E3: No Surprises but Nintendo

Not content with being the craziest arm-flailing console around, now with added balance pad, it seems the Wii is now going to revolutionise the world, and its gut.

Feature by Josh Wilson | 09 Aug 2007

E3, the biggest, baddest games exposition is no more. The glitz, the glamour, the scantily clad ladies that had some integral role in gaming, all gone. The scaled back event was never going to be as interesting as last year, what with all the consoles now out. However, that didn't stop the big three from holding their own glitzy conferences as per usual to spin some statistics in their favour, and show us a few of the games they have coming as well. As always, The Skinny trudged through the press releases, conference footage and the whiney as always 'blogosphere' to bring you the definitive, 'All You Need to Care About' guide to this year's E3.

Having had their rather fat, and sometimes disabled baby out for some time now, Microsoft haven't really had any major announcements for a while. This trend continued, as we suspected it would. The majority of the Microsoft presentation involving Peter Moore a) reeling off stats about how awesome they are, b) foolerising himself with his poor Rock Band performance (which incidentally, will be shit hot - three guitars, a drummer and a singer all playing at the same time, on the same console. Roll over Guitar Hero) and c) announcing a fairly hefty amount of exclusive games for both the Xbox360 itself, and Xbox Live Arcade. The most intriguing were the two new RPGs: Lost Odyssey and Mass Effect, both of which look stunning, have engaging stories and some rather cool game mechanics.

Sony, after a rather shocking year (amazing arrogance to the consumer = low hardware sales, even lower stock and a load of redundancies) really need to pull their finger out. Whether they did or not is debatable. For example, the onslaught of their Home service (a 3D world where you can buy things to populate your 3D house - apparently real life just isn't good enough for us anymore), while looking rather nice, does seem a bit clunky and pointless. After they got that out of their system, Phil Harrison proceeded to brandish his new PSP Slim - Sony's attempt at a DS lite - which is marginally slimmer, with TV output and 'better' battery life (which is arguably a lie as it has since transpired that while it is more efficient, the battery shipped is worse than with the original, whose battery you must use to get better life) and which still uses rubbish UMD. After this hogwash, and a few more crappy PSP games came the good stuff. Two surprising exclusives in Unreal Tournament 3 and HAZE, as well as some interesting in-house games (Echocrome, a pseudo-optical illusion puzzler in 3D being the most interesting) and then their heavyweights - MGS4, Killzone 2 and Gran Turismo, all looking pretty fucking brilliant. If these games live up to their promise, Sony could, maybe, possibly make a bit of a comeback.

And then came Reggie. After his (deserved) victory speech, Mr Fils-Aime went on to showcase some of the upcoming 100 Wii titles, most of which have been seen previously (the two most noteworthy being the new MarioKart - with back to basics one-man-per-car fun. It will also be playable online - and Super Mario Galaxy). This was closely followed by some demonstrations of Metroid Corruptions' 'revolutionary' controls, plus the arrival of a WiiZapper attachment - to turn both Wiimote and Nunchuk into a fully fledged gun control system - and of course some games to use it with, including Ghost Squad and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. After all these revolutions, Shigeru 'legendary game mofo' Miyamoto took to the stage to announce the latest game idea to pop into his amazing noggin - WiiFit. Not content with being the craziest arm-flailing colsole around, now with added balance pad, it seems the Wii is now going to revolutionise the world, and its gut.


http://www.nintendo.com, www.playstation.com, www.xbox.com