N-Philes

E3 Media Briefing Afterthoughts

Posted June 8th 2009 by Adam Glasgow.

E3 is good and over, and I've had the weekend to recover from my trip and roll everything around in my head. Overall the show was much less chaotic than I was expecting, which almost surely has to do with the fact that it's a closed event and you have to be over a certain age to get in. I am grateful for this. Anyhow, here's what I thought of the media briefings.

Microsoft's Media Briefing

The whole thing was silly an over the top, but I guess that's what they were going for so congratulations to them. I've never seen so many celebrities in one place pretending to give a shit about video games. Regardless, they had a strong showing of software, including the announcement of a new Metal Gear Solid action game staring Raiden. I would probably be more excited about this if they showed any kind of footage. A few new Halo games: ODST and Reach. I'm putting money on Reach being an MMO of some kind. I don't really care.

The big deal surprise thing Microsoft threw out was Project Natal – which is essentially their controllerless, voice recognizing response to the Wii. A few applications of it have potential, I think, but the ones I liked the most were the more practical ones. Making voice calls and being able to pull up information from the web and share it while talking was cool. Pretending to kick a ball by kicking the air was less cool.

There were a good number of other practical, neat things they're doing with Xbox live. Netflix streaming improvements (you can finally add movies to your list through your Xbox), last.fm access, twitter and facebook integration. A few of those would be useful to me.

Nintendo's Media Briefing

This was definitely the most boring of the three briefings to me. There were a few awesome things announced, namely Super Mario Galaxy 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Metroid: Other M, and one or two fun looking DS game... things. Other than that, this was a hard thing to sit through. Are we seriously talking about the Women's Murder Club DS game? And C.O.P. DS? Jesus. And what is this vitality sensor shit? Not only does it sound stupid, Nintendo failed to show off any real use of the thing. Why they decided to present it is beyond me.  Oh well, at least there were a few good Wii games announced.

Sony's Media Briefing

My big complaint here is that this thing was brutally long and spent way too much time on stupid junk. Other than that, I was fairly impressed. A very solid line up of games, the new PSP looks great (although $250 seems pretty high), Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker blew me away, and a few new Final Fantasy games were shown off for the super nerds. Most of the other games they showcased weren't big surprises, but most of it looked good. New Assassin's Creed, Gran Turismo 5 (man I don't care about this game), God of War III, etc. ModNation Racers looks awesome; it's basically a highly customizable kart racer that's clearly heavily inspired by the trendy hobby of vinyl toy collecting.

Sony's big reveal was their motion controllers, which seemed to be the farthest away from being finished but also the most interesting of the three companies. It seemed like real one to one movement, like what the Wii pretended to be able to do start out with. My biggest concern is that it seems to require a lot of hardware: up to two controllers a person and an eye toy. But the archery and sword tech demos were awesome.

Final Thoughts

Every company is now highly invested in some kind of motion control. Whether or not we'll look back at these years and say "that's really where it began" or "what the hell were we thinking?" is hard to know. I think if I had to pick who I thought had the best show it would be Sony - a lot of good games and some nice surprises. Second would be Microsoft for essentially the same reasons. Nintendo showed off a handful of exciting games, but beyond that presented nothing noteworthy or interesting. I guess I should have expected that, they're definitely in "slow and study wins the race" mode.

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