For the past 24 hours, my inner video game nerd has been all kinds of happy thanks to the E3 streams. Being an incredibly narcissistic being, I’m am thoroughly convinced that everybody in the world wants to read my opinion on the different games and systems which have been shown. So here they are. Today: Microsoft and Sony.
Microsoft: Too much kinect. That’s pretty much it. Don’t take me wrong: the kinect is an incredibly piece of hardware I would love to work with *hint hint*. The object recognition tech they showed was amazing. The finger tracking demo is cool and has serious potential (virtual murals, anyone? or maybe finger painting without the mess). The sesame street game looked very cool and, let’s face it, cute. But then they brought out the shooters controlled with kinect. I have, for a very long time, believed that FPSs belong on the PC. A controller just feels weird to me. The lack of precision is annoying. But with that said, I don’t think the kinect is the solution. The PS move (and even the wii) control schemes are perhaps better suited to a shooter because there’s an actual physical object to hold on to but on the kinect it just looks really weird.
Am I forgetting something? I feel like I am. Oh right: Microsoft also announced Halo 4. Wasn’t halo supposed to end at reach? Oh well…
Sony: Sony opened with, pretty much, an apology for what happened with the PSN. They didn’t go into a whole lot of detail about what happened and a positive tone was kept at all times which is definitely what I think they needed. As a PS3 user, I would have been a bit ticked off if they hadn’t at least mentioned the “incident”. Despite that, and exactly because I am a PS3 (and PSN) user, I don’t think my trust in Sony will ever be completely restored. It’s outrageous for a company to suffer such a large attack.
After dealing with the elephant in the room, they moved on to a quite large list of exclusives. The overall message is: we have a lot of games on PS3 which you will not be able to get anywhere else. Things that stood for me were Uncharted, the EVE related game and inFamous2. Medieval move also looked pretty cool.
And then, there’s the new devices that were presented. I’ll get to the NGP (looks like it’s called vita now) in a minute but first let me mention what truly amazed me: the 3D monitor they presented. It’s a 24” 3D monitor which looked absolutely bland until they revealed that 2 players can use the same monitor for co-operative play but, instead of doing it in split-screen, each player sees a different 2D image. That is an awesome idea and although I will probably not get the new monitor, I can see why a lot of people would.
And then, there’s the vita: a psp with a new processor, fancy graphics, 2 analog stick and a touch screen. No really, that’s it.
More profound and incredibly important insight on E3 tomorrow.