I looked into the past of Game Usagi and it turns out that we apparently haven’t done press conference reviews since 2008. This year’s conference reviews will take this form: a list of highlights of the conference, a list of “lowlights” of the conference, a list of neutral information and then a summary and an overall conference score. Check out after the jump for the 2011 review of Microsoft’s E3 Press conference:
Highlights:
- Modern Warfare 3 single-player gameplay demonstration with a SCUBA attack on a Russian submarine in Upper Bay to the south of Manhattan.
- Map packs and add-ons for MW3 will all be timed exclusives for the Xbox 360
- Gameplay demo of Mass Effect 3 depicted a mission where you are retrieving a presumably virile Krogan female to take back to Tuchanka and showed off new melee mechanics that might make it actually feasible to punch things now.
- Ghost Recon Future Soldier CG trailer was pretty neat showing Matrix-style frozen action of people getting shot through the head and stabbed in the neck.
- GRFS will have the most thorough gun customization yet available (called “Gun Smith”) allowing you to take guns apart to their most basic pieces and customize literally every moving part in them.
- Bing-branded search is coming (possibly for Kinect only) to the Xbox 360 to allow for topical searching of all of the content available on the Xbox 360. (ex: saying “Xbox Bing X-Men” will bring up a list of all the X-Men content available including game demos, themes, movies, etc.)
- Claim media partnerships for content on Xbox 360 are increasing by a factor of 10 and will soon include millions of pieces of content instead of hundreds of thousands.
- Youtube is coming for Xbox 360 and will function essentially the same as it does on computers, just with a presumably fancier interface of some sort.
- Live TV shows will soon be available on the 360 for the US, UK, France, and Australia.
- Part of the Live TV experience will be live UFC games augmented with stats on players and things like polls on who is going to win and the like.
- New gameplay trailer and live game demonstration with Cliffy B and Ice-T (the rapper) of Gears of War 3 which is looking fantastic. Featured them shooting the head of a very, very large enemy and NPCs piloting armed mini-mech suits (called Silverbacks) in the battle.
- Halo: Combat Evolved HD remastering called “Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary” trailer shown featuring much better graphics (though not nearly as good as recent Halo games). New features include network multiplayer and co-op.
- Forza 4 trailer was shown featuring incredibly realistic graphics (blowing all previous racing sims clean out of the water) and a release date of Oct. 11th.
- Minecraft with full Kinect support is coming exclusively to Xbox 360 soon.
- Easily the best part of the conference was Tim Schafer from Double Fine. He was there to show off their new Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster game coming out this fall, which in spite of its aim at children was the most polished and most fun-looking Kinect game of the day. He had the best quips of the day including saying that he learned everything he needed to know in life from Sesame Street including, “I learnt about the letter “B” from Big Bird, how to count from the Count, and how to take care of my body from the Cookie Monster.” He also introduced the cheesy father/son duo that were to conduct the live demo of his game with a “Unleash the simulated family!” followed by a comment about how real they looked. Thanks for being the only honest part of the waggle-fest, Tim.
- Kudo Tsunoda actually got to introduce something good this year (they also didn’t let him anywhere near a Kinect, which helped). Kinect Funlabs, which is available for free starting today is by far the best showcase of what really is possible with the Kinect technology. Pretty much all of the pie-in-the-sky features that have yet to be realized from the original Kinect concept video have found some kind of actual life as Funlabs apps.
- The first Funlabs app shown was called “Kinect Me” that takes a scan of your face and your clothing and within about 5 seconds makes a full-out Avatar with your features. Better than the 3DS Mii Maker, it seems to actually map your face and clothes onto the Avatar to make it as close as possible. (While the demo lady claimed that these Avatars with their custom stuff could be used for regular Avatar things, this remains to be seen.)
- The second Funlabs app was a “finger tracking demo”, but it shows off some other cool features of Kinect as well. First you take two pictures of yourself. The picture of you is essentially removed from the background in the first picture and transposed in three dimensions over the second picture and then you can use a pointed finger to draw a sparkly line around your selves in three dimensions, which is really, really neat.
- The third app that was shown off was an “object scanning” proof of concept app. The demo lady used a stuffed animal, scanned it’s front and back, and within seconds was able to wiggle around a 3D representation of the stuffed animal on the screen.
