E3 2010: Josh's Day 1 Thoughts

Okay, so another E3 is upon us and we’ve been bombarded with press releases, screenshots, trailers, and tons of other information.  I figured that each day we would do a little recap on what we thought of what happened during the day.  Let’s get rolling.

Today we started off with the Microsoft press briefing.  I guess the main news out of this briefing was Xbox 360 Kinect is getting released on November 4^th.  What do I think of it?  I’m honestly not 100% sold yet.  The games they showed off looked very very family oriented and leaning towards kids.  They did show off a trailer for a Star Wars “Kinect” game, which looked to be their big “hard core gamer” game.  A couple other developers started to announce their own Kinect games, like SEGA’s Sonic Free Riders and EA’s SPORTS Active 2, which weren’t part of Microsoft’s press briefing.  We’ll see what comes out later this week and in the future, but, again, I’m not sold.  VideoKinect to do video conferencing really doesn’t grab me.  And controlling the system with my voice…meh..not interested.

Something strangely absent from the Kinect announcing was the price.  I think, and this is my opinion, that Microsoft wants to charge $149 for the Kinect, but they are unsure if they have the software titles to drive the hardware at that price and they might need to lower it to $99.

Microsoft also followed up the Kinect announcement with the announcement of a brand new “Slim” Xbox 360 which is coming out this week.  Seriously…this week.  Hey Sony…this is how you keep a system under wraps.  Didn’t see a bunch of leaked production photos of this one until like the week before…and that was a couple box shots.  Hardware looks good and if I needed another Xbox 360, I’d pick it up.

EA also did a press event today.  We learned that Crysis 2 will support true stereoscopic 3D.  We’ll see how this 3D phase goes and if people adopt the hardware necessary to play games and watch movies in 3D in their own home.  They also announced a new Need for Speed Hot Pursuit and an expansion for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 called Vietnam.

Ubisoft did a press event tonight hosted by Joel McHale.  Honestly, it was very hard to watch…they really need to practice these things more in advance.  Probably the best of out this press event was Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.  They are also working on the Michael Jackson game, because not enough people have profited from his death yet.