If there was any sentiment going into Microsoft's E3 briefing this year, it was that Xbox 360 feels like the future. And the past and the present. It was a wheel-and-disc 360 made of Meccano, remember, that in 1936 burned down the Crystal Palace, having suffered the now-infamous 'three red lamps' error. Scientists predict that in the 24th century, the holodeck aboard the USS Enterprise will suffer crap textures because COD sells better on console. And until a late descendent of Microsoft Entertainment SVP Don Mattrick (or Nintendo) tells us otherwise, that's as close to the Next Generation as we're going to get.
Opener Modern Warfare 3, for instance, is still a James Bond game. Thunderball this time, the player's team of divers emerging from a flooded New York tunnel to cripple a submarine, climb aboard it (against a knackered Manhattan skyline), fire some big rockets, and surf waves and sinking aircraft carriers towards a waiting dropship. "It's absolutely huge," said Sledgehammer cofounder (and Dead Space co-creator) Glen Schofield. It looks it, and it will be.
We've observed over recent years the evolution of Don Mattrick into a living 360 avatar, and his journey is almost complete. Much the same can be said of Tomb Raider's evolution into Neil Marshall movie The Descent. Both this and Modern Warfare looked like interactive cutscenes, though in fairness to Raider it was the opening level. The evolution of EA Sports president Peter Moore's accent into an American one stalled back in 2005.
An epic marathon of cliches - "You're fighting for the very survival of the universe!" - introduced the news of comprehensive Kinect support for Mass Effect 3, which goes something like this. During dialogue sequences, you speak your choice of on-screen response and Shepard says something substantially different, but along the same lines. Then you bark orders to squadmates (again via Kinect) during evolved stop-and-pop combat. It looks like Mass Effect, plays like Mass Effect, and sounds like a very awkward person talking to Mass Effect.
If anyone was going to bid first to do the Minority Report thing with Kinect, it was always going to be Ubisoft. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier's 'Gunsmith' feature lets you create "20million entirely unique weapons" through gesture and voice, splitting them apart on screen with a dramatic parting of the hands. This, confirmed CEO Yves Guillemot, "is something a gamer cannot do with a normal controller." You can't boil an egg with it, either, but that doesn't make Cooking Mama a masterpiece. All further titles in the Tom Clancy franchise will "leverage support for Kinect," it was announced.
The watchwords for a Kinect-powered Xbox Live (the "invisible interface" offering "effortless control") were reiterated with the latest dashboard design, which seems a clear move to tally with that of Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. The service's traditional entertainment options are due to multiply by "a factor of ten," incorporating services like YouTube and Bing, and network TV providers like ABC.
It wouldn't be a camera if UFC president Dana White wasn't in front of it, and it wouldn't be a new and exciting media platform if the UFC itself didn't capitalise on it. With its Facebook broadcasts and on-demand TV, the MMA promoter introduced its Xbox channel at E3, with all the interactive trimmings you'd expect. It wouldn't be a Microsoft keynote without Gears Of War, either, though this was, admittedly, the first time Ice-T had taken the stage to play it, confirming the game's status as a crossroads of online memes and folk heroes. It's also a handy benchmark of kick-ass Unreal tech.
Then, for one glorious split-second, Epics Cliff Bleszinski was still on stage during a Crytek video. Slightly inglorious was the moment when Ryse, the Crysis maker's swords and sandals epic, was revealed to be a Kinect 'swipe and headbutt thin air' game. Forza Motorsport 4 looks disgustingly good, as if the blood of a certain other racer was thick in the water. The trailer for Fable: The Journey, meanwhile, tells us that "Albion's end is coming," and features the smoke monster out of Lost. The stage demo involved a man gesturing spells towards goblins in an on-rails shooter.
If the target of Minecraft coming exclusively to 360 and Kinect, meanwhile, is the heart and mind of the more hardcore gamer, the target of Disneyland Adventures must be somewhere in the throat. "Available in your home this holiday season," threatened Microsoft Game Studio VP Phil Spencer. Kinect Star Wars belongs in a 90s amusement arcade, as did the person demonstrating it. The apparent lag suggested he was in the 90s, and after a lengthy bout of mindless, barely comprehensible 'air light-sabering', the entire conference appeared to be joining him.
The kids, at least, are going to love Double Fine's Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster, even if the kid on stage seemed a little uncomfortable about his 'relationship' to his adjacent 'dad'. The inane gesturing in this segment alone should keep the internet stocked in gifs until sometime next millennium. Much like Harmonix's Kasson Crooker at Microsoft's jamboree last year, who bravely returned to the stage this year to show off Dance Central 2. None of them, however, will do justice to Kudo Tsunoda's barely-legal mime for 'Kinect Finger Tracking'.
Tsunoda likes to keep the good stuff to himself, and here introduced Kinect Fun Labs, which with its raw and simple toys evokes a certain forgotten gem of the XNA R&D department, Kodu Game Lab. Full body capture (for instant avatars) and object capture (for importing real-world objects as props) were as brilliant and they felt inevitable, and for the curious are available now. "Imagine the possibilities that this technology unlocks," droned Good Science Studio head Shannon Loftis, which given the astounding lack of innovation in the show so far rang monstrously hollow.
Sometime during a round of Kinect Sports: Season Two golf, those who neither want nor plan to physically act out their games would have probably wondered what planet they were on. Is it the one we were living on before Wii made a fortune, where Microsoft now acts like an alien? Or is it the one on which Kinect just became the fastest-selling consumer device ever, making this mutation of Xbox 360 - evolution isn't the word, somehow - a foregone conclusion? When the biggest reveal of the evening is a "new trilogy" starting with Halo 4 via a remake of Halo 1, talk of possibilities is about as next-gen as it gets.
Worth a read and it's own thread
http://www.next-gen.biz/features/microsoft-press-conference-report
