was worthy of whatever price point Kinect is coming out at. You all did notice there was no price set on the Kinect right?
The rest of the news was nothing earth shattering here. Another CoD, Halo, and MGS game. ESPN hitting the 360 could start a revolution on how we start watching TV though. I’m curious what this leads to. I’m ready to see what Sony and Nintendo have to show as MS just didn’t blow my socks out the door.
Eric – Oh, sorry, I just woke up after falling asleep from the lack of new announcements, or really anything truly compelling. The amount of time spent on Halo:Reach, COD: Black Ops, and Gears of War 3 made it seem like Microsoft had nothing new up their sleeves and were playing it really safe this year. Sure Kinect is something new, but with no price announcement it almost seems as if they didn’t want a potential high price point to dominate the news headlines.
The Kinect games were what was expected with Wii-Sports copies, but really nothing else. The fitness game coming from Ubisoft will garner mainstream press attention as the ‘New Wii-Fit’ but little else could be found in the way of titles for core gamers.
ESPN for me was the surprise, because well I like sports, one of the only reasons I was keeping my cable service was to watch sporting events, with that now being handled on my Xbox, it may be time to show Comcast the curb.
Microsoft made the mistake of not showing Gamers, at least the ones that would be in the theater and watching on live streams what they wanted and follow E3 coverage for: Something New.
Rob – Seriously? Most of this conference bored me to tears. I can see some sort of value to Kinect, but only in the dance, fitness and cute pet tiger games. Racing? I want to hold a steering wheel. Motion controlled DVD watching? Is a remote REALLY that hard to figure out? I also don’t want to have to wave at my Xbox to get it to pause my movie. Honest. I really don’t.
The swordplay in the new Metal Gear looked fairly compelling, and of course I’m a sucker for anything Gears of War. One thing struck me though,a s I watched – this is a conference full of gaming sequels. Not a single new IP in the bunch. Looks like iterative game development is taking a cue from Hollywood and sticking with the tried and true, the “appeal to the lowest common denominator” approach. I suppose it’s working for them.
I am SO not a sports fan, so don’t really see the point of ESPN. Do you really watch the same games over and over? Is on demand that important? I dunno. Not seing the draw here, but I’ll let my sports fan buddies do the talking on this one.
As my compatriots said above, the blatant Nintendo rip offs continue with all the Kinect games. Kinectimals, KinectKart, Kinect Sports, the list continues. Do they really just steal ideas and put a new face on them? Oh, wait… there was that time at Apple…
Blake – Lets face it folks, Microsoft screwed the pooch on this one. They practically ignored their target audience in the crowd, in favor of catering to the masses. THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU DO AT E3! Having to sit through 45+ minutes of mundane Kinect tech demos is one thing, but to not give us an actual moneyshot with the price is more like slapping every audience member in the face. I guess it is a good thing they decided to give everyone a free Xbox 360 Slim to cheer them up.
When you look at what was actually demoed, there were little to no surprises from what used to be a staple of the E3 experience… shocks! I guess I should haven seen this coming when the E3 trailers started trickling out over a week ago. Where is the fun in that? All I can really say is that if this is the best that they have to offer, with no price for the Kinect in sight, they are going to have a long year ahead of them. Oh, and in case I didn’t make it clear earlier, unless a kinect shows up at my door for free, I won’t touch the damn thing. Dear Microsoft, I want my morning back!
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