Instead it started pretty much from where they left off at
last year’s E3 with Mr Green Helmet Man and his everlasting adventures in
space. Yes, it’s Halo 4 and to be fair it looked pretty good! We were treated
to an over-the-top trailer that Halo’s getting a reputation for and then a
small playthrough of an early level which featured a lot of cinematics and a
new feature that sees Chief using his visor to scan objects in a way that has
echoes of the Metroid Prime series.
I can’t really fault it, I’m a fan of the Halo series,
though I have to say I’m considerably less excited about this instalment than I
was for Reach. That being said though this showing of Halo 4 did actually make
me want to play the game which is more than I can say for the rest of the
conference’s offerings.
Yes, unfortunately Microsoft started with the biggest gun in
its arsenal and it really went downhill after that. Splinter Cell: Blacklist
was shown straight after and wasn’t too bad, it seems to have adopted the Metal
Gear Solid approach to sneaking and killing rather than the whole hide in the
dark and pop out after a 15 minute wait only to mess up and have to start over.
It looked okay to be fair, I prefer it this way, but I’m not exactly chomping
at the bit to get my hands on it…
The real cliff-fall came afterwards when Andrew Wilson, the
head of EA Sports was welcomed onto the stage. Now, Wilson had already spent a
massive chunk of time warbling on about the EA Sports titles at the EA
conference by this point and he essentially copied and pasted his script and carried
on here at Microsoft’s.
Well this seemed like as good a time as any for Microsoft to
get to its real agenda. Ladies and gentlemen give a warm welcome back to the
Kinect.
Yes, everything is better with Kinect isn’t it? Cooking,
playing guitar, juggling, everything is better with Kinect! And of course that
includes football and American football! Microsoft kept on with their tradition
of having celebrity endorsements with Madden when they called Joe Montana
out onto the stage to tell Wilson how real this game is. To be fair to Madden I
suppose yelling out audibles on the line is a decent way to use the Kinect,
FIFA on the other hand is completely pointless. Seriously, pick up a ball and
go play in the park with your mates, no one will use Kinect with FIFA, just
leave it EA!
Finally Wilson left the stage and although EA may have been
done for the day, Kinect certainly wasn’t. Possibly the most disappointing
trailer of the entire E3 expo was shown next: Fable: The Journey. Want to throw
your arms around firing magical spells at enemies? Didn’t think so, even the
steadfast Microsoft fans in the audience couldn’t applaud that rubbish,
something that left Peter Molyneux all down in the dumps.
The main problem with Microsoft’s conference was simply the
lack of games, or anything of interest to be perfectly frank. They spent so
much time on things nobody cares about, people aren’t here to see how fast
Kinect can use Bing to search for Sci-Fi movies, yet Microsoft spent over 20
minutes showing us things like this.
Some bloke came out and showed off something they’re calling
‘Xbox Smartglass’. This is obviously their answer to the Wii U, however though they showed how you can attach your Halo Waypoint stuff to it they
spent most of the time showing how you can watch a movie on a tablet AND on
your Xbox! Wow, it’s not like Netflix have been doing that as standard for
years or anything…
Smartglass was just a weird reveal by Microsoft, it’s just a
tablet (that everyone already has according to them by the way) that can
connect to your Xbox and smartphone. Why is this news, that’s just
connectivity, why are you talking about it at E3!? The Wii U uses its bundled
in gamepad for gaming and all sorts; Smartglass is a tablet that works as a
tablet - who’d have thought?
But this revelation pales in comparison to the big one: yes
I know you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for years now but they’ve
finally done it. INTERNET EXPOLOER IS COMING TO XBOX. Jesus…
Let’s talk about sports… no let’s not
By this point of the conference I just want to see a game!
Any game! Show that Fable trailer again! I don’t care just please stop talking
nonsense! But unfortunately I was not put out of my misery, instead Microsoft
wanted to talk about sports… it took a lot of patience for me to get through
this.
Did you know you can watch ESPN on Xbox? You can watch
baseball, and football, and hockey and OH WHO CARES!? Seriously, you can watch
ESPN on TV! Why are you going on about something that should just be a basic Xbox
feature by now!? Show us something that involves a game at least! Every year
Microsoft turn up to E3 to tell us all about something completely irrelevant
like a drop down menu or something! Seriously Microsoft, STOP DOING IT!
