Usually every year I am excited about the Microsoft E3 Press conference. Nothing puts a smile on my face more than the thought of some big game announcements and previews for my beloved console. But to hear that most of the conference was about Kinect and how much this thing is about as revolutionary as the latest Final Fantasy title I feel a little disappointed and underwhelmed.
To be honest I am pretty much done with speaking about Kinect. So if your interested at all at what Kinect does or whatever. Check out my previous post devoted to the thing. It will tell you what its all about and the games coming out for it.
The conference opened with a demo for Call Of Duty: Black Ops. To be honest I am not a big war game fan, it is all too real for me. But something about this demo actually got me a little excited. Which is a bit weird really as the Modern War Fare 2 stuff last year didn’t really phase me in the slightest. Thing is I really can’t put my finger on it either. In the demo came in two parts, first part you were taken through some underground tunnels to get behind enemy lines. The feeling of claustrophobia was pretty damn neer perfect as you had no idea if an enemy was coming round the corner or not. The second half of the demo show you hijacking a helicopter and causing all sorts of chaos, blowing up bridges etc. It looked pretty fun, and I would actually like to look more into it. It also turns out that Xbox 360 will be getting all the new COD maps and DLC before anyone. Good old limited console exclusivity…this is for the next three years by the way.
Next up we have Metal Gear Rising. Oh my sweet zombie jesus this game looks somewhat amazing. Not being much of a MGS fan myself but being a huge hack and slash fan, this game looks set to be a revolution in hack and slash games. In the first trailer you saw Raiden hacking everything and anything to bits, be it cars, people, buildings. But that’s not all, there was a clip where Raiden was pretty much dicing up a in mid-air and you could control each slash Raiden did. This is going to be blood thirsty yet awesome. The trailer finished with the words “What will you cut? It’s all in your hands.” Yes this looks utterly insane and I cannot wait.
Next on the menu is the infamous gears of war 3. Now this is the part of the article where I look at the Gears footage and compare it to Jokesounds review of the future on gaming lives. Was he correct? Lets watch.
They showed off the 4 player co-op campaign mode for a bit. It looked typical gears Of War really, which isn’t a bad thing at all. What I really did like the look of was the Mutated Locust. Now these are some pretty mean SOB’s. You know in Halo 3 where some of the flood Mutate in the later levels. Think that times 20 and your kind of there. There are also some female characters for you to use so that’s always a plus for girl gamers and 12-year-old prepubescent kids. As for jokesounds review of the future. You may have missed the mark a tad, but its a demo at the end of the day so we just don’t know. There is gonna be a new mode called Beast, More on that when I get info.
Next up we Have Fable III with our good friend Peter Molenux, lets see what he has to say. He basically says all the things I know already, 10 decades after fable II, says revolutionary about five times then shows a trailer which looks pretty good. Looks like you will indeed have a dog again, and again you have to save Albion. but to me this time it looks like you can do things like combine magical spells, I saw fire and electricity being thrown at the same time so that looks pretty awesome. Not much else revealed though, watch this space.
A side note here, Crytek have joined forces with Microsoft game studios and are working on a project called “Codename Kingdoms” This is all I know. Moving on.
Halo Reach time, and yes I did nerdgasm a tiny bit. What was shown was a demo the campaign mode of the game. Its darker, more brutal and just generally more awesome than any other Halo title. Its classic Halo mixed with new Halo. The old tuning folk drop ships are back, elites are back and are as bad ass as ever. But what I did love was a glimpse of the space battle at the end of the demo. Yes that’s right people, Halo reach has battles in space where you are controlling a small gun cruiser and shooting up covenant space ships. Oh hell yeah! And that’s all bungie had to show. Bring on September.
Then the rest of the conference was talking about Kinect and the brand new Slime Xbox 360 with 250 gig HDD and hardly any fan noise. That’s cool and all but why do I get the feeling Xbox is trying to look like an old Fat PS3? *facepalm*
That’s all from me on the Microsoft press conference. Tune in for a round up of PS3 and Nintendo press conferences plus whatever else the team finds out about E3 2010.
- Garv
