Microsoft E3 2009 Impressions

 

I watched a live stream of the Microsoft E3 press conference last night and was quite impressed at the stuff coming out in the next year or so. Luckily I missed the first few minutes due to streaming issues so did not have to sit through the Rock Band: Beatles part.

The highlights of the show were definitely Splinter Cell: Conviction, Alan Wake (finally!) and Project Natal. 

Conviction had a novel way of communicating mission details to the player with mission name and target appearing in game on the walls and the graphics and game play part wasn't half bad either.

Alan Wake was finally demonstrated with some nice game play which looked like a mixture of Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark. Graphically the game looks good and given the recent trend of survival horror games it might turn out to be a hit (over hyped as it is).

The center piece of the show was definitely Project Natal. A motion capturing, voice detecting control system demoed with a mixture of prerecorded videos and live action. The prerecorded part was amazing but the live action part needed a little work as can be expected. The Avatar in the live action demo was doing stuff that would shame a contortionist, nothing that a little rag doll modeling won't fix though. Peter Molyneux's studio also prepared a video showcasing the technology that seemed a little too good to be believable. The fact that it will only be shown behind closed doors to a selected audience only strengthens my suspicions.

The conference was nicely organized with the some big games shown up front and then an announcement was made saying that everything from that moment on would be exclusive. Other newsworthy items were ODST, Forza 3 and Kojima himself coming out to confirm that he next MGS was in development on the Xbox. Games for Windows was conspicuously missing from the conference, which is surprising considering the fact that some big third party games were released last year that supported it. Ah well, one more nail in the coffin for PC gaming.

Image from Gamespot.