June 10th was a big day for tech and games, so I decided I would let you know what I thought was important or interesting.
Microsoft
First up was the Microsoft keynote for E3. This as you can imagine was about the Xbox brand and the stuff the are developing for it. They were smart with the keynote and pretty much kept everything about the games since last time they talked about it, it just sounded like they were making the worlds greatest DVR.
They started off with a cool video about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Since Metal Gear passed up the 360 it is cool to know that will be in on the action for the next gen.
They also announced a new slimmer Xbox 360, and that all Gold Live subscribers will be getting free games similar to PlayStation Plus. Which is good because Gold is a rip off, so they should give us something, but they also announced the One would cost $499 it includes the Kinect 2.0, but still ouch.
They also announced quite few exclusive games, but the two I am most interested in are: Below which is a roguelike and the first time I had heard that description at E3, and a new Killer Instinct game which has been promised since MS bought Rare.
Then they showed Master Chief in a cloak, and since he wears armor I am not sure what it is for, but I am guessing he is a mage now, so I wonder what his favorite spell is. I am hoping it is Magic Missile.
Apple
Apple at the same time as the E3 press conferences was doing their developer keynote at their WWDC, which pretty much boiled down to that they were stealing Windows Phones design language, they are launching their own Pandora, and they made a computer looks like a black trash can. Not really, but pretty much that.
EA
EA decided for their Press conference that it would be good to keep faking people out that they were showing Battlefield, but instead showed us Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, and Star Wars: Battlefront. Both of which look like fun. Then they talked about sports games for like … forever. Like that now basketball games have a real ball with ball like physics: huzza!
Butt then they said the magic words: Peggle 2 and all was forgiven. This will be my wife’s favorite game of this new generation, and one last piece of awesome news was they announced Mirror’s Edge 2. Which is great. There are so few non hyper-sexualized female protagonists it is good to see one return.
Ubisoft
I thought Ubisoft was going to drop the ball for awhile just showing us games we knew were coming, but their new Crew racing game that takes place in the whole USA looks pretty cool, and if they are true to their word then I can’t wait to terrorize Lynden with a dune buggy in the game.
They saved the best for last and showed a new Tom Clancy game, but instead of it being a shooter it is a modern day open world RPG called The Division and it looks amazing! That is how you save a press conference.
Sony
Sony was the last presentation of the day, and they started off with some Vita and PS3 stuff, and it was all fine, but just uninteresting, Beyond: Two Souls looks like fun though, and it is good to see that they are still catering indie support.
They finally got things going with a steam-punkie game called The Order: 1866, but then they quickly just started showing us already announced games, and games from other people, but they turned it around.
The first bit of news was bad: you will need a Playstation Plus account to play online, boo, but you can buy, sell, and trade disk based games all you want, and your console doesn’t call home to check licensing, yeah, and it only costs $399, the crowd goes wild (though since it doesn’t included the Eye it insured no one would ever use it)! After that they dropped the mic and went home.
I hope you liked this little press conference write up. It was fun to put together.
Well put man! I liked taking in all of the information and love that Sony is going back to their roots while Apple is almost trying to deliberately create the ugliest and most expensive computers.
Yeah Microsoft had a great list of exclusive games for this E3. It is a shame they added that crappy DRM to the console.
I’m really surprised Sony doesn’t have DRM and authentication as I thought it was being pushed by the publishers. That really undercuts Microsoft even more than the price. Will still want to read the reviews on the machine as they actually perform before putting down the big bucks – if I have big bucks to spend.
Yeah that really was the biggest deal, but today it was announced that Sony would allow the publishers to make whatever type of DRM they want, so I guess it is better then the forced DRM of the X1, but it could be kind of a mess too.
That almost seems messier to me, but easier to reverse if/when customers revolt.
Yeah it is a hard deal. Maybe if people promise to stop pirating games we can get rid of all the DRM 😉