Well hello there everyone! Haven't done one of these in awhile. This week is almost assuredly going to be dominated by news coming from E3, the world's most extravagant wanking party. Seriously, there's nothing like this in the film industry – nothing this gaudy, nothing this IN YOUR FACE about all these new products coming out. Still, it does satisfy the "oh my god new games!" part of me, and I know that I'll be keeping tabs on all of the major developments. We'll be doing wrap-ups of each of the Big 3's press conferences as they happen, so stay tuned for that.
Natal is out, Kinect is in.
Boy, does Microsoft have an uphill battle to face or what! After essentially marketing their console as the "hardcore gamers' console of choice," Microsoft is trying to do a 360 (ha! See what I did there?) and basically be Nintendo circa 2005/2006. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that already happened, so don't expect people to be blown away when pretty well every game you announce for your motion controller is stuff that has been done on the Wii, is already owned by most people who are going to be playing games, and doesn't cost the arm and leg that your stuff will.
Yes, Natal, now rebranded as the kind of silly sounding Kinect (although, I said the same thing about the Wii when it was announced as its name), has gotten off to a disastrous start, and the only way that Microsoft could have made Kinect something interesting for the people who care about its unveiling would have been to target a different audience than Nintendo already did in its early Wii phase. Like Christian said in the last podcast, as soon as they make something like The Elder Scrolls V Kinect-only, people will rush out en masse to buy it. Why? BECAUSE THAT'S YOUR MARKET, MICROSOFT. Jesus, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure this out!
And if you haven't heard about the kerfuffle with Microsoft's Kinect unveiling last night (where they basically roped gaming journalists into being unwitting commercial extras while Cirque du Soleil performed (to the tune of $10,000,000 I heard!) and kind-of shitty looking Kinect games were unveiled (except Joyride, that game looks hells of awesome), you should check out this video here.
Move time!
I was pretty unimpressed too with Sony's Move unveiling earlier this year, and unless something has drastically changed (as I've heard that they're essentially going with the Microsoft approach to motion controlling, which is essentially the Nintendo approach from five years ago), I can't see people being enamoured with the Move either. I get the feeling that both of these extremely expensive peripherals for already pretty expensive consoles are going to go the way of the 64DD or any other doomed peripheral. And by the time that these motion controllers are implemented correctly, Nintendo will already be onto the next big thing…
And speaking of Nintendo…
Putting aside my love of Nintendo as a developer and console maker, this is their E3 to take. It's the perfect balance for the company – the other console developers are going to be focusing on the casual market in obviously derivative ways, while Nintendo can boast about already conquering that market, while going on to definitely demonstrate (inhale) Zelda, Pikmin, the 3DS and whatever games will come with it, which from what I've heard, might include Star Fox and a Mario game, not to mention Metroid: Other M, The Last Story, Xenoblade, and on an outside chance, an F-Zero game or a Kirby game. That covers a lot of bases in terms of franchises, and who knows? There might be new IPs from second-party developers like Retro and Sora. It's going to be exciting to watch.
With all of that said…
I don't necessarily buy into that "winning E3" garbage. It's just a trade show, but it's been made into fanboy pandemonium central, and while it's easy to get caught up in that, we will try not to do that and just present what happened while critically analyzing it. Sure, I think that Kinect and Move are stupid now, but they might turn out to be mind-blowing. Who knows?