Topic: E3 2011 Discussion

I love the Halo 4, it looks really great! I am really excited about Microsoft this year! And it makes me want to buy they're console which I will when I go to college or get a job.

Rayman Origins looks pretty sweet.
That's about it for me as far as Ubisoft goes...MAYBE Assassin's Creed.

I'm just gonna throw out my prediction right now: EA "Won" E3 Day 1. I don't think Sony will be able to top them.

thinking of picking up a kinect this week

I think it's safe to say that a lot of the disappointment you hear about Microsoft's E3 presentation is that they didn't release any information about their next gen system, which had been heavily speculated on for some time now.

If I had money I would buy myself a Kinect right now! To bad I don't have the money >.< awe Kinect will be so old by next year when I go to college.

I dunno i'm pretty excited for Sony's for some reason. We'll see though.

where are all the rpgs?

Waiting until after Mass Effect 3 hits, probably.

Yeah I'm going with you on this...but then again new systems always steal the show...so, I dunno...lol.

Really? Sweet! Honestly, I was sold on the game ever since I saw this:

If you can do that to all the NPC characters I think I might not ever need another game.

that is really awesome I have to say

Here are my thoughts on the Microsoft presentation:

First thing's first: we cannot expect M$ to have a blowaway E3 every year. They only do home consoles, no portables, so they have half the opportunity to do big hardware reveals as Sony and Nintendo. The 360 is old. Highlights will be the games.

There were a fair amount of solid looking games. Tomb Raider in particular looks neat. COD/Halo/Gears sequels for shooter fans to nut over.

Then there was Kinect. There were 3 main types of games for Kinect:

1) Core titles that utilize Kinect completely: Fable, Star Wars and Ghost Recon. You're pretty much stuck on rails with Kinect, because there's no good way to manipulate the camera. You also need to create abstract gestures to shoot guns, and it doesn't look like the accuracy can be nearly as high as with pointer controls or dual analogs. Lots of abstract gestures are the opposite of intuitive, as well. Kinect as limiting/awkward=fail. Hopefully, once Kinect more established, Microsoft won't feel the need to force devs to shoehorn it into everything.

2) Titles using Kinect for some features (voice control, menu support, particular actions) along with the controller: This is promising. Mass Effect's voice controls, while superfluous, are intuitive and immersive. The ability to possibly eventually have true conversations that effect the game world in the future is intriguing, even though we're not near that yet. Controlling teammates with voice control is more interesting. Could this be the end of dumb companions who do more harm than good?

3) Casual games: No surprises here. People criticize Sesame Street/Disney being shown, but with the average gamer age in the 30's, many of the gamers watching E3 probably have young children.

The Kinect Labs feature was really interesting. So much cool stuff has been done with Kinect on PC, it's great to see Xbox owners being able to play around in that space. The fact that dev kits are open for anyone to play around with is awesome.

Overall, I'd give the presentation a 7/10. I would have liked to see more of some games (esp. Tomb Raider), and the games that relied too heavily on Kinect seemed fairly awkward. However, there were a lot of strong titles/sequels (and if many of the Kinect only titles offer gamepad support too, they would be pretty fun), but not a whole lot truly new.

One thing that disappointed me was that Microsoft focused too much on the kid games

Is there any way I can "rewind" a live feed? Because I'm only going to be able to see 1/3rd of Nintendo's conference live, and I want to see the beginning before the internet spoils it for me.

What's up with the Micrisoft hate?

Is it just because they want to sell their console to kids too?

Well focusing more on the kid stuff certainly doesn't work at e3, which is mostly populated by older gamers

OMG NINTENCATS?

@donald_duck: well, as someone else said before, most people there are old enough to be parents themselves

Nice to see's Ubisoft's mascots in one spot

@Dragoon On the Gametrailers stream there's a rewind button, but it only goes 30 minute back.