By Edge Staff
Microsoft likes to bring a message to its press conferences, and whatever happens over the coming days, few will argue that its strongest was pulled for this year’s E3.
At an event widely expected to resume the pre-2007 razzle dazzle, Xbox didn’t just come to steal the show; it stole the living room as well. Then, just for good measure, it stole Metal Gear Solid, Steven Spielberg, and gestural control along with it. There were so many broadsides that even the most innocuous image – an elephant in Africa, for instance (or should that be Afrika?) – seemed aimed at someone. The message, then: completeness – and then some.
Coming just weeks after his promotion of Wii’s Boom Blox Bash Party, Spielberg’s appearance was actually the most convincing. Indeed, the controller-free motion-capture of Project Natal, presented with customary chutzpah by ex-Fight Night producer Kudo Tsunoda, was enough to make anyone dance up on stage – even those in bed with the enemy. Tsunoda himself took an obvious shot at the “preset waggle commands” of the competition, but it was unnecessary. Natal, currently boxed in a familiar-looking strip that recognises full body motion, proximity and voice, has been on the cards since a Nunchuck was first thrown. But few could have predicted the extent or precision of its technology, or the parting promise of imminent hands-on time.
Next to this, the early appearance of two of the greatest living musicians – well, one and his drummer – of all time seemed a bit insignificant. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr couldn’t have looked more bedazzled in an alien spacecraft, and much like the Close Encounters director to follow, they really just turned up to anoint rather than inform. But while it’s hard to get excited about a plastic guitar after seeing a family of four perform a complete pitstop, driver and all, with just their hands and feet, The Beatles: Rock Band was a charmer. So too the rest of the games, even if Epic’s demo of Contra/Metroid throwback Shadow Complex evoked an old response to technical hitches: “this is about showing, not telling.”
Many of the trailers and demos came with caveats. The seismic announcement of Crackdown 2 was weakened somewhat by an apparent zombie/mutant theme, while the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer was short but sweet. Does Forza 3 really offer much that’s meaningfully new? To some raceheads, maybe, but not to all. Typically meagre offerings from the visiting Japanese, namely Square Enix and Hideo Kojima, said little about Final Fantasy XIII and the newly announced, hardly surprising Raiden vehicle Metal Gear Solid Rising. But at least they turned up (take that, swine flu). Splinter Cell Conviction looked rejuvenated – even stunning - but questionably propulsive, while Halo 3 ODST really doesn’t seem the game to boast a “great story”, but boast it did, and the announcement of whole new Bungie space adventure, Halo Reach, did very little to explain exactly what it would consist of. Our cheer was saved for the arrival of Sam Lake, who introduced a technically stupendous, vocally hilarious (intentional, we hope) slab of ‘survival thriller’ Alan Wake. Modern Combat 2 made no excuses for dumping one of the most lucrative brand names in gaming, nor did it have to.
Whether the announced partnerships with Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm will set the world on fire does, of course, depend on the eventual users. Is Facebook really as much of a foreground task that it belongs on the NXE? Shouldn’t the content really be flowing more the other way, on to the net rather than from it? Perhaps. But of all the features crammed on to those sliding panes, the photo sharing seemed the best and most obvious fit. Interface-wise, much the same could be said of the Last.fm service, though its free delivery to Gold account holders was compensation enough. Sky’s contribution of a much-vaunted live TV service, meanwhile, was surprisingly polished, perhaps because it kept its trickier content to a separate, more established TV planner.
Longstanding questions about Xbox’s foray into home entertainment were met with strong words, though admittedly a few of the ‘buzz’ variety. But clunky as it sounds, “instant-on 1080p HD” should at least hush complaints about the subpar quality of previous content from Netflix and others, and we’ll just have to see if the on-demand streaming can keep up. The most important bit, as it has been through much of this hardware lifecycle, was that so much new was arriving on old hardware, fulfilling J. Allard’s vision of a software-driven generation. Natal, it was promised, will work without issue with every Xbox ever sold. That’s if the Xboxes themselves are working, of course – an issue the speakers wisely avoided.
They left out little else. The moment corporate VP John Schappert began throwing his hands about - the very image of Seinfeld’s George Constanza - to proclaim “the transformation of our console into a true entertainment device”, the tone was set for a show that delivered. “We can finally say our platform is complete,” grinned interactive entertainment boss Don Mattrick, who Spielberg blew off the stage in all but body. But while the building of Xbox into a truly formidable device was the best we may have expected, the evaporation of one particular piece of hardware – the controller – took things to another level. As he introduced the world to Milo, a little digital boy who took a giant chunk out of the man-machine divide, Peter Molyneux was in his element. This time, though, he really appeared to have something to talk about.
There’s been a childlike, frisky quality to every Microsoft conference – and we don’t just mean Peter Moore showing off his fake tattoos – which entirely befits the youngest of gaming’s big three. And in what promises to be the longest generation in hardware history, there can be few stronger qualities than youth. Microsoft is showing that Xbox 360, at three years old, still has its whole life ahead of it.
