E3 2010: Microsoft Conference Thoughts
Deflated? Dissapointed? These are words no games company wants to hear, and yet they’re the words currently running through my head when it came to the Microsoft Conference. A conference that is usually filled with promise left me with a cold feeling as it attempted to waltz the grim-wiidango that Nintendo performed years ago. Kinect is Microsoft’s baby and it wanted to show it off as much as possible, but what it showed off felt stilted and wooden, a mix of gaming smattered with technology decisions that sound and look interesting, but might not neccessarily be interesting when we finally have it in our homes.
The conference started off good enough, with Treyarch showing off their baby Call of Duty: Black Ops. The cynical side in me wondered how much Treyarch were whipped by Activision into supplying the amount of gameplay footage we saw, and indeed how much technology and ideas were now being footed from the unofficially dead Infinity Ward. Either way Black Ops looks promising, although its title is somewhat confusing. What exactly is so secret about flying about a russian helicopter and blowing the shit out of everything?
The trailer ended to be replaced by a monotonous Microsoft drone, one of many it turned out. With much talk of transforming your TV, transforming your entertainment and other words beginning with transform, you would have thought the next thing to pop up would be a Transformers game. Instead Kojima (our friend, according to Monotonous Drone 1) made an appearance to show some footage from Metal Gear Solid: Rising, one of many games that will use Kinect (but far more interesting than the rest of the games shown). The hacking and slash katana action of Rising looks fairly interesting, ending in watermelons. Whether this is an example of true gameplay footage or not however remains to be seen. Rising ended as quickly as it started, to be replaced by the usual suspects. Halo. Gears of War.
It’s not that Halo and Gears of War aren’t exciting games to have, but rather that these games have their own running hype outside of Microsoft that they really don’t need showcased anymore. The showcase of Halo: Reach was alright, but was nothing we hadn’t seen, until the very end, when there was a new feature of space battle action. The showcase of Gears of War was also good to watch, but again didn’t really showcase anything we hadn’t seen before, or certainly knew would come from a Gears of War game. Big monsters, big guns, muscle men in big suits. The usual.
Then it finally reared its head; Kinect. By the end of it I was wishing for the Gears of War and Halo trailers back. What should have been a concise demonstration showing off Kinect’s abilities turned into a long dull part by part look at technology that was neither exciting nor dull, sitting instead in a grey area of “This is all fine and well, but shouldn’t we be showcasing far more games?” The showcase started off by showing that Kinect also has speech recognition ability. “Xbox, play” the smiling guy says, and thus begins what will surely be another long running Internet meme as we wonder whether we can tell it to kill, or find love. He was soon replaced by a woman talking to her sister through the Xbox in what has to be one of the most stilted, wooden acted conversation ever to grace these conference showings. Fine, great, we get it. Kinect can act as a webcam as well as do the stuff it’s made for. Get to the games!
It was here that Microsoft’s conference became the Nintendo conference without looking. The games, if they could be classified as this, were the same class of shovelware the Wii was throwing out a dime a dozen. Simple action based games like running, jumping and so on. Games that may well be Kinect based, but I would hope would not be a proper example of Kinect’s capability. The games continued, each with their own actors (it should be noted by this time it appeared that Microsoft had bought 80% of the Asian workforce, so high was the count of Asian’s on scene. Racism aside!) ham acting their way through games that were okay to downright boring. Kinect Sports was the most ironic, stealing just a little perhaps from a certain game with a similar name.
It felt like it wasn’t going to end, then Microsoft throws a poor kid on stage to play with a tiger on screen. I felt sorry for her. Nobody wants to be acting like an idiot on stage, least of all acting like an idiot when your audience is the game critique who report back to the gaming populous who are in tune with the Internet community. I fully expect gifs to follow sadly. She was replaced with dancing, Harmonix’s newest dance creation for Kinect. The female was alright. The spectacle based nerd made a mockery of himself, and again will probably have to face they ire of a not to sympathetic web community.
Ubisoft and Turn 10 showed off Kinect based games next, though Ubisoft’s showing could be classified as less of a game and more of a fitness exercise. Yes, it’s Kinect Fit in all its glory, with a women dropping her clothes somewhat on stage, much to the excitement of pasty white nerds. She was replaced by Turn 10, who in probably the most silly of statements suggested that “We can’t enter into Ferrari’s in real life, but with Kinect you can!” Except I can’t. It’s virtual. VIRTUAL!! If Forza are making another game for Kinect I do hope it’s a proper full game, and not just a “Forza Lite” to fill the Kinect shovelware gap.
Kinect finally started to wind down. Price? They didn’t say! After all that, they didn’t even mention how much the damn thing would cost, glancing over it totally and explaining it would be out and about for the holiday period in November. The conference wound down to the Xbox Slim, and managed to surprise everyone by stating the newest console would be out today at the same price as a standard Xbox. Pretty good. Then they do something so cringe worthy I can’t help but feel it was to soften the blow of having to listen to so much Kinect rubbish. They gave everyone in the audience a 360 Slim. How nice of them, eh?
I don’t often get behind the “Who won” arguments that come from these conferences. In the end each company is a product of their means, and they all do equally well in their own way. Despite this, Microsoft’s conference this year felt thoroughly deflated and lost. They’ve given Sony and indeed Nintendo a clear advantage to impress. You’ll have to wait till tonight to see if that happens!
Categories: Gaming
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