So it’s Friday and the week of sheer madness that is E3 is drawing to a close. It may be a little sad that there’ll be no announcements until Gamescom comes around, but it’ll be nice to get back to normal for a while. Anyway with all the things that have happened this week, the question is simply ‘what did you enjoy?’. This book ends nicely with Monday’s discussion on predictions. Why don’t you take a second to go back and look at what you thought was coming?
Right back from reading the past? Good, lets move on. Looking back at what I thought was going to happen it seems I should be fairly disappointed by Microsoft’s conference, and I was really. Whilst Kinect does look sort of cool, we didn’t see anything new after the Kinect only event and there certainly wasn’t anything really targeted at ‘core’ gamers. I was spot on with Halo: Reach and Gears of War 3, although those were pretty much a lock. Nothing cool and new like Shadow Complex, although we did get the 360 redesign. That was probably the least disappointing part of the event, and I do think it looks pretty cool.
Sony? Well we saw a lot of 3D, but far less GT5 than I thought we would. Maybe it’s because GT5 pretty much sells itself at this point, but it did seem odd that it wasn’t demoed. They did have an absolutely fantastic conference, with some big surprises that none of us saw coming. Perhaps the only real disappointment is the missing of titles like AGENT and The Last Guardian, but the event went well overall.
Finally Nintendo. Well I wasn’t expecting much, and they hugely over performed. The 3DS alone looked brilliant, but showing off new iterations of Zelda, Kirby, Goldeneye and Donkey Kong Country in one show was absolutely brilliant. They’ve certainly beaten away the disappointment of their recent conferences, and they do seem to be shifting their target to ‘core’ gamers again, something that’s bound to re-enforce their already strong position.
As for the show floor all I really wanted to see was Arkham Asylum 2, and we don’t seem to have seen any footage from the Batman title crop up yet. In fact I’d say this year has seen less show floor videos than we normally get coming out of the conference, and aside from what I’ve heard of Mortal Kombat there hasn’t been that much outside of the press events that has excited me.
One final shout out for the week goes to Ubisoft for putting on the weirdest, most insane press conference that I’ve ever seen. If it wasn’t for the reports confirming what I saw I’d be pretty convinced it was some kind of weird fever dream, it certainly felt like it. I have absolutely no idea why people were playing laser tag or why people were dancing to Michael Jackson, even though it’s 4 day later.
So what did you think of the big show? What did you enjoy and what bored you? How were the press conferences for you? Let it all out.
Severn2j
Killzone 3 was probably the highlight for me, along with the GT5 release date.. The non-appearance of certain games was a bigger issue tho, namely Agent, TLG and Aliens: Colonial Marines. I did like the turnaround from Valve as well. Nice that they’re on board finally, and having Steam on PS3 is a bigger deal than Portal 2, imo. Overall, a win for Sony I think.
TSBonyman
Out of what Nintendo showed, Kirby really appealed to me.
I thought microsoft let their core gamers down badly.
Sony did great but my most anticipated game, the last guardian, didn’t show so it felt like there was something missing.
Hopefully Gamescom will rectify that.
upselo
I don’t really know where to put that down, but I have to say that one think I liked about your E3 coverage, is your RSS. Thanks to you enabling the whole content of your articles into RSS (as opposed to only the subtitles earlier), I have been able to keep up with your excellent coverage at work, where most gaming sites are blocked.
So thanks a lot, and keep up the good work !
PriceKitty
Sony kicked everyone’s ass.
They never cease to do so.