Geek Swagger.
Microsoft’s E3 press conference
Microsoft's press conference this year was very interesting and it hinted at a lot of change in their strategy moving forward. It started out as you would normally expect - some of the most highly anticipated 360 games were shown off. These ranged from and to the star of the show, . All were given their chance to shine with a singleplayer demo, and they all looked pretty damn great. After that, when the "hardcore" crowd was satisfied, the conference took a drastic turn.
With the success of the Nintendo Wii it has become more and more enticing for companies like Microsoft and Sony to try their best to appeal to the the family market of gamers. What this means is more and more games that are familiar and easy for non-gamers to play become popular. Whether this is good or bad for the gaming industry can be debated in a myriad of different ways, but it's important to note that it seems like Microsoft is headed in that direction. They started out by announcing something that I had hoped for, an overhaul of the Xbox Live user interface. Despite having less efficient use of screen real estate the new UI is pretty slick looking. Gone are the fisher-price colored blades, and now everything is integrated much more pictorially. My biggest complaint about Live's interface right now is that everything seems to be text. Obviously Microsoft saw that this was a problem and so they've made the interface much more visually stimulating this time around. Unfortunately it's hard to explain a user interface without images, so I'll go ahead and provide one of those now.
Okay so the image is a little small, my bad. If you'd like to see a bigger version there's a nice that you should check out. You'll notice that the first icon in the front (blue) shows a cartoony image of a user. This is what I was talking about when I was speaking of Microsoft's efforts to reach more casual players much like the Wii. This new digital representation of the gamer is called an avatar, and it's basically a mix of characters and . You can create and customize your avatar with different clothes and hairstyles which will undoubtedly cost you some MS points from Live. Your friends list will now be a compilation of your different friends' avatars instead of just a list of their gamertags. Your avatar will also take the spot of your gamerpic as identification in games. I can't really decide how to feel about the whole avatar thing because I obviously haven't used it for myself. It could be cool, it could be a gimmick. That being said I'm happy to get the user interface refresh, I think the new UI looks pretty slick and it adds some interesting functionality.
The next major announcement after the new interface/avatar functionality was that, at long last, Microsoft has partnered with Netflix. This is huge! I never expected them to do this because it seems sort of like a cannibalization of the , but along with the Fall update Xbox Live subscribers (gold members only) will be able to watch movies from their Netflix instant streaming queue right from the 360. It'll be free aside from the usual $50 a year Live subscription, and they've even announced that you'll be able to party up with your friends' avatars to watch Netflix movies together as a group. This sounds pretty interesting but I don't know if I'll want to be talking to people while trying to watch a movie. Alternatively it could be that everyone would just get together and be silent because they're paying attention to the movie, so I'm still trying to figure out if this is a feature I'll use. The important thing about the group watch feature is that it also works when you're not watching a movie. What that means is that group voice chat is finally coming to the 360.
After the Netflix announcement they spent a lot of time demonstrating several casual games slated for this holiday season. Much like the avatars this is another attempt to by enticing the casual crowd to pick up an Xbox 360. They showed off a sequel to the trivia game "Scene It?" which uses the big-button controller. From there they moved on to which invites players to get in front of their Xbox Live vision cam and goof off doing a bunch of different stunts which are animated with a backdrop on-screen (kind of like a green screen). Based off of the different participants performance rating a movie is compiled using their animations at the end. Finally "Lips," a karaoke game from the makers of , rocked the crowd with a special performance. The game comes with a plastic microphone peripheral and works with any .MP3 you provide. I have to say, during this whole section of the conference I kind of dozed off. These kind of games don't really interest me much because in general they set you up to look like an idiot in front of your friends and family.
Towards the end of the conference a representative from Square-Enix took the stage. If you aren't familiar with Square-Enix, they're responsible for some of the most popular Japanese RPG's including the Final Fantasy series. I was impressed at first because they announced 3 separate original games for the 360. It's obvious that Microsoft was really trying to reel in some of the Japanese market. Then, at the end of the conference, a megaton announcement was made: . Me personally, I'm not a huge fan of this sort of game, but FFXIII was one of the last fully exclusive traditional franchise games that Sony had in their possession. Obviously by securing it on the 360 as well Microsoft has dealt the PS3 a huge blow.
Alright then, what's missing? First, Microsoft didn't announce the rumored motion-sensitive controller. I think that's awesome. As I mentioned in my E3 preview I really hoped that the whole thing was just a rumor and that seems to be the case. Another huge area that was completely devoid of coverage was Microsoft's initiative. In past years they've at least previewed some titles for it, but not this year. All-in-all Microsoft had a lot of interesting announcements this year, I think they had a really solid showing. I'm looking forward to Sony's conference today (7/15) because they have some ground to make up.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by dmkemick on July 15, 2008 at 4:00 am, and is filed under Gaming News, Microsoft, Nintendo, PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
