Notable stuff from E3 (if you haven’t noticed, there haven’t been geek tags on stuff, there’s just too much geek stuff to label):
- Halo 3. The trailer itself is fairly standard stuff – I thought the music was especially well done, the graphics were noteworthy, and the plot might actually be interesting this time. I’ve got a lot of brewing anger from Halo 2 that Halo 3 has to resolve, so I’m expecting the world from this.
- Sony’s Press Conference. It sucked. It sucked hard. It was definitely the most disjointed of the three – they would jump from talking about the PSP to talking about PS3 games, back to more stuff on the PSP, then about their stupid song service, and back to PS3 games. I exaggerate not. I noticed a fundamental difference in speech – where Microsoft and Nintendo called the users “players” and “gamers”, Sony called them “consumers”. Sony obviously doesn’t care – especially in the fact that their console is essentially going to cost $600 bucks. I couldn’t really care less about their assimilation of the 360 and Wii controllers, though. That’s just smart tactics.
- Nintendo’s Press Conference. The best of the three. Not a lot of specs or details, but they’ve proven the ability of the controller, which is exactly what they needed to do. The Zelda demo looked freaking awesome, freaking awesome enough for me to buy it at launch come this November.
- Microsoft’s Press Conference. Surprisingly good, aside from Peter Moore’s incessant clapping and complete failure to maintain dignity as he got a tattoo for freaking GTA4. Who cares? It was cool for Halo 2, so why go through the trouble? Beyond that, there were a handful of possibly nifty games, but nothing spectacular. The whole idea of connexting the 360 and the PC, though, was cool. It’s definitely part of their anti-Mac and anti-Linux campaign, by setting down a “games for Windows” tagline, but, so long as they keep it otherwise open, it’s just gravy. I’m still not sure how I feel about Vista, but, we’ll see.
That’s pretty much it for the moment. Today may bring some interesting things, or it may not.