Microsoft’s E3 Slagfest

July 16th, 2008

xbox 360 avatar based interface

These comments are related to Microsoft’s E3 conference and showing. You can read an account here.

Considering that Microsoft has started loosing its grip on exclusive 3rd party properties to multiplatform-ism, unaided by weak first party support, they have done a fantastic job this E3 with the limited resources available. Much like my predictions, they flaunted their exclusives while added value to their already existing services.

As for their showing of casual games, I’m also quite pleased with how they avoided copying motion control and instead focused on key software to appeal to the casual audience (even though they still don’t understand them and everything except for Lips is destined for complete failure). The new front end and Mii styled rip offs are neat as well. What frustrates me though is how they have tarnished a more than solid showing with rude and outlandish comments regarding the “console war” and how the Xbox 360 is trampling all over it, casual gaming and the Playstation 3.

While Microsoft ought to be pleased about Final Fantasy XIII making the leap to their console, such a move doesn’t represent the pulling power of the Xbox brand at all, it represents a struggle to break even in a consolidating industry. This didn’t stop Microsoft’s cock headed gloating by Don Mattrick; “Final Fantasy joins a long list of former PlayStation franchises finding a new home on Xbox 360,”. He later raves of how Microsoft have been tallying the number of previous “Playstation exclusive” games making the switch to Microsoft’s console. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Editorial | Comments (4)
Tags: , ,

The Rains Are Comin’ – E3 2008

July 13th, 2008

wario land shake it wii
Tomorrow, the annual E3 expo kicks off with Microsoft’s conference followed on Tuesday by Nintendo and Sony (much in the same structure as last year). I get so excited by E3 each year that I’m thinking of holding back content for a few days as we’ll all be absorbing the flood of information coming from the show.

All of the bigger sites, as by tradition, have already put forth their predictions of the show. I’d like to do the same but try to keep it focused on a few ideas of my own that haven’t really been discussed yet.

Microsoft

I agree with the idea that most of Microsoft’s show has already been done, we’ve already seen plenty of content on Gears of War, Fable 2 and Banjo Kazooie and I think that the hands on feedback with be quite similar to the video impressions. Banjo Kazooie though stands out with uncertainty and should clarify how the new Rare is holding up.

Microsoft’s showing looks surprisingly slim and with many of their big games already being shown in video form, I think that they’ll need to step it up on all fronts to hold their own (as their 3 key titles won’t be enough). This means, confirming their status on motion sensing controls, announcing a new Xbox Live interface and banking on their timed exclusives (Rock Band) as well as the GTA IV downloadable content. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Editorial | Comments (0)
Tags:

How can one man survive the E3 media snow in?

August 1st, 2007

Now that the dust has settled on E3 for another year, I’m still trying to get thru all of the content. I wanted to look back and reflect..

…on how damn difficult it is to keep up to date on everything that happened! E3 finished a few days ago(when this was written) and I still have over a hundred feeds to read just on the event itself. Its ridiculous.

Just to stress the ridiculousness here is a run down of everything that I had prepared for E3 Basically everybody wants news, screenshots and a comprehensive list of video. Pretty simple right?

I am a keen IGN subscriber, so I get all of my news and screens from there. Overall they do a pretty comprehensive job. Although their video is a bit lacking, so GameTrailers cover me here. IGN sometimes misses some of the smaller, more interesting announcements, so I subscribe to another gaming feed which fills in all the gaps.

Here’s the run down of articles, this includes pre-E3:

IGN Playstation 2 – 70 articles
IGN Playstation 3- 275 articles
IGN Playstation Portable – 80 articles
IGN DS – 125 articles
IGN Wii – 186 articles
Other Feed – 60 articles
GameTrailers – 1126 videos and counting

Total =796 feeds and 1126 trailers

Pretty damn insane if you ask me. Of course I don’t read all of these I get the best ones, so probably over 500 feeds.

Posted in Editorial | Comments (2)
Tags:
Newer Entries »