- Harmonix announced Dance Central 2 will be able to bring over all of the music from the first game as well as feature full-out simultaneous 2-player gameplay. They brought Kasson Crooker, the guy who danced quite humourously at last year’s conference out so everyone could laugh at him, but had some more professional dancers do the gameplay demo and actually make it look kind of cool.
- CG Trailer for Halo 4 was shown with Master Chief being awakened from his stasis on the broken ship we left him on at the end of Halo 3. The ship is exploding rapidly and he dashes to the end of the ship to see it being taken in by a tractor beam coming off of a much, much larger ship. Halo 4 is due out Holiday 2012, and we’ll obviously find out much more about it in the coming year.
Lowlights:
- Gameplay demonstration of the new Tomb Raider coming out in Fall 2012 featured surprisingly good graphics, but constant annoying sickeningly stereotypical and bland chatter from Lara Croft.
- Most EA Sports games coming out this next year will have some form of voice control or waggle courtesy of the Kinect.
- It is unclear whether or not the voice control in Mass Effect 3 will be possible with just a headset or if you really need a Kinect staring at you for it to work.
- Kinect motion control for Ghost Recon Future Soldier seemed accurate enough, but looked ridiculous and uncomfortable. Certainly not a method for multiple-hour long gaming sessions.
- A new new NXE menu system is going to be launched for the Kinect that enables all of the “Xbox… pause/play/Bing/etc.” features that they have been touting for a while.
- Only four countries (not including Canada) will have access to Live TV shows on the 360.
- Kinect voice navigation for the new new NXE lagged considerably and was demonstrably slower than just using a darned controller.
- Crytek Kinect game (formerly known as Codename Kingdoms) is now called Ryse and the trailer showed off superb graphics in this first-person hack-and-slash game set in ancient Rome, but showcased some of the clunkiest and impractical controls of any Kinect game yet. That game, even if it is fun, will not be playable for more than a half hour at a time without physical arm damage.
- Live gameplay demo of “Fable: The Journey”, a 1st-person Kinect-only Fable IV game that can partially played sitting down, but requires all kinds of zany, large gestures and will generally be too impractical to be as fulfilling as its predecessors.
- New Disneyland Kinect game has a navigable copy of Disneyland, but also featured the worst-looking minigames of the day with the most fakely “excited” children I have ever seen. Gems from their “exclamations of excitement” during the gameplay demo include: “OH NO! CAPTAIN HOOK!!!”, “We’ll get those coins next time…”, “This is so fun!”, and my favourite “FIST BUMP!!!!”.
- Star Wars Kinect was given a live demo to not only show its very basic and poorly styled graphics, but also how laggy and impractical the controls are. You have to yell “Lightsaber, ON!” to engage your lightsaber. Seriously people. Seriously.
- Kinect Labs will probably used mostly for creating naked avatars and large dancing wangs.
- The demonstrations of Kinect Sports Season 2 were incredibly cheesy (at least as cheesy as the Disneyland kids). A new gesture featured in the game is using the “shield your eyes from the sun while looking in the distance” pose to get an overview of the golf course. Accustomed to the game already, she was able to get a very edge-of-your-seat birdie on the par 4 hole. Two jock-like dudes came out and were then very serious about their cartoony football game, squatting for the ball snaps and running on the spot screaming like crazy people.
Other Information:
- Non-sport EA games like Hasbro games and The Sims will have varied Kinect features over the coming year.
- Mass Effect 3 will have Kinect voice-control features including reading out dialogue options instead of selecting them with the controller and giving position and weapon commands to party members on the fly.
- Kinect Sports Season 2 will feature 6 new games including skiing, tennis, football, and golf.
Summary:
This year’s Microsoft E3 press conference had a lot of ups and downs. There were some laugh-out-loud hilariously cheesy gameplay demos of games that were somehow approved to be made and some core games shown off that cannot come out soon enough. No huge surprises from this conference, except for the perhaps how lazy developers are being with making Kinect viable for extended gaming sessions, but it was a fairly solid one considering that Microsoft doesn’t have any new hardware to showcase like Sony and Nintendo do. Overall, in spite of its penchant for cheese this year, I’d give this conference an:
