And for reference, here are my reviews of 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. This year I’m adding the stipulation that I won’t factor in multiplatform showings, since as impressive as Modern Warfare 3 and BioShock Infinite looked, that has no bearing on the relative fortunes of the consoles on which they were demonstrated.

So, in chronological order…

Microsoft

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Last year, I wasn’t happy with the first look at real-life Kinect stuff, but I gave it a pass because I was confident that Microsoft knows its market – the people who made the Xbox a success where other ventures had failed. Now, I’m not so sure. How many times during that conference was something that looked interesting unveiled, only for someone to come out and sacrifice their dignity by squatting, hopping, waving and – shudder – fist-bumping in front of thousands of people? Ryse (formerly Codename Kingdoms), which was last year positioned as something new from Crytek for the Xbox core audience has suddenly become an on-rails Kinect game. Fable? An on-rails Kinect game. Ditto Star Wars, Sesame Street… and I have to say I’m nervous after seeing the Master Chief floating through an exploding ship in a fashion not far removed from what a bunch of avatars were doing in Disneyland Adventures not long before.

I’m probably just being paranoid on that one. There’s no way that Microsoft would risk a valuable and popular franchise with that kind of nonsense, is there? Wait… what was that Fable game again?

Back in my territory, Gears 3 looks good, but it’s Gears 3. It’s not going to blow any minds after anyone who’s interested has already played the beta, if not the two previous games, and let’s not forget that this is the second E3 for a game that was originally going to have been long out by now. It’s not new.

So with Halo 4 only present in CG form and a remake of the first Halo hardly likely to win over anyone, I guess it falls to Forza 4, then. In fairness it did look gorgeous, with nary an embarrassing Kinect demo in sight, and after Gran Turismo dropped the ball there’s a big opportunity for Microsoft and Turn 10 to nab that ‘real driving simulator’ label. Not that it matters to me, though. As I’ve said many times in the past, I couldn’t care less about driving simulators and need my virtual driving heavily diluted with arcade action. Bring back Bizarre Creations and Project Gotham, I say.

D

Sony

Sony’s offering was better than Microsoft’s, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to sound excited. On the PS3 front, putting aside re-releases and Move games, I make it Uncharted 3, Ruin, Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time and Starhawk. The former and latter are looking excellent and I loved their respective predecessors, but we already knew about them. The others? Meh. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly good but I can take them or leave them.

Coupled with Microsoft’s damp squib, it seriously seems like this generation is running on fumes. Whenever the PS4 and next Xbox turn up, we don’t appear to be in danger of having another PS2, still receiving significant games after the release of its successor.

But of course, the big deal was the first E3 for what was formerly known as the NGP: PlayStation Vita. Strange name, but it makes a break from the PSP and it’s of secondary importance to what is an impressive piece of hardware. The graphics it’s pushing look superb, and the cloud functionality brings the niche connectivity features between the PS3 and PSP into a realm where they might actually get used, as long as its utility isn’t going to be predicated on buying two versions of the same game.

It’s said, however, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and that’s exactly what Sony is doing with the Vita. Even as someone who likes the PSP and still buys games for it, and with the 3DS not so far setting the world alight, it’s an extremely powerful handheld that’s hosting pocket versions of big-console games, and it didn’t work last time. Looking at Uncharted: Golden Abyss, we’ve even got the banner franchise being farmed out to a minor first-party studio. I’d like to be proven wrong, and I’d like to be able to play it for more than three hours without charging, but I’m not expecting either prediction to go my way.

Based purely on the fact that Sony’s conference wasn’t entirely focused on utter shite, it gets bumped up two grades. Then gets one taken away for not featuring The Last Guardian.

C

Nintendo

If big hopes were on Nintendo with the knowledge that it was to unveil new hardware, they were only enhanced by the other platform holders’ failure. And like many people, I came away disappointed here as well.

First, the other stuff, though. It generally takes a lot for Nintendo to get me excited because I’m a bit bored of another Mario Kart, another 2D Mario, and so on. And don’t get me started on bloody Smash Bros. I’m not yet burned out on Star Fox and I’ll always love Zelda – especially when I’m getting a free one for my under-utilised DSi – so I’ll give them those two.

To be honest, I’m still digesting the Wii U and wondering what to think. I’m generally positive, which may surprise some, even if some subsequent revelations have dampened its gloss somewhat, but we’re going on the press conference, and that was disappointing. I don’t know anyone who didn’t leave with questions, including whether or not it was even a standalone console. It was a failure of communication and, to be honest, the aforementioned disclosures have left me with questions over how much of the omitted information was deliberate. Time will have to tell because it’s certainly not coming this year, but it’ll be nice to have the option of playing Nintendo games alongside half-decent third-party offerings. Until the new Xbox also comes out in late 2012 and restores the console power status quo, of course.

Sadly, the announcement that I’m most looking forward to trading for my hard-earned currency is the Zelda symphony CD. That makes it extremely underwhelming, but that’s one more new announcement that I’m excited about than the other two, so Nintendo comes out on top by default.

C+

This has to be the most disappointing E3 in years. The three conferences were average at absolute best and I struggle to think of one new announcement that interests me. Also, gone seems to be the pleasure in finding obscure new announcements hidden away in the nooks of the gaming news sites, because there aren’t any – maybe we’re finally seeing the impact of every studio that doesn’t make nothing but million-sellers closing down. Running on fumes doesn’t even begin to describe this generation from the looks of things.

So without further ado, in chronological order…

Microsoft

To be honest, I got exactly what I expected from Microsoft. We all knew that there was going to be a huge focus on Natal Kinect and that was borne out. It’s undeniably technically impressive, but the lineup doesn’t interest me in the slightest so far. My antipathy towards the Wii is no real secret, and so it’s going to take something special, likely from an established developer known for great ‘normal’ games, but for the time being I’m happy to be an observer. I can see people who are in the intended audience being really impressed by it.

If we’re talking stuff outside hardcore games, ESPN was the most impressive thing. It’s almost certainly not coming here, but it’s potentially the definitive way to watch sports, and it’s included in an existing Xbox Live subscription. I’m a football fan, and having a library of classic matches as well as HD streaming live stuff with all those community features would be fantastic. Imagine getting a similar thing with the BBC iPlayer, for example.

As for the real games, there weren’t really any surprises for the most part, but what I saw impressed me. Gears 3 looked like Gears 3, and Halo: Reach really looked like a proper next-gen Halo game. Crytek is apparently making a God of War game as well, and MGS: Rising looked decent, albeit like it’s reviving something that should now be finished with. That interests me still, as even if it’s part of a genre that I don’t often get on with, those cutting mechanics look incredibly cool. Could be some real potential there.

Echoes of Sega’s E3 1995 Saturn announcement with the unveiling of the new machine, which perhaps isn’t the kind of memories to be dredging up, but you can’t deny the effectiveness of showing off the reduced size of your redesign by having it on stage inside the old one the whole time. It’s been much-needed on the technical side for a while, and I’ll certainly be tempted to upgrade at the next price drop. I’m liking the look of it, actually.

But the overall impression was underwhelming. Halo: Reach was the only game that really got me excited, and that’s… well, Halo. A Halo game that was announced over a year ago and that most of us have already played, in fact. I’m writing this section on Monday night before either of the other two conferences so I could be proven completely wrong here, but I expect Nintendo and Sony to blow away the paltry number of new announcements to appeal to gamers, and they’ll almost certainly be exclusives, which Call of Duty and Metal Gear Solid aren’t. There was a lot of flash there for really not that many new games for 2010 and 2011.

So a fairly unimpressive line-up of new games with some intriguing but unproven technology means that this conference scores a…

D

Nintendo

Low expectations have become the norm for Nintendo’s annual E3 showing, but I’m happy to say that this year’s offering was a pleasant surprise. Maybe there’s less lustre on some of Nintendo’s well-worn franchises – I’m surprisingly nonplussed about new Zelda games nowadays – but new announcements like the beautiful-looking Kirby’s Epic Yarn and the potentially great Donkey Kong Country Returns – that looks to have enough going for it to elevate it above DKC’s status as the red-headed stepchild of Nintendo platformers – left me with a positive impression of Nintendo’s upcoming slate for the first time in ages.

Previously announced games like Metroid: Other M and the new Golden Sun looked decent too, and some of those are coming out pretty imminently. With nothing as horribly embarrassing as the Wii Music announcement, even on the casual end of the scale – Miyamoto talking like he was in Wayne’s World 2 came close, admittedly – there’s very little to whip gamers into a fanboy rage about. Maybe it’s just the way that Microsoft hoovered up all that negative energy yesterday, or maybe Nintendo threw its base a bone by showing games with genuine universal appeal. Even if it’s too much to hope for that we’ll see a permanent return to the Nintendo of old, there’s plenty of reason for optimism there.

I should probably expand on Zelda rather than glossing over probably the biggest software announcement. Putting aside the technical issues during the demonstration, there was a dizzying number of nifty ideas on display in a short period of time – the usual Zelda drip feed of new abilities will be entirely necessary – and I really liked the art style, somewhere between the relative realism of Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time and the cel-shaded look of Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass. I haven’t gone near a Zelda since Link’s Wii debut, but this will almost certainly change that.

And then there was the 3DS. Hardly a surprise and really impossible to make any judgement about without seeing it and the effectiveness of its primary gimmick, I’m nonetheless certainly on board. It seems like a proper hardware upgrade rather than the stopgap that’s been the DSi – I’m really regretting spending my money on that now – and there seems to be extremely strong software support and great potential applications with 3D movies and imagery. It’s pulling in names and developers that haven’t been associated with the DS, it’s got Ocarina of Time, and the fanboys can finally shut up about Kid Icarus. Also, with versions of MGS3 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, it’s surely the definitive system for stealth games, because it doesn’t get better than those two. Whenever demo kiosks start showing up I’ll be right down there to have a look. On current hype levels it could be the first Nintendo machine that I buy on day one since the original DS, and the first that hasn’t disappointed me early on since the GBC.

Nintendo left me really optimistic about its future, which is something that I haven’t been able to say for a while. It’s not going to make my Wii my number one system, but I’m definitely going to be hooking it back up soon. This conference gets a…

A

Sony

Sony’s was an odd one. By far the longest of the conferences and with a sizeable list of games, also easily topping Microsoft’s showing for hardcore gamers, there wasn’t all that much to get excited about unless you’re investing in a 3D TV. Killzone 3 looked like Killzone, but that comparison is not as much of a compliment as it was when similarly applied to Halo in my Microsoft roundup. inFamous also returned after a pre-E3 unveiling of its sequel by somehow becoming even more bland. All it lacked was Resistance 3 to complete the list of unlikeable Sony franchises that get me grinding my teeth with passive-aggressive dislike.

Even so, out of the HD twins, this was by far the superior conference. We had EA showing off some staggering-looking new games – Microsoft might have got the sales coup with exclusive Call of Duty content, but Medal of Honor is what I want to play more – and the Valve announcement was actually, in my opinion, one of the bigger ones of the show. Not that Portal 2 is coming because that wouldn’t have surprised me anyway, but that Steamworks and features like Steam Cloud were on the way: those are features that aren’t possible on a system as locked down as the 360, and if they work with the PC/Mac Steam client – Steam Play with the PS3 is surely too much to ask, but I’d love to be proven wrong – we could be a serious step towards the one console future, with Microsoft’s system firmly on the outside looking in.

Oh, and it showed the Top Gear Test Track with the Stig. Win.

Of course, Sony had its own motion-control solution, and it’s an utterly shameless design rip-off. Nothing on it that I wouldn’t prefer to play with a controller, and it’s not even as technically impressive as Kinect. It has buttons, you say? Nothing’s stopping developers from letting us use a controller while using Kinect, and a 360 controller doesn’t look like a sex toy. And that Sorcery game really needs to link up with EA and the Harry Potter licence.

I still liked a significant chunk of what I saw, so it’s just a shame that it was padded out with innumerable montages and unlikeable skits, some of which were up there (down there?) with All I Want For Xmas is a PSP, and a suspiciously enthusiastic crowd – it kind of lost me when a promotion with Coca-Cola was greeted with whoops and cheers – because what’s there was quite good. Chop half an hour out of it and let the games speak for themselves and you’ve got a very effective show with a lot less twattishness.

Twisted Metal was the big surprise, and although it didn’t make up for the notable absence of last year’s ‘one more thing’ The Last Guardian, I’m a big fan of that series and I’m looking forward to the PS3 one immensely. The on-stage presentation could have done with a bit more polish, perhaps, but it’s looking massive and is bound to be brilliant online. Time to seek out a US copy of Twisted Metal Black to put me in the mood, methinks.

Even so, I see more PS3 games that I want to play in the future than 360 games, so I’m giving this one a…

B-

It’s a pleasant surprise to be able to laud Nintendo’s E3 offering for once, and I hope that it heralds a long-term return to form. It feels so strange after all these years…

The first was Microsoft, which started us off with a strong showing. We knew some of what was going to be there, but there were no complete leaks like last year’s NXE unveiling, and most of what we knew was in name only. It’s fairly normal at this point to go into E3 without much knowledge of what we’ll be playing on our 360s at the end of the year, and we can now see a strong line-up taking shape: Halo 3: ODST, Left 4 Dead 2, Crackdown 2, Forza 3, and the re-emergence of a fantastic-looking Splinter Cell: Conviction, which has got me all hot and bothered for the series again. Modern Warfare 2′s footage wasn’t as mind-blowing as COD4′s from two years ago, but my preorder’s in.

The headlines will undoubtedly be grabbed by two unveilings, though. The first is Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which is a huge PR coup for Microsoft but isn’t a mainline Metal Gear and so isn’t quite the shock of last year’s FFXIII reveal; still, I like MGS4′s Raiden, so colour me interested. Secondly, we’ve got Project Natal, which I don’t expect to work nearly as well as the video suggested, but if it does it’s certainly an incredible technical achievement. Expect much talk about that over the coming months.

Plus Microsoft got the fucking Beatles to show up. God knows how much that cost…

Criticisms? As a closet fan of the Halo novels I’d like to have seen more than a teaser of Halo: Reach, but I understand that ODST is the one that they want you to care about for now. But mainly, where was Rare? The token Killer Instinct and Blast Corps rumours of course didn’t come true, but no new Perfect Dark? Not even another Viva Piñata? Hello?

But that aside, Microsoft did what it had to do with aplomb. The 360 has a great selection of games for this year and we now know that stuff like Alan Wake is finally coming in 2010, and MS is even showing signs of making a serious attempt at coming out from the bald space marine niche where it’s been happy to exist. This one gets a solid A.

Nintendo had simultaneously the most and the least to prove going into E3, sitting comfortably at the top of the sales charts but also leaving much of its traditional audience – or at least the ones who can’t convince themselves that Smash Bros is a good game – underwhelmed, exemplified by last year’s showing.

Super Mario Galaxy 2, Team Ninja’s Metroid, and Golden Sun DS. That pretty much summed up what we got that I’m interested in, and I really am gagging for a go on Metroid. It’s better than last year’s and the first two are undoubtedly AAA titles, although it still had a depressing emphasis on games that our demographic probably doesn’t care about. No great DSiWare content? No Virtual Console for DSi? Nothing entirely new for the hardcore audience? Instead, we get something to monitor your pulse and more Wii Fit.

I can’t in good conscience slate a conference that unveiled both a proper new Mario and Metroid, so I’m going to give this one a B-.

Sony‘s was a show of two halves for me. It started off with Uncharted 2, which looks spectacular, and if it’s nearly as good as the first game – there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be – it’ll be a certain purchase. MAG didn’t demonstrate particularly well because it’s a bit slow and complicated for this context, and I’m not convinced that the headset-free PSN is the best place for such a co-op game, but I love my multiplayer shooters and I’m intrigued.

