The Xbox 360 E3 press conference fails to impress

The lights just went out on the Xbox 360 E3 presser, and the worries sparked by the showy but thin on content Kinect presentation seem to have been confirmed. Actually even beyond what I expected.

I did indeed anticipate a quite sizable spotlight on Kinect, I didn't predict that actual core games would have received that little stage time.

The presser started slow with the announcement of a timed exclusive on the DLC contents for the Call of Duty franchise for the next three years. Nice for some I guess, but I doubt anyone was really there to see a Microsoft executive gloating about how they managed just another time to screw over everyone playing games on competing consoles.

Then Hideo Kojima appeared on stage. Everyone was bracing for a big announcement, an exclusive Metal Gear Solid game for xbox 360? A brand new game we never saw?
Kojima started speaking and basically went like this: "Hello everyone, I'm very happy to be here, let me introduce my underling. Bye!" And he disappeared, leaving me with my jaw dropping out of surprise as another Konami dude got on stage and started showing Metal Gear Raising.

The game looked pretty decent, but nothing groundbreaking was shown. There are a couple good news, though.
The first one is that it doesn't seem to be a Kinect title, like many feared, meaning that we will probably be able to play it with a normal controller, without waving our hands in the air like idiots. Kinect wasn't mentioned at all, and no Kinect logo appeared with the trailer.
The second good news is that there seem to be no timed Xbox 360 exclusive on the game, debunking a theory that seemed to be quite popular lately.
Hopefully everyone will be able to play the game at the same time, whatever their console of choice.

Finally they moved on to the exclusives: in rapid succession we saw Gears of War 3, Fable 3, Halo Reach and a new game from Crytek codenamed "Kingdoms".
"Kingdoms" was really the only new core-oriented exclusive announced by Microsoft at this E3 presser. There was absolutely nothing else, and what's worse, the short trailer presented actually shown nothing of the game.

Then they moved on to Kinect, showing how it'll let you speak and wave your hands around to control your xbox 360 (quite often to perform operations that are much more confortable and quick to be done with a single keypress), a Kinect-related deal to show sports on xbox live, and how Microsoft seems to think that they invented the webcam. "Look! It's following you around as you move!". My three-years old logitech webcam does that as well.

Finally they shown the Kinect-specific games line-up. And that's when things went totally as predicted. ALL of them are wii-like family/casual oriented showelware that has absolutely nothing to offer to core gamers.
The presentation was horribly cheesy and obviously staged (the little kid showing the Eyepet clone was really a sad show), and overally they failed to attract much else than big, gaping yawns.
The only one that seems to have some decent potential is the Star Wars games we already saw yesterday, but it won't be a launch title (it will be released in 2011) and it really doesn't seem much more than an on-rails third person shooter/brawler. Playing with swords with any kind of immersion really requires something in your hand, and Kinect lacks exactly that, between all things.

Following that Dan Greenwalt came on stage to drop the usual dribble about how his game is the best of the world, and to introduce what seems to be an expansion for Forza Motorsport 3 coming 2011 (it still had the Forza 3 logo, so I doubt it's a new game, also the visuals were the same as Forza 3). It featured a nifty mode in which you could walk around and inside a static Ferrari, which is nice car porn, but has really little to do with gaming. Then proceeded to show-off the game played with motion controls in what could be defined as nothing else than a pathetic slideshow with no real racing, as the demonstrator passed a long line of almost static cars on a road.

As a fan of racing games, I found it extremely underwhelming. First of all, no self respecting gamer will ever chose to control something requiring as much precision as a "simulative" racing game with just his hands held in front of himself.
It's obviously less precise than a controller or an actual wheel, having nothing in your hands when driving is anti-immersive, and holding your arms in front of you like that for long periods of time is going to cause plenty muscular fatigue.
There's nothing you need less, while doing something challenging, then your muscles starting to hurt and lose precision and quickness of motion.

Finally, the game shown absolutely no head tracking capabilities while driving, thing that, given that it's one of the features that will be included in Gran Turismo 5 and that it's the only actually useful application of motion control to racing games, proved to be really disappointing.

Finally, what's obviously Microsoft's idea for a big surprise was dropped. The fabled Xbox 360 slim really exists, in a nice imitation of Sony's announcement of the PS3 Slim. The problem is that the announcement didn't really come with what actually made the PS3 slim into a big success. The price drop.
The only thing similar to that is a discounted pricetag that will be applied to older xbox models that will be phased out, until they're gone.
If you are one of the few that uses a wireless network to play online (bad and laggy idea, but some can't draw a cable from their router to the console), then the built-in wireless will be a nice addition, and the removal of one of the worst xbox 360 hidden costs.
Otherwise, the new slimmed-down console offers really nothing interesting, besides a slightly weirder design that kind of reminds the Alienware style.

The whole show proved to be so underwhelming that Don Mattrick had to actually encourage the audience to applaud at the end, while announcing that every single one of them would be gifted a free Xbox 360 slim. Such an open act of press bribery is already quite frown-worthy, but seeing it fail was actually even more sad.

In the end the whole press conference left me really unimpressed and actually worried about the future of gaming. Microsoft has grown to be one of the biggest "powers" in the gaming market, but their idea of the "Biggest gaming conference in the world" (as proudly announced on the Xbox.com website) seems to be only one new exclusive game dedicated to core gamers and a whole bunch of yawn-inducing shovelware that would be better placed on the shelves dedicated to the Wii.

I somehow expected it to be bad, but this bad? Not really. Maybe if you love (watching) sports you'll be more excited than me, but in the end Kojima's appearence seemed to me to be the very symbol of this E3's Xbox 360 presser: "Nothing to see here, bye bye".