This is a post about all three conferences in general, but I went ahead and titled it “Microsoft” because I probably won’t mention them again. They mostly had demos and not much new stuff to announce. (Which is understandable… they’ve already made their console, haha.)

Anyway, I spent most of the day downloading the videos of the pre-E3 conferences from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. First off was Sony, since I was bored and Nintendo’s conference wasn’t put online, yet.

Pretty much everything I wrote about Sony in my last post still stands. They said they weren’t interested in gimmicks, but gimmicks are what they showed… and seeing King Playstation himself unveil the “new, innovative” motion-sensitive controller as if they’d just now come up with the idea made me sick… and when I saw them actually use the thing, I laughed out loud. The player was flinging that thing all over the place. Oh, and it looks exactly like a Playstation Dual-Shock. Only without force-feedback… and cables. Wireless, motion-sensitive controller. Man, oh man… I cannot believe how blatantly they ripped Nintendo.

Then I watched Nintendo’s conference… holy hannah. Everything I hoped for. I’ll write about it tomorrow.

Then the Halo 3 trailer was released… and now I want an Xbox360. More about that later, too.

Then I watched the Microsoft Conference, and while they really didn’t introduce many new things, they left one for last… the fact that Xbox Live will be accessable from Windows, Xbox and cellphones. When Bill Gates started talking about it, I was like “pssh, gimme a break”. But then I saw them actually play with the thing… and it’s really, really neat. They let on that, say… your friend is playing a game on Xbox360 and wants you to play with him! So he pulls up the friends list on his Xbox and sees you’re online using Windows and sends you a game invitation. The invitation appears on your desktop and, if you accept, and the game he wants to play is also released on Windows, you can play with him… on Windows… with him on Xbox. Amazing, really. I was impressed. I didn’t expect that at all.

They also talked about getting “creative content” into Japan. That was funny. Xbox sells horribly in Japan. They also have Nintendo ruling their gaming industry. There’s no room for Xbox over there. Sorry, Microsoft.

That’s about it for the new, cool stuff with the Xbox. The rest was game demos and such… pretty much what current games for the 360 look like. I still don’t see where they’re getting “next-gen” from. But I notice, while watching the conferences, that both Sony and Microsoft were constantly pushing “power and graphics”… and Nintendo was pushing “intuitive innovation and change”. Such an incredibly different mindset.

Nintendo knows exactly how it works.