It’s good to see renewed support for the PSP, even if I won’t be buying a PSP Go, and maybe this commitment from Sony coupled with reduced development costs will see a renaissance in the system. I hope so, because I’m a fan.

Final Fantasy XIV was a surprise, to say the least, but I’d love to hear the difference in cheers between when it was announced and when everyone saw the little ‘Online’ under the title. Not the megaton announcement that XIII was last year, and the slight disappointment was compounded by what came next. The tech demo for the Wii Remote waggle wand lost some of its impact coming after Microsoft’s controller-free controls and a further demonstration of Wii Motion Plus and just went on for far too long, particularly when there wasn’t actually a game to come with it. The same goes for ModNation Racers, which wasn’t even that impressive and seemed to last for an eternity – I wanted to kill myself when he promised to create a track “in less than five minutes”. I was reminded of the endless demonstration of Gran Turismo HD from the infamous E3 2005 showing.

It ended very strongly with Gran Turismo 5, which I don’t really care about as I’m not exactly a fan of realistic racers, and the holy duo of The Last Guardian and God of War III. It goes without saying that both of those are must-haves, and I’m just disappointed that it looks like we’ll have to wait until 2010 for both of them.

Much like the Microsoft one it showed a host of great games, and it only really suffered from the slack middle section. That doesn’t stop it getting an A as well, though.

Overall, then, a far better show than last year’s, and fans of all platforms will have come away with something worthwhile even if this year’s show has pretty much confirmed motion controls as the way of the future. And hey, no sales graphs either. Gaming needs to make a song and dance about itself like this once in a while, so let’s enjoy the rest of the show.

Until next year…

Probably not, I would guess. I miss never being able to visit a ‘proper’ E3, but you can see why things changed. It gave the industry a focal point each year, providing an excuse for a mention on the evening news for one day of the year and to drive ad revenue for the gaming websites, but it cost a tremendous amount of money and, really, did it do anything that the new, low-key events couldn’t?

Nowadays we’re just as likely to see a big announcement happen out of nowhere, or to see a platform holder or even individual publisher hold a small ‘gamers’ day’ type event. Hype it up, invite the specialist press, get it on their front pages, and you have pretty much the same net benefit as the old dog and pony show, right?

I’m not so sure. I think the industry needs a big focal point of an event like Hollywood needs the Oscars and the music industry needs its Christmas number one. Without E3 there’s no one event for all the big announcements and this year’s major releases to start the hype train in advance of the Christmas season. Do we expect a mainstream press that’s ambivalent at best, if not outright dismissive, about gaming to bother with a dozen minor events to show the latest sequel? Of course they won’t.

From the perspective of a gamer I actually like the constant trickle of news that comes from surprise events and developer visits, not to mention the wholesome nuggets of new information that often appear on development blogs, but it doesn’t make it easy to find, either on an individual basis or for the media outlets themselves – how many sources would you have to cover to read every piece of news? E3 got everyone’s attention and everyone expecting the big announcements and unveilings to be there. It was so big and extravagant that the TV news couldn’t help but pay attention, and now we don’t really have anything like that.

It’s a shame, and I don’t know whether or not it’s going to change. There is all kinds of whining after another disappointing show on the GAFs of the world, but most people don’t know or care and I’m sure that, if I was a major publisher, I’d be looking at the few million dollars that I’d just saved in not putting on a light show and losing weeks of development time, and shrugging my shoulders. Money talks…

• Microsoft – I wasn’t blown away, to be honest. Seeing live gameplay of Resident Evil 5 was initially my highlight, in the same way that the Call of Duty 4 was a gem in a pile of (mostly) shit last year. Gears 2 and Fable II both look good and are certain purchases that it’s nice to have dates for, but things like avatars do nothing for me and the occasional cool feature and probable gem do not a great conference make. No Alan Wake (the new Duke Nukem Forever?), no big new IP announcements, a new interface that I’m not convinced about. Just the warm feeling from the fact that there was no motion controller announcement… yet.
   
