Ryo back to fill in this week’s Tech Tuesday. E3 officially kicked off yesterday with Microsoft’s press conference in the morning. After short delay of thirty minutes, we were immediately treated to the first look at E3 2010’s goodness. If you haven’t gathered by now, I’ll be focusing entirely on E3 and what information I’ve gleaned from it just from the first two days. For old time’s sake, let’s kick this show off.
Microsoft went into this year’s E3 convention with a very clear goal: demonstration of the newly named Kinetic. A large majority of their press conference consisted of showing off it’s features and a few tech demos of games that will be released for it. Even the announcer’s from ESPN’s Sports Center dropped in to announce the partnership between ESPN and Xbox Live to bring Sports Center to the dashboard, free to gold members like Last.FM, Facebook, and Twitter.
This was an interesting look into Kinetic’s capabilities and compared to last year’s E3, they’ve smoothed out a few things. The voice command inclusion should hit home with a decent sized audience. Another interesting feature that’s been added and refined is the tracking of the camera in the sense that it will actually turn and adjust itself to be able to see you. This little feature was demonstrated by a developer and her twin sister chatting in a video chat with the twin moving side to side to show it off.
Speaking of video calls, the quality of the video and sound seemed top notch though I do need to caution not to get overly excited since the whole thing happened on a fairly robust network. Actual quality with home connections still needs to be shown, but it seems like this new addon isn’t going to be a piece of expensive plastic like so many nay-sayers have voiced. One last little note on this device, there are fifteen confirmed launch games for when it hits store shelves on November 4th.
Now, Chatting away about Kinect is good and all but there are some other topics to touch on before we get to the juicy tidbits of the press conference. A teaser trailer was shown for Call of Duty: Black Ops and the game looks like it will be another solid hit under Activision’s belt. Hideo Kojima took the stage to chat a moment about handing over the torch then passed the spotlight off to his producer Shigenobu Matsuyama who then proceeded to show the teaser trailer of Metal Gear Solid Rising. Lots of dicing things up in the trailer, everything from people and cars to a watermelon. The audience was excited to see Cliff take the stage and show off Gears of War 3 and the four player co-op it will be sporting.
What had me on the edge the moment I realized where the presentation was going is when the speaker started talking about the game that redefined Xbox Live and how it is always good to know stories from the beginning. Yes, that’s right. Halo. Specifically Reach. The audience was treated to a big thank you from Bungie for helping out with the beta then a teaser trailer composed of campaign footage ending in possibly one of the best confirmations of a single player aspect dreamed up. Dog fights in space. The trailer cut off right as you can see the player shifting a craft dubbed the Sabre left and right to dodge incoming fire.
Now for that juicy tidbit I mentioned earlier. The Xbox 360 Slim was unveiled in a sneaky way. The little bugger was on stage disguised as a normal 360 the entire time. The new model looks just like the leaked pictures that surfaced a few days ago. The slim will sport an internal 802.11N wifi card and an internal 250Gb hard drive. The real kicker of all this? $299 price tag. No joke.
Oh, did I mention that retailers have already received the consoles and will be available later this week? The new console is also listed as having a custom port made for Kinect to provide connectivity and power to the device. It was expected the device would need to be powered by an adapter or by batteries, but this will alleviate that requirement. The slim still has the ethernet ports and USB ports so wired connections still haven’t been removed for those preferring ethernet cord connections won’t be left out. Check out Kotaku for a picture of the preliminary system specs.
Stay tuned for a wrap-up tomorrow so get back to grinding through your respective games. Whether that be behind the wheel of a race car or on the back of a horse. I’ll be back with some highlights of other happenings at E3.
