After the rough outings they’ve had in years past, Nintendo took their place as the group that doesn’t know how to make a splash at a game expo. Much like Sony, Microsoft had a nice split between discussing improvements to their hardware, and upcoming software.
– The first game shown off, which had quite the detailed first look, was Fallout 3. The game takes place in your standard post-apocalyptic America, which looks great (graphically, not in America getting destroyed).
– Next shown was Resident Evil 5. The game looks and seems to handle…well…exactly like RE4, including the same dying animations. They detailed the plot a bit, which still involves Chris, a member of a new organization called the B.S.A.A. and they went on to show his partner for the online co-op mode, Sheva Alomar, another B.S.A.A. member. The two of them team up for little animations for their teamwork to access new areas, a la Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and then showed a sequence with Sheva fighting off an onslaught of zombies, with Chris providing support with a sniper rifle, all of which looked great.
– Gears 2 and Fable 2 were also detailed, but just kind of showed off what was already known (except Gears 2 now has Halo 3 weapons).
– The biggest revelation was the new Xbox 360 dashboard, which detailed the new Avatar system, which can be read about here, and the new Xbox Live Arcade titles were also announced, which can be read about here.
– Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts and Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise were shown, and a port of the N64 Banjo-Kazooie game is coming to the Live Arcade later this year.
– Box Office Smash: Scene It? , a trivia game was shown, as well as a Vision Cam-centric title entitled You’re in the Movies, a game where you…make movies (which just isn’t as cool as the ol’ PC movie making program).
– Lips, a new karaoke game was announced, which plays music videos behind lyrics, and allows for multiple players to sing and looks to offer very little that isn’t in Karaoke Revolution or any other vocal-centered music game. It’s too early to brush it off as a clone of such titles, though.
– Rock Band 2’s song list was shown off. It’s big.
– Square-Enix loves the 360, and has three games coming out, including Final Fantasy XIII. You can read more about it here.
While the 360 had a couple big announcements during their conference, a whole lot of news came afterwards.
– A new Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was announced.
– Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is nice-looking.
– There’s a new Prince of Persia title, which will have a non-linear story and some slick graphics.
– 2k Sports’ games are going to be much better, they say (how true is this? Who knows?).
– Bungie didn’t announce anything. Many cried, some committed suicide. It’s on your heads, guys.
– Lots of demos were shown off for games coming out on the 360 (the demos weren’t always on the 360, obviously), including Ghostbusters, Resident Evil 5, Saints Row 2, Mercenaries 2 and Dead Space.
– Not really E3-related, but you should not bother checking out the demo for Too Human on the 360.
– Afro Samurai made an appearance as a game, made by Namco-Bandai. It uses a slick cell-shaded style and will offer lots of badass combat features.
– Mirror’s Edge looks really cool. It’s almost seeming like it’s time for EA haters to stop. They won’t, though.
And that’s about it. I’ve got to say that Microsoft had a strong showing for a mid-generation year in terms of games announced. While it wasn’t as powerful as 2005-2007 Nintendo Expo showings, it was still some good stuff.