  But then Square dropped the bomb. As last words go, FFXIII on 360 put most of Steve Jobs’ infamous “and one more thing” reveals to shame. Not even a rumbling of this news before the show, which is remarkable in itself, and it dealt a big blow to Sony early on. With the possible exception of Gran Turismo, this has been Sony’s trump card since FFVII in 1997, and it was the one third-party PS3 exclusive that I thought untouchable. Make no mistake; that announcement was huge.
   
  It doesn’t change the fact that the rest of it was relatively lacklustre, but it feels like it was all a ruse to lead up to that. For the biggest E3 megaton – something that I thought was becoming a lost art – since “five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars”, this one gets a…
   
  B 

• Nintendo – If you ever need reason why so many hardcore gamers seem to have abandoned Nintendo to focus on the fight for second place, this is why. Last year’s Wii Fit reveal was a disappointment and in that respect this at least had something that vaguely interests me in Animal Crossing, but it’s still basically the same thing as Nintendo brought out on N64, GameCube, and DS. It might have more online functions, but all I’m going to be thinking about is how much better it could be done on Live and PSN.
   
  Add another mini-game compilation, another peripheral, and, in Wii Music, one of the most pathetic ideas I’ve ever seen (I can’t help but think of the musical chairs game in The Simpsons when Bart was put into the remedial class). Someone summed it up for me on a forum post when they said: “At least now that Nintendo has show that it hates hardcore gamers we won’t have to pretend to like the Wii any more.”
   
  Thanks for the good times back in the day, Nintendo, but I’ll take an insular industry that makes games that I enjoy over this popular tripe.
   
  D- 

• Sony – Sony really didn’t deviate too much from what was largely a successful formula last year. The embarrassing Home jokes were gone, and no baffling cameo from Chewbacca, and we just got games. It deserves credit for making the most entertaining Powerpoint presentation in history. LittleBigPlanet can make anything interesting.
   
  On the games front, Resistance 2 looked good but early, and while stuff like God of War III and MAG sound promising, didn’t Sony learn anything about showing CG trailers a couple of years ago? When your big reveals are CG and your lead game is one that pretty much everyone who cares enough to watch a conference has finished at least once since it came out a month ago, it doesn’t make it look like there’s a lot of content.
   
  C 

This E3 will go down in history for the Final Fantasy XIII announcement, which put the Microsoft conference ahead on entertainment value alone. Other than that, very disappointing in my opinion. No big new game announcements (so far), no proper price drops or anything, and the bitter taste in my mouth that the mainstream press is going to be fawning over Nintendo finding a way to charge you to play air guitar.

And why did Microsoft choose to show only their 2007 titles and then show Resi 5 anyway? Why not just show other future titles and plug the strength of the 2007 lineup? They could easily have had their cake and eaten it.

The show itself fairly poor until it was saved by some excellent gameplay footage of big games like Call of Duty 4 (plus online beta!) and Assassin’s Creed. I’m still as hot for Halo 3 as I ever was after that trailer, as well, although it was admittedly not a brilliant trailer. It’s just that they played it safe, had their aforementioned high points, a couple of low points (the Madden thing was…ugh), and came out just affirming what we already knew: that the Xbox 360 has a strong 2007 lineup. They need a huge X07 or TGS now.

Overall: C+

Mario Kart? It looks the same as Double Dash and they already did it online on the DS. No Animal Crossing. Little new on Smash Bros except a release date met with dead silence. The focus on Wii Fit meant that it ended up coming off like an infomercial for a step machine like you get on Five US when CSI isn’t on, and just affirmed for me that Nintendo and the Wii is no longer going with what I, as a gamer, want.

Overall: D

The new PSP is a good improvement even if it didn’t have internal memory (I’ll buy one when it gets hacked), Echochrome looks cool, and MGS4, Uncharted, and Killzone all look superb. For the first time since E3 2005 I’m seriously considering when I plan to buy a PS3 and which game is going to do it.

Overall: B+

Overall, though, I think we can all agree that the new E3 is a disappointment for those of us who like to sit back and enjoy the show. Bring back the old one, I say!

