Yes I'm lazy, but I'm back

Well, I'm back. After an unpleasant stint of academic responsibility I have taken excessive time to do absolutely nothing. It was good, it bordered between being boring while simultaneously being awesome. Now I feel that I should start doing a few things so that I don't devolve into a pile of inanimate goo (I've been sitting on the sofa watching E3 footage and MMA for days as I'm stuck in the countryside with no games consoles and erratic weather. Not looking for pity, I'm demanding it)

Big news for those who appreciate the higher art form of gaming. As the news is fairly extensive I shall do a series of posts that will bring an abridged version of the important E3 announcements. Here it goes.

Press Conferences

The games will not be covered in the press conferences as there are simply too many for one post. The Press Conferences section will be a summary of the basic announcements and some accompanying comments related to those announcements.

Sony

- This press conference was genuinely exciting. Sony released big announcements with some phenomenal game titles as well as new hardware announcements. In all honesty my excitement comes from their line up of games rather than the hardware stuff as it is still too early in development to see if it holds any potential. Their announcement of a new PSP model was leaked before the show and frankly doesn't interest me in the least. Also the fact that the new PSP GO costs 250 euros isn't bordering on ludicrous rather it's trekked some ways into that territory.

The new motion controls shown can go two ways. The likely direction is that they are gonna copy Nintendo and attempt to hook-in the casual consumer with a barrage of pseudo-games, in this case it does not overly interest me. However it is possible that they actually use this hardware well to bring casual games to the platform while at the same time employing the dual motion sensor for core games as the shield and sword tech demo in the conference showed a glimmer of promise. This pretty much covers the core announcements, excluding games, made by Sony. Overall the conference dragged in some places but was well presented and held enough exciting news to keep the viewer interested in the announcements.

Nintendo

- This conference was appallingly bad. In fairness the titles announced by Nintendo are genuinely good and Nintendo fans have reason to be happy with this years showing, it's simply that the presentation was so horrible that I spaced out after a few minutes. The only real non-game announcement I think they made was the development of the Wii vitality sensor. This is essentially a sensor that you clip on your finger that monitors your heart rate. The only way I can think of using this is to incorporate it with workout games to monitor your heart which is really quite lame. I do hold the hope however that I am wrong and Nintendo will find some way to make it more fun but I remain quite skeptical.

Also the Wii motion plus is coming out soon so that the Wii can finally track the full motion of the controller. Although this was somewhat promised at the beginning of the Wii and makes buying all the controller accessories a small fortune it does promise to increase the potential of games that wish to use the motion controller more prominently. Altogether not a bad conference in terms of games but I have to wonder why all the suits at Nintendo are being payed if their press conference was that bad.

Microsoft

- Probably the best conference in terms of presentation. They kept up a nice flow of games and announcements while steering clear of sales figures and pie charts. Started with some big multi-platform games then moved on to a long reel of game exclusives. The only real new hardware presentation, beyond adding Facebook, Twitter, misc. into Xbox Live, was Project Natal. Although they had some tech demos demonstrating their better 'eye-toy' I remain very skeptical about the potential, at our current technology level, of this device.

My 'gut' instinct is that the main reason for Natal is to add the casual market slice to their profit chart. I would like to clarify that I do not begrudge any of the companies attempting to access the more casual market but I would hope that they see the inherent potential in using the new hardware for game purposes as well. Their conference was mainly focused on games so there is not much to write.

That pretty much sums up the press conferences as I don't plan to cover the major developers and publishers as their main announcements were covered by the big three. Next post I'll cover the real meat of E3, the games.