Thankfully they gave into my demands, sort of. We got to see
Nike+ Fitness which looked alright, I suppose it’s another attempt at an answer
to Wii Fit. It did look alright but I prefer Wii Fit as it has a balance board
which you can do so much with. Without the balance board I can’t see it being a
particularly good experience, but that’s just me.
GAMES!
For all those who had fallen asleep or just simply closed
the video link by this point I can inform you they did actually show some
games.
Exclusives were few and far between, instead Microsoft
decided to give a lot of airtime to third party developers which is a bit
worrying for the company. Of the exclusives that were shown, there’s a new
Forza named Forza Horizon which is essentially a Need for Speed game and then
there was Gears of War Judgement which was given a brief trailer. I’ve lost a
lot of interest in both of these franchises so this news sailed right over my
head. Also revealed was Ascend: New Gods which is presumably trying to get a slice
of Sony’s God of War pie; Lococycle, a game that looks like Extreme G to me;
and Portal 3… oh sorry Matter, not Portal, nothing like Portal. Silly me.
As I say the bulk of the show was given to third parties. Tomb
Raider was given a chunk of time to show some more gameplay off which they did,
it showed off Lara as she enters an enemy camp and then goes on an incredibly
long and painful fall that is not too dissimilar to the scene in Hot Rod…
This was a bit of a theme for Microsoft in that they had
people come out and play the game, but there would be no commentary as to what
was actually going on, what was new to the game, what abilities you could
combine and use. Nothing like that, just a man stood on a stage with a control
pad playing a game, a bit boring if you ask me. This is what Capcom did when
they sent out their minions to play Resident Evil 6 – they just played it, no
information at all…
Racketeers, an Xbox Live arcade game, didn’t do this,
instead the demonstrator spoke about what she was doing as she was playing.
Yes, the game wasn’t great, and yes it features Kinect but at least this woman
showed a bit of enthusiasm! Give her a better job Microsoft!
I know you’re probably thinking this is a terrible
conference, and you’re right, it was but it wasn’t all bad. One of the
highlights was probably South Park: The Stick of Truth which looked pretty decent. You play a new
kid who enters the town and joins the boys in a big stupid RPG adventure. Looks
like fun and might be a surprise hit with a bit of luck. Shame they didn’t show
as much of it as they did Splinter Cell, Resident Evil 6 or Tomb Raider though.
Blockbusters
So that was it for the conference, all that was left to do
was to send out Don Mattrick to wrap things up: “We started today by showing
you the exciting return of Master Chief and Halo 4 and now it’s only fitting to
close with another blockbuster game.”
The game he was talking about was Call of Duty Black Ops 2.
I really don’t care about Call of Duty, if you’re looking for new footage of
this new game type in ‘Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2’ into
YouTube and watch that. It’s just the same thing shovelled out every single
year. I’m so bored of it I think I’d rather play the new Fable. Okay that’s a
lie.
Microsoft’s show was extremely disappointing. For some
reason I expected them to do well this year, they’d had two very poor shows in
the previous two E3s and I just thought they’d get it together for this one.
Instead they spent too long talking about things gamers just do not care about
and irrelevant connectivity rubbish that has no place on the E3 stage. Sure,
it’s great that you can connect a tablet to your Xbox but come on, this is an
age where I can connect my mobile phone to my oven… tablet to game console is
just old news.
If there was a word I could use for this conference it would
be this: boring. Other than Halo 4 and South Park there wasn’t anything to
really get your teeth into. The people on the stage looked either bored or
horribly rehearsed, and there was even a part where Usher came on stage to plug
his latest song… eh?
This could be a difficult year for Microsoft, I don’t see
enough exclusive content to see them beating the likes of Sony. It feels to me
like Microsoft are losing track of the important stuff in the gaming industry.
Okay I’ve bashed Kinect a bit in its lifetime but it’s actually an okay piece
of kit if used correctly, for example in dance games or mini games, not in Mass
Effect or Star Wars… Just face it Microsoft, not everything is better with
Kinect. Too much time is being spent on Kinect and other pointless endeavours
while they forget the real meat and potatoes of the industry: the games.
Connect your tablet to your Xbox all you like, but if you’ve
got nothing to play what is the bloody point?
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