Microsoft

• $100/£80 price drop across all SKUs.
• Halo 3 campaign demo, hopefully closer to the real thing than last time.
• Ninja Gaiden 2. I then spend an hour trying to clean up the mess I made.
• Some real PGR4 and Fable 2 video.
• Rare bringing back one of their classics (I don’t think it’ll be Killer Instinct, for the record).
• At least one current PS3 exclusive coming to 360.
• Shenmue III. Please? If enough of us believe they’ll have to do it.

Nintendo

• Lots and lots and lots of sales graphs.
• Animal Crossing Wii shown and it’ll be a kind of walled-garden MMO: you live in your town with friends over the net, using WiiConnect24 to let anyone mess around in the persistent town at any time. Ban this sick burglary simulator!
• Mario Kart Wii.
• More Smash Bros shown, with a new feature that we haven’t seen. I’ll be upset if the Ouendan team isn’t in it. Sonic finally making it in is an outside bet.
• A new console for the Virtual Console. Neo-Geo?
• Miyamoto waves something around and Reggie has a new line for the fanboys to run into the ground for the next year.

Sony

• Absolutely no sales graphs whatsoever.
• $100/£75 off PS3.
• PSP redesign.
• Killzone 2 is finally shown and looks very good, albeit no E3 05 trailer.
• Home and LBP. Lots of comparisons to MySpace put me off it even more.
• Sony ruins their palindrome with the announcement of the force feedback Sixaxis. Shockaxis?

Any thoughts or predictions of your own are, of course, welcome.

Honestly, they might as well not bother putting on a show now. Publishers hold their own little events all year round (EA and Ubisoft have had them in the last month, for example) so nothing will change there, and since the huge events are incredibly popular it’s tempting to speculate that this is only going to make the venerable Tokyo Game Show and neophyte Leipzig Games Convention even bigger. Tempting in that it’s easier for me to get to Germany and preferable for me to go to Japan than Los Angeles.

But now how are fanboys going to endlessly debate who “won” E3? How are we going to see Peter Moore’s tattoos and Kaz Hirai’s hyperbole in the same place? What else do kids who run fan sites have to blag their way into? Where can shitty doomed peripherals go without Kentia Hall? And now there’s one less career path for jobbing “actresses” who are willing to drape themselves over cars and guns while overweight men in shorts have their photos taken with them.

And I’m not at all bitter that I’ve never been and now never will…

Completely off-topic I know, but I’ve also written a review of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS which can be found here and on the review index. Take a look.

This is probably going to be a long post…

First the conferences. I stayed up late to watch the Sony one live and, like most people seemed to, came away disappointed after all the hyperbole. Only three games really struck me – Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Virtua Fighter 5 – and the rest seemed spectacularly unspectacular. Tekken 6 didn’t even look as good as DOA4, and Resistance looked like a browner Call of Duty, for example. I was impressed with the very cool Eye of Judgement demo and the aforementioned three games, but then…$600. It’s not even a generation ahead of the 360 but is $200 more? No thanks.

There is a $500 unit, but who wants that? You lose the HDMI (so none of the advertised 1080p, ever), memory card slots, and wi-fi. At least if you buy a Core 360 you can buy the things to take it up to the premium one at a later date, but with the PS3 you’re stuck with the crippled one. I’m not going to get started on the “amazing innovation” (their words) of the motion sensitive controller but suffice to say that Nintendo must have been pissed.

What made me laugh was listening to Radio 1 the next day which is usually the home of PlayStation fanboy chavs and the opinions that were called in were universally negative. They even said that the consensus seemed to be that they’d “copied Microsoft and Nintendo and slapped a massive price tag on it.”

Nintendo came next. The Wii has some cool applications, Red Steel has some very clever touches, Metroid Prime 3 should be great even if it looks the same as the first two, and I love the idea of a speaker on the controller for stuff like shooting games. No doubt the Nintendo titles designed around it like Super Mario Galaxy will be cool as well, although I hope it’s more of a pure Mario rather than something more gimmicky like Mario Sunshine. What I wonder is how well some of the stuff can hold my attention on a home console – I definitely agree with the DS philosophy for portable games, but I like my lengthy and complex games as much as the quick arcade titles on the home consoles.

