I could go into detail about Microsoft's showing at E3 this year, but it was just so boring. This is a company that has no idea how to handle their market, especially now that it has been significantly expanded thanks to Kinect. On the one hand, Microsoft is the company of dudebro FPS fans, and in that category, they were more than willing to show off a new Halo game, Gears of War 3, and Modern Warfare 3. If any of that excites you, you might be reading the wrong website.
On the other side, they've continued pouring as much money into sequestering the Kinect from any meaningful purpose as they can. Watch TV with voice commands! Search Bing (Bing, seriously) with your voice! It's the future, everyone, and we're living it! Other than that, they've followed up the post-E3 2010 drought of Kinect games with… sequels to those games. Dance Central 2, Kinect Sports 2; it's all here! Aren't you excited?
Potentially promising things such as Kinect Star Wars and Fable: The Journey have been turned into a mini-game fest and an on-rails game, respectively. And that missing link, the "bridge" games between the "casual and the hardcore," has been exposed as a bit of a facade. Does anyone want or need to do voice commands in Mass Effect 3? No? Thought not.
Once again, the problem here is Kinect's optional status. Developers are not going to use the system in any meaningful ways because they don't have to – instead, they're more than willing (as always in the videogame industry) to ape something else to diminished results. In this case, it's the boatload of Wii games that use motion control in particularly tepid ways. At least on the Wii you have Nintendo and a few other developers who take the opportunities afforded by motion control seriously. On the Kinect, it's an idea that's been taken and boiled down to its most capitalistic essence, and that's a massive disappointment for something that I once considered to be one of the most exciting developments in video gaming.
I own a 360, and there are a lot of experiences on that console that are worth talking about. XBLA is often kind of wondrous, for instance. But there's not a whiff of anything resembling elegance, innovation or, unfortunately, interest at this year's E3 conference. Here's hoping Nintendo and Sony can save this from one of the worst showings… ever. (Yes, this might even be worse than Nintendo's 2003 E3. Or, um, last year's Microsoft conference.)