Pic from ’09. Sorry, couldn’t get a shot of the stage from this year.
Microsoft’s E3 2010 press conference just wrapped up, and in case you missed it, here’s a run-down of the key points from the press conference. Videos included!
Metal Gear: Rising will be Kinect-enabled (video here)
Hideo Kojima came out on stage and showed a new cinematic/gameplay trailer for Metal Gear: Rising, and it looks like the game will be Kinect-enabled. It wasn’t specifically said at the conference whether or not you’re required to use Kinect to control it, but I’m fairly confident that you’ll have the ability to choose between Kinect control and a standard controller. We’ll just have to wait and see on that.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (video here)
I didn’t get to see all of the demo, but what I did see looked like your standard Call of Duty gameplay, with the addition of a Hind helicopter firing hellfire missiles at unsuspecting badguys in the jungle. I honestly have faith in Treyarch despite some people’s malice towards them over Call of Duty 3 (and even World at War in some cases), and I think this one might turn out to be surprisingly good. Can’t wait to see what new multiplayer mode they have up their sleeves. ‘Cong zombies? Spetsnazombies?
Gears of War 3 4-player co-op demo (video here)
The Gears of War 3 demo didn’t really show too many new things, except for the 4-player co-op thing. It did show that you can pass weapons to another player, though — not sure if that’s a co-op only gameplay feature or if you can do that in single-player as well; not that I’d want to give my Lancer to my horrible A.I. buddies. Even though it didn’t show many new features, it still looked like it’s going to be, well, bigger and better. I’m really looking forward to this one.
Fable 3 (video here)
Not much to say about this one, because not much beyond a trailer was shown of it. The art style seems to have changed a little bit, and the gameplay looks like it might be similar to Fable 2′s. Since this game’s going to be Kinect-enabled, we’ll just have to wait for Peter Molyenux to show it off in detail before we can know any more about this game.
Crytek’s Xbox 360 exclusive game Codename: Kingdoms (video here)
Just like they said in the conference, Crytek’s known for pushing graphics capabilities to its limits — so seeing that Crytek’s working on an Xbox 360 exclusive game is pretty exciting. I’d love to see what they can pull off when they only work on one console. The trailer they showed didn’t really tell much about the game, except that it might be based on ancient Rome, or perhaps the Spartans. I couldn’t really tell, to be honest. New info about this game is sure to come up from this E3 event, and I’ll post it when I find it.
Halo: Reach campaign (video here)
They showed off a fairly lengthy clip from Halo: Reach, and it looks like, well, Halo. If you’ve played Halo: Reach’s multiplayer beta, or any other Halo game for that matter, you know that’s not necessarily a bad thing to say — though on the flip side if you hated the previous games, I don’t think there’ll be much for you in this game to change your mind. Anyways, the gameplay trailer (which I’ll try to post here when it’s available) showed standard gameplay, but ended with a pretty big twist when Spartan “6″ gets shot up into space in some kind of advanced space rocket, and then immediately begins to engage in an orbital battle against the Covenant. That was probably the most exciting part of the trailer right there.
ESPN coming to Xbox Live, free to Gold subscribers (video here)
This was an interesting piece of news, because they weren’t exactly clear on what they meant by “free to Gold subscribers” — do they mean that all the content will be available free, or access to the service will be free? I’d be willing to bet that it’s the latter, because I just can’t see them giving people free access to all of the sports videos they promise that will launch on the service.
Here’s the specifics: you can download college and professional sports, including college football, college basketball, professional football and basketball, baseball and soccer, with a launching total of over 3,500 games. It will be Kinect-enabled of course, and you can invite other people to join in with you while you’re watching a game, and you can participate with trivia and vote for your favorite team, as well as access live score updates direct from ESPN. Sounds very interesting, but like I said in the beginning, I think they should’ve communicated better about what exactly “free to Gold subscribers” meant.
Xbox 360 “Slim” officially announced with a twist (video here)
Well, I was right about the Xbox 360 “Slim” being announced at E3 this year, but I was wrong about it being bundled with Kinect — and that’s where the bombshell was. You’re not going to have to wait until the holidays to buy the new Xbox 360, it was announced that the new Xbox 360 starts shipping today to retailers, and should be at your local retailer within a week — for only $299. Yeah, that was another surprise.
The features that were dug up from NeoGAF that I posted about turned out to be true, too. In case you don’t remember what the new Xbox 360′s features are, it includes a 250GB HD, built-in WiFi, and is “Kinect ready”. I don’t think “Kinect ready” actually means anything significant, but their announcement of when Kinect will be released has me wondering.. and that brings us to the final point in part 1:
Kinect launches in North America on November 4th
Yep, I don’t think you had to be a psychic to see that they were going to put this out around the holidays. They didn’t give any details as to when it’s going to be shipped to other parts of the world, but I imagine that information will be revealed at a later time — maybe even from this same E3. The interesting wording in this announcement, though, is when Microsoft said “Kinect will be compatible with over 40 million Xbox 360s currently on the market”.
Considering I have an old Xbox 360 Pro (the ones without a HDMI), that kind of wording worries me. Am I going to have to buy the new Xbox 360? Granted I probably WILL buy the new Xbox 360 since it gives me a good excuse to upgrade, but I’d like to know why Kinect won’t be compatible with all Xbox 360s. It could be that he was referring to the arcade units, the ones without the hard-drives — Kinect might require a bigger chunk of memory than an Arcade units’ internal memory can handle. Update: Jeff Gerstmann said on his twitter that the new Xbox 360 has a dedicated power port for the Kinect, and that older 360s will have to plug into a separate wall outlet.
I’ll have post 2 up with details on all the Kinect launch games that were shown at E3 shortly. Spoiler alert: the games looked less fake this time.
Part 2 is up: Part 2
Edit: put video links for most talking points, added Call of Duty: Black Ops — oops!
Edit 2: added clarification about Kinect courtesy of Jeff Gerstmann’s twitter
Related posts:
- Microsoft Begins its Pre-E3 PR War
- Xbox 360 “Slim” Revealed, Natal Possibly Named
- Microsoft Will Top Natal Announcement
- Kinect’s First Games Revealed
- Deus Ex 3 Human Revolution Trailer E3 2010
