E3 2007: Microsoft Impressions

With more than enough montages to choke an enraged chimpanzee, Microsoft's conference was all about the games. No real hardware announcements and only a few title announcements here is my breakdown of the Microsoft E3 2007 keynote presentation.

Pick-Ups:

Viva Pinata: Party Animals and Scene It!. While feeble attempts to battle the Wii's strength these games will be welcome additions to existing players. Scene It!'s ridiculous looking controller looks like it may be easier to pull mom or the little sister into a game of movie trivia.

Xbox Live Arcade gets a ton of new titles, alot of which are independently developed. I've been waiting forever for Tetris and they delivered. The Sega Vintage Collection is amazing and there are a ton of great looking games like War World and Switchball that show the power of compact development.

Although nothing really big announced about GTA IV the revelation that the trailers were captured with 360s put rest to the question whether the game will look worse when it releases. Now we know it can only get better on the PS3 version.

Xbox Live Video Marketplace finally hits Canada. I've been waiting forever for this and the guys over at gamerscoreblog.com hinted at it during their Toronto stop. Now I just want to know if we'll be seeing all the content the US gets and if prices will be any different.

Gears of War PC was leaked days before the announcement but the high def video and tidbit details really get my motor going for this release.I just want to hear a confirmation of multiplatform play, but with the announcement of Epics implementation of LIVE resources into the Unreal Engine III I doubt it won't.

Rock Band will have weekly downloadable content! I can't stress how cool this is. I know I will be pouring Microsoft Points down the drain, but this is what developers need to do if they want their games to stay competitive between releases. Plus, watching Peter Moore jam to the Hives is priceless.

Let-Downs:

No price-cut. While we still have a few days of E3 (unlikely), and the Tokyo Game Show around the corner (more plausible) the lack of price cut was a real surprise considering Monday's PS3 news. Microsoft could really be competitive by simply dropping the cost of all three SKUs by $100 and throwing in a free memory unit with the core. This would make them have an out-of-the-box ready sku competitive with the Wii and the two more serious units way cheaper than their respective PS3 rivals. Alas, this brilliant move did not happen and instead we got...

The Halo 3 Xbox 360. With speculation over the mysterious unit spotted at the rehearsal this is a serious disappointment for anyone hoping something cool would come out. No built-in HD-DVD, no 65 nm chips, just a colour change and fanboy targeting. This is a seriously lame attempt at cashing in on the license and although I do appreciate the pink and blue controller announcement this is completely lackluster.

While we're on the topic of Halo, the short film by would be Halo: The Movie director Neil Blomkamp is complete rubbish. It looks nothing like the Halo universe and simply does not fly in my books. If this is any indication of what the film would be like if he was heading it I'd rather they didn't.

Summary:

Microsoft's game plan has always been about providing players with the titles they want. They did that this E3 with their display of titles ranging from the family friendly to the Jack Thompson inducing. The year looks to be great as each of the titles they showed will be available this year, but because of this the presentation was lacking in any hard-hitting news. Then again it's rather difficult to wow the all-seeing eye of the Internet.

Without a price-drop announced it will be interesting to see how that affects the sell rate between 360 and PS3, but there is still some time for it to come. I'm excited for a lot of titles now because of this conference, but I am left wondering whether Microsoft will be able to keep the steam up next year with nothing new announced to build hype.