Pretty good press conference this year. Here are a few bullet points of my thoughts.
- Driving vehicles in the new CoD looks good. Nice to see them coming back into the series. Hopefully they will not be in multiplayer though.
- Gears of War 3 Co-Op looks pretty good. They are clearly giving it more thought. Hopefully trading weapons isn’t the only new interaction between players. It is also nice to see that they are getting a bit more creative with the Lambent Locusts instead of just having them glow a bit and explode when you kill them. The visuals look improved a bit, which is pretty impressive considering how good the last one looked.
- Metal Gear Solid Rising is not at all what I was expecting. However it does look pretty cool. Sword gameplay that appears to actually work well. I will be checking this out. Now I just have to start playing Metal Gear Solid 4 first.
- Natal now named Kinect. Can’t say that I love the name, but I don’t dislike it either. Sounds like a very focus tested “neutral” name to me.
- Lots of new dashboard stuff announced for Kinect. The “Kinect Hub” was a smart idea. The video chat interaction to Live Messenger was a good idea, however I doubt I will ever use it. I have had a Xbox 360 Vision Camera for a long time now, and only video chatted with people maybe twice.
- Interesting selection of Kinect games. Naturally Microsoft has its own versions of Wii Sports and the like. However they actually look pretty decent, and way more interesting then what the Wii offers. Some of the interactivity there is pretty cool. Clearly demonstrates why full body tracking is superior to holding a motion sensing controller. I will be interested in seeing what Sony shows off tomorrow, but at this point I can’t see a physical controller setup beating this.
- Tons of ESPN content coming to live for free. I can see a lot of college students happy about this one. Especially those without Cable TV. I don’t follow sports at all, so I don’t really care at all about this. However the fact that its free to gold members is pretty cool. I was expecting some sort of subscription fee.
- Crytek is making some sort of medieval action game exclusive for the Xbox 360. The trailer showed absolutely nothing, so why even bother announcing. Perhaps once Crytek makes a game with gameplay that lives up to the visuals I will start to care.
- Halo: Reach single player looks pretty good. The animations on the Elites look more fluid then ever, and the environments look properly large and detailed. The graphics are not mind blowing by any means, but it is a step up from both Halo 3 and the Reach Beta. They show a little bit of space vehicle combat at the end. Could be cool, but from the little they showed it looked mindless and not at all tactical. Plus, who wants to fly in 3rd person. First person please!
- New smaller Xbox 360 console. This time with a larger hard drive and new case design. Personally I am not digging the new case, however the fact that its (hopefully) more reliable and comes with a bigger hard drive for the same price as the current elite means that there is no reason for any new buyer not to go with this. I just bought a new Xbox 360 in March when my previous one broke for the 3rd time and was finally out of warranty. Why oh why couldn’t it have lasted until now. Oh well.
- Overall it was a good press conference. Not as good as some of the previous ones, but still solid.