Knee-jerk Reactions to the Three Conferences

What did we see from Sony yesterday? A bunch of charts. A corny montage of "gamers" worldwide that made everyone's eyes roll. Still waiting to see some farks of the monkey-guy. Game demos that seemed ill-prepared and stilted (the Genji one jumps to mind). A controller that, while not the horrible "theft" of Nintendo that everyone makes it out to be, was clearly a reactionary move to the big N in order to add another bullet point to the back of the box. Does anyone REALLY think that motion sensing features are gonna be big for PS3 games? Raise your hands. I didn't think so. Oh and let's not forget the eye-toy, 3D, motion-sensing Yu-Gi-Oh type card battle game...thing...or whatever. Hey it's got ducks! We all love ducks.

Oh and the price, dear God, the price. $600? I need a raise. Actually I don't, because while there were some really, really cool games that got my attention during the presentation, like Heavenly Sword, 8 Days, Assassin's Creed, and Lair, none of those games make me feel like running out and dropping six bills for the privilege. FF XIII makes me almost want to try the series again after abandoning it for good midway through FF7. But again, six bills? I'll pass, thanks. Oh but there's a "bargain" version for $500 right? Unfortunately Sony has sneakily removed big functionality from that version, like HDMI connection, Wi-Fi, and memory stick support, etc. That one's an even worse idea than the Xbox 360 core system.

Nintendo on the other hand, paced their conference a lot better, showing off better looking products and in a more polished fashion. Shiggy coming out in a tuxedo and conducting the virtual orchestra was entertaining. And I really got into some of the Wii games they showed off, Zelda of course, Warioware, and Mario come to mind. I was also excited to see Fire Emblem and some of the DS games.

The Zelda and tennis demos are where I think I finally started to come around on the Wiimote. The control options and possibilities are starting to make sense to me, and finally seeing it in action, doing a variety of different things in Zelda has alleviated some of my concerns (but I still need to try it for myself in a lot of games and see how well the control works before I'll be convinced) about the whole thing. Wish there were more details about the online service, but what they told us sounded ok.

It's not all rosy though. Red Steel was underwhelming. First of all, they better change the name of the game to Clean Steel, because there was no blood (whaaat?) in the demo. Controlling the swords and gunplay looked fine, but the graphic quality left a lot to be desired. It just looked so last-gen, with not-so-great looking textures, and blocky character models. Zelda Wii looked great and clearly better than last-gen. What happened here? Not to be a graphics whore, but it's hard to see and play stuff like FEAR, Call of Duty 2, Gears of War, etc and then come back and have to be satisfied with GameCube quality stuff. Maybe the best-looking Wii games will rely a lot on more style-driven graphics than realistic themes.

Despite those issues, I felt more interested in the Wii after seeing the press conference than before, and I'd totally buy one at this point if they kept the price around $200. So, mission accomplished, Nintendo. The name's still dumb though, and sorry Reg, but the Lexus, Ikea and Google analogies don't hold water. Those brands never elicited a wince from me.

Microsoft's press conference surprised me the most. I didn't expect to be as engaged with their announcements as I ended up being. Gears of War looked Hyphy with a capital H. That's the kind of game that would get me to pick up the console. The action looked crisp and visceral and overall way more compelling than say...Resistance Rise of Man from Sony's conference yesterday, which you could argue is a similar sort of game.

Lots of other good looking games too--Lost Planet, Too Human, Viva Pinata, Prey, 99 Nights, NCAA 07, Splinter Cell, Blue Dragon... I can get into all of that. GTA IV was a surprise, but that's not until 07 so I'm not even worrying about it now. HD-DVD add-on...umm...yay? Oh yes and more lip service about supporting gaming on PC with Windows Vista. Crysis looked cool, but the montage of other PC games was like 3 games long.

Here's the part that had me sitting up in my chair -- the Xbox Live functionality across 360, PC, and Windows mobile phones. Wow. Getting points for playing games on your PC and your phone. I'm into that. Getting game invites on the PC from a friend playing on 360? I'm into that. Playing (and ruthlessly pwning) controller-wielding Xbox 360 players on the same FPS game with my PC version (mouse and keyboard)? Totally unfair, but I'm into that. Buying one copy of a simple arcade game like Zuma and being able to play it on all three platforms? I'm into that. Tweaking out my Forza car on my phone and PC and then racing it on the 360? Into that. Bring it. I'm ready.

Good job Microsoft, I am really really close to running out and getting a 360 (and a windows mobile phone) now. But I'll probably hold off until I see some real implementations of this convergence technology that are compelling--right now it's all just a promise w/o implementation. I can think of something...Someone tell Blizzard to make a World of Warcraft auction house manager that works on Windows mobile phones and I will sell my soul.