E3 press conferences

[Ace Pace]

Yesterday(my time) we finshed watching three press conferences by Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. Each conference was in its own way impressive. I'll go through each in order of happening.


Sony:
Sony's conference was possibly the most arrogent, yet most visually impressive. Starting off with a giant list of sales numbers to prove how powerful they are, we moved onto the PSP, cutting in a short series of gameplay movies from new titles. Nothing very impressive but there were some nice games there.
Then the moment we all waited for, the PS3. Sony hit back to all complaints that the PS3 couldn't do last years graphics, with strong demonstrations of Gran Tourismo HD, Heavenly Sword, Final Fantasy 13. The key was really evolution of all current gameplay trends. There was nothing new in terms of gameplay, in fact, non of the games brought anything new to the table, bar fucking amazing graphics. And the graphics are VERY impressive. Sony then brought up its contender for the online market, some kind of quasi Xbox Marketplace ripoff quasi MTV ripoff. It has non of the Xbox strongpoints and no charm at all. Low point.

Then comes in Sony's 'announcement' regarding the controller. Now for background, in E3 2005, Sony showed off some Boomerang, non playable, that would include vibration capability. Since then, they got sued and had to dump vibration capability. Therfor they ripped off Nintendo, pretty sucessfully, and took tilt detection and added it to the Sony Dual Shock 3.
They showed a pretty nice game for it, Warhawk, which stops me from laughing my ass off at hte ripoff, however, I'm not sure how many will use that feature.
Thats it for Sony.


Nintendo:
Nintendo possibly had the most entertaining conference I've ever seen. It was full of life, starting with a series of reels showing the Wii in action. Up comes Reggie to the stage and starts a nice speach, interspaced with gameplay from the Wii, about how innovation is importent. Watching the games running in the background was very impressive.
Theres not much to add, Zelda was great, as expected, the party games were shown off alot, WiiSports and WarioWare for the Wii.
They had some guy who had never played before, he managed to beat the Nintendo executives pretty well.
Can't say much else about the conference.

Microsoft:
Microsoft had what seemed to be one goal during this conference: We got an advantage and we know it.
The entire conference was all about Exclusive games, Exclusive Live arcade, showing lots of great games like Gears of War. The live arcade, they're talking about lowering the barrier of entry.
Later on, theres alot of talk of exclusives, GTA4 will have Xbox360 specific features. There was much talk over Xbox Live, about expanding it and making all games use it. Also announced a webcam to match the headset.

Overall it was a very impressive preformance, however, it was all about gameplay.
Sony= graphics.
Nintendo= Innovation.
Microsoft= Expanding current trends of multiplayer and gameplay evolution.