Completely dissapointed with what Microsoft brought to the table and my respect for Peter Moore has just moved down to aartard. Sure it's not completely his doing, he's still the one to blame. Blame for what? For the horrible press conference. What did we see from Microsoft, a kidy friendly controller and some of Disney's more lackluster movies, JOY! I sat up till 11:30 EST waiting, hoping that Microsoft has something big to show to us all. Nope, just a bunch of really cool musicians they don't even show to the folks at home, instead showing us the abyss of space with floating halo screenshots very reminiscent of the ever-so old windows flying at you screensaver.

The Theme

What was the theme this year? Simply, "We are better than those other two. Look. We're better." How do they do this, bring up a bunch of people, fascinate us with games and videos we've already seen before topped off with a plethora of numbers being thrown with a passion. Numbers, which were represented in a whole bunch of graphs. Not to mention, numbers that were mostly directly related to the fact that the 360 was released a year before the other two conosoles, and the only one that wasn't related - Momentum gain after all console launch - was rivaled very well by Wii sales.

This is the main thing that simply disgusted me. Here I was, waiting all day to hear what Microsoft was going to do, going to pull out of left field and amaze everyone, but no, instead they simply write out the definition for douce bag.

That's pretty sad as well. There were good parts, Kim, the head of Microsoft Game Studios, had great stuff to show, and did it well. The Assasin's Creed run through was really neat, bit rough on a few edges, but still very much on the plus side. Unfortunately it was completely outweighed by unnecessery appearences by Heisman winner, whathisface. Yes, I don't watch football, I'm sorry, but I really don't think you football fans were really impressed by the little white boy going "I guess you schooled me brother".

The Games

For the most part, they had the good games in there. It really inforced the second theme, which was BIG FRIKIN' HOLIDAY SEASON! Some were a bit more questionable in their breif glimpse and my thoughts are they put them in because more would mean a longer video that would play out the really well done videos, especially the Games for Windows, very nice.

With the Halo trailer, well, even that wasn't amazing. It had small glimpses of interesting parts. I was kinda dissapointed that they didn't really give you a good look of the different masks that will be featured or w/e it is. I just realised that around an hour before the conference and wasn't sure what was going on there. Still, it was a good trailer, just nothing special. And the live action, meh.

In Moore's final round-up the first two coloumns were completely or partially exclusive, partially being games that offer certain feature via 360 i.e. Virtua Fighter 5. I don't think I need to restate the games coming out since he only seemed to repeat them around 5-6 times through the show, Halo, Mass Effect and Bio Mass leading the pack.

The other games did look good, PGR 4 was nice, Gears for the PC looked really nice, Call of Duty raised my brow a bit and pretty much every other game that got it's own spot was a good choice to show. As fore mentioned Assasin's Creed also struck a good chord and similarly with Resident Evil 5. Viva Pinata: Party Animals however, it's just Microsoft's retaliation to the Wii's massive sucsess in it's already huge collection of party games, and I have the disctinct feeling it's not going to reimagine the whole genre in like a whole new revolutionary way.

Aslo, on a side note, the Rock Band performace was just laughable, although the game looked quite good, we've already seen it in the recently released video featuring Welcome to the Jungle and Pete Moore's the best one to laugh at. Since his performace went past the playful, "Oh look I made a mistake" to more of the "Jeez I don't know how to actually play games, please end this quickly." That was good.

The Other Things

To start off, the Halo Limited Edition Console. It's nothing really surprising, with all the other really big limited editions merch, I'm pretty sure this wasn't in the far shights or unimaginable. Then we have the first announcement, the kidy controller. I thought that was pretty cool, along with scene it, which I guess can work as a great family game with a 360 already in the house and little ones. We'll just have to see the other games making it's way for this controller. Although it doesn't seem too unreasonable from a pricing stand-point for just this one game, it's just the idea of buying four controllers but only using it to play one game. As I said, Scene it will probably be fun for families, just not Guitar Hero or DDR.

Marketplace, it's expanding. Like always, great. It's good news that opening everything to Europe and Canada. Me being from the latter made me feel special. Also, Disney. Catalouge coming to Marketplace, I'm very happy. I was a bit confused though, this is probably just my stupidity though. From his first mention, it seemed like the whole Disney catalogue and not just select titles, but when the trailer showed up, there was only movies of Disney's lesser greats. So that got me rattled a bit, having not seen Cindrella or Alladin or some of Disney's truley memorable cla.ss.ics.

Final Thoughts

This rant way longer than I expected. Sorry. On the whole it probably wasn't such a bad showing, they were some nice things showing and some nice cool things showing. It's just that it's E3 and maybe this is what happened with the downscale, but gamer's (or maybe just me) have come to expect a lot from the three big ones around this time of year. It just seemed that it let me down, from my hopes and expectations. I don't hate the 360, I actually am waiting to play a lot of the titles on one, but it's just that it's E3. The horrible advertising of their market share didn't help things either.

I'm sorry if I might have offended anyone here, or challenged your veiws, this is more of a rant post than a proper blog post. Thank you for anyone who read it, it got pretty long. Also, I'm not an avid blog poster, so I don't really know how to post a proper one.

-bumboy
Yeah, it's a weird name. There's long story.

The team has also been pleased to announce that they have almost gotten to a testing stage, where they shall be conducting internal alphas.

On a final note, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!