E307 - Microsoft

I wrote this up last night after the Microsoft event. The site wasn't working when I wanted to post it, so I post it now.
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Just finished watching the press conference. All of the games that they focused on (except one) will be out this year. Before I go to sleep (it’s after 2 AM here) I’ll run through some bullet points:

-Microsoft made a Wiimote–-though more in Design rather than Function (one big ‘win’ button and other smaller buttons, but no motion sensing or pointing was mentioned)
-Resident Evil 5 made an appearance, but it’s not coming out this year. Everything else Microsoft mentioned is coming out this year
-Mass Effect, Lost Odyssey coming out this year. Fable 2 was barely mentioned, if at all, so that isn’t coming in 2007.
-They showed a live-action trailer for Halo 3. A little strange, but interesting.
-Gears of War PC
-Call of Duty 4
-They featured the Naruto 360 game for a while
-Peter Moore played the ‘Rock Band’ guitar and sang a little.
-Microsoft is releasing a Spartan Green (my words, not theirs) 360 to commemorate the launch of Halo 3. Some might call it Diarrhea green.
-Assassin’s Creed continues to look darn cool
-They stressed that GTAIV will have more content on 360 than ‘other platforms’, and VF5 will be online only on their console
-They announced a bunch of XBLA games, one of the notable ones being Marathon. There were lots of other stuff, including original Sonic and Golden Axe which they said were available *now*. Nifty.
-Video Marketplace, announced partnership with Disney (which includes Miramax and some other stuff). They showed a whole bunch of movies from that group, then announced that all of the movies that they just showed were available on Marketplace *now*. Nifty again.
-Played some PGR4, showed off the bikes
-Other stuff. I’m tired, it’ll be all over the net soonish anyway.
-Closed with a Halo 3 gameplay/story trailer. Wasn’t terribly impressed, but it was fine.

I thought it was an ok show. Outside of the Wiimote and RE5 showing up, there wasn’t anything particularly unpredictable or shocking. I was watching it both through Gamespot’s live feed and on G4, but G4 kept going to commercials at the most random and inappropriate times. Mass Effect trailer? Commercial. Call of Duty 4 demo? Commercial. Halo 3 trailer at the end? ‘nother commercial. Good thing the Gamespot channel was about 15 seconds behind the G4 broadcast, so I didn’t miss anything.

It was alright but what I hate about all these conferences are that they always have to brag constantly about how well there console is doing. Too many statistics in my opinion. I wasnt gob smacked by anything that they had to show. Im still looking forward to the 360's line up this year but everything I wanted was shown at last years E3 funny enough. Aside from PGR4 which had me doing flips.

EDIT - But boo for not enough Jade Raymond.

It was about what you expect from a conference, the constant "Woo we rock here's our cool :skull::skull::skull::skull:" talk and some nice video. Assassin's Creed probably had the best video of everything they showed off.

I think calling the Scene It thing anything like a Wiimote is a bit unfair. It's just a really simplistic controller for Scene It, and maybe other games too, I suppose. But I guess it is the closest looking thing to a Wiimote out there, so the comparison is inevitable.

RE5 footage looked good, can't wait for the full trailer. They made some pretty good announcements for XBLA, and the Disney movie deal will be huge for them, though I have little interest in the video marketplace. Halo 3's trailer was really well done, as always. The brief scene in which Master Chief and the Arbiter are standing on a cliff was absolutely fantastic. Oh yeah, and Mass Effect coming out this November? Hooray!