Perched in the audience, I got a nice first hand look at all the goods Microsoft revealed this morning at their E3 09 Press Briefing. Many of us went in not knowing exactly what would be shown, but we had some good ideas. How well did the they deliver? I was damn impressed with most of the event. Read on for my thoughts on how it all went down.
Starting the show with The Beatles Rock Band was a pretty nice move. The gameplay and trailers looked good, with slight tweaks to the standard Rock Band aesthetic showing off the new motif for The Beatles. The highlight of the entire event, in my eyes, was bringing out Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Between seeing the two of them, Yoko Ono, and the wife and son of George Harrison, it’s going to be tough to bring me down.
Highlights of the middle portion for me were the gameplay demo of Modern Warfare 2, which looked fantastic, the demo of Splinter Cell: Conviction, the Halo: ODST gameplay demo and Halo Reach reveal, and the announcements of Crackdown 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. The biggest gameplay element of the show, for me, was Forza Motorsport 3 and the features it brings to the table. Being able to create and edit HD video to share online is huge, as well as the new updated livery editor features. I’m not sure it’s “the definitive racing game of this generation”, but it’s going to be one of the biggest for sure.
After announcing some new social media integration with Facebook and Twitter (which I think will be huge for Microsoft), the Redmond giant wheeled out Project Natal. If anyone didn’t know some sort of motion sensing peripheral was coming, they were living under a rock. However, Natal surprised me. The full body motion capture and voice recognition could have tremendous impacts in the gaming populous. Those intimidated by controllers of any sort will have zero barrier of entry and we could see some amazing projects take advantage of this technology. Peter Molyneux’s Milo demo blew my mind; I think he may have just created the beginnings of SkyNet. The real time detection of player features and drawings could bring some utterly amazing new possibilities to games in the near future.
Overall, I think Microsoft had a terrific press briefing. It’s going to take a lot from Nintendo and Sony to top what we were shown this morning. Sony may be able to do that with the huge games they’re showing, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
EHH it was OK. this is what i dont get and maybe you can clear it up for me, is the MGS game going to be an MS exclusive or multiplat? because if its exclusive kojima is a sonofabitch!
also forza to me looked to be for casuals, gameplay for EVERYONE. i got the vibe that MS is goin casual. especially after seeing that gay ass project NATAL. shit looks like casuals will love it
their niche is casual compared to the ps3 owner, imo. plus everyone has seen what the wii has done in hardware sales. all consoles should be offering a wide variety of party, family, and childrens titles. I am not ashamed to admit I prefer minigames and DLed games to full titles most of the time. In part because I completely fail at using the analog sticks to aim and move. Just can’t do it so that limits me from most of the best titles.
I thought the show looked awesome. I almost crap my pants when I saw the Halo: ODST trailer, and I heard about Halo: Reach this morning, but its blowing my mind just thinking about 2 Halo games in 6-9 months. ps, I’m a preety big halo fan. I’m very surprise about the L4D2 announcement, it got me by my shorts about how short it was when L4d came out.
I don’t really care about the motion sensing thing cause I would not have any use to it.
Over all, I say nice, but I can’t wait to see what sony is bringing to the table.