It was the DS that had the most impressive showing from Nintendo for me. The inimitable Ouendan gets a whole new English version for the West in the form of Elite Beat Agents which is fantastic news since it means I get an excuse to buy it all over again. On top of that there’s Diddy Kong Racing DS, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, New Super Mario Bros (can’t believe they actually called it that), Starfox DS, and a new Yoshi’s Island. The DS rules, and will of course play FFV and FFVI Advance.

Microsoft were last, and without a new console to show the responsibility passed to a certain super soldier. He came up at the end but had managed to slow Xbox Live downloads to a crawl by popping up early on there. Wow. It looked stunning and showed just enough to get me really excited for the series again. It’s one of my favourites and I absolutely cannot wait for Halo 3.

Gears of War was the other big one and also looks excellent, much improved from its last showing. The GTAIV announcement seemed massive at the time (I was ready to declare Sony dead with that news) but returned to reality when it emerged that it’s coming to PS3 as well. Oh well, it’s nice that MS are getting equal or better treatment this time. The rest of it left me with several games that I’m interested in, not least the possibility that Fable 2 might do what Lionhead aimed for with the first. Another mention should go to how much I liked the trailer downloads on Xbox Live – having them all in HD and 5.1 sound was brilliant.

The main show didn’t really bring a lot of new stuff from what I saw, since the big three had blown their loads at the respective conferences. Probably the biggest post-conference revelation was Super Smash Bros Brawl (Wii), complete with Solid Snake. The announcement of the draenei as the second new race in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC/Mac) is cool, and the size of the expansion means that I might be reviving Nekofever before too long. Battlefield 2142 (PC) looks good, if slightly underwhelming in these Unreal Engine 3-powered days (is it me or does every UE3 game look identical?). Still with the FPS theme, Huxley (360/PC), Prey (360/PC), and BioShock (360/PC/PS3) both look great, with IGN actually declaring BioShock to be a possible game of the show.

Spore has been a big talking point ever since its first tech demo a year ago and it still seems like one of the more revolutionary ideas of the show, both from a gameplay perspective and the technical aspect of so much of the content being procedurally generated. I’ll be interested to get my hands on it because I tend to either love or hate them – I loved Black & White for all its flaws, but didn’t get on with The Sims at all. It also, of course, wouldn’t be an E3 without a non-gaming “celebrity” making an ass of themselves. Not that she has to try too hard.

Overall a good show, then. Nothing really incredible from anyone, but nonetheless plenty of great games for all systems (except the N-Gage) coming in the next couple of years. The end of 2006 should be interesting if nothing else.

The Internet has made E3 much more of a public event than it used to be when we had to rely on magazine coverage the next month which made audacious (though ineffectual in the following example) stunts like the Saturn launch possible, but from what I’ve seen so far Microsoft should be commended for opening it up more than I’ve seen before. We’ve always relied on third-parties for coverage but this is the first time that I can remember a console manufacturer providing fast access to new show content themselves. Certainly the first time it’s come direct to the console.

Microsoft’s conference isn’t until tomorrow but already Live subscribers (most of them, if my friends list is any indication) have a dozen or so HD trailers to download and a demo of Test Drive Unlimited. The demo is nothing special and Sonic The Hedgehog is the only trailer which struck me immediately, but with any luck we’ll be able to download trailers for the likes of Halo 3 and Gears of War tomorrow, and we already know that we’re getting demos of Lost Planet and Moto GP 06 over the next couple of days. Not to mention that Live Gold is free for the duration of the show and that some of the trailers aren’t even on IGN or GameSpot.

Admittedly some of the stuff is eliciting disinterested reactions, but being able to watch this stuff in HD with 5.1 sound on your own TV instead of a Quicktime window is a nice boon. How much it’s going to do depends a lot on what Sony shows in a bit under three hours, but I hope for Sony’s sake that it looks better than this.