Xbox 360 E3 Media Briefing (Lots about Project N... Kinect!)
Posted: 2010-06-14 03:54pm
Xbox 360 E3 Media Briefing Feed (aprox. 2hrs, the briefing starts at around 30 minutes in)
W...O...W. Does it say something when the most exciting game to me is the exercise simulator? The skeletal mapping was quite good, and it tracked her sweater! My Xbox will now be HAL apparently.
W...O...W. Does it say something when the most exciting game to me is the exercise simulator? The skeletal mapping was quite good, and it tracked her sweater! My Xbox will now be HAL apparently.
Wired.com (Click for pictures) wrote:
Live Blog: Microsoft’s E3 2010 Press Conference
By Chris Kohler June 14, 2010 | 1:09 pm | Categories: Console Games
LOS ANGELES — We’re about to see what the future holds for Xbox 360.
Following a glitzy, over-the-top performance from Cirque du Soleil on Sunday evening, bleary-eyed journalists are currently sitting in Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theater awaiting the Xbox 360 press conference.
Microsoft is expected to concentrate on Kinect, its camera-based motion controller formerly named “Project Natal.” But it will also show games aimed at traditional players, like Gears of War 3, Crackdown 2… and surely some top-secret game premieres.
Live blog coverage with photos by James Merithew begins below.
10:06 AM — We’re in. Gus Mastrapa, Chris Baker and I are in the second row, ready to receive Microsoft’s message, bathed in soothing green light. Could the future of humanity be this event?
<snip>
10:30 AM — Music pumping from the PA! Lights blaring! This is like riding Space Mountain! I’m pumped up! For marketing!
10:31 AM — Lights go down. Sizzle reel begins. It’s a trailer for a military videogame. What is it? Men jump out of helicopters! They shoot things! I have never played a videogame like this ever! Is this the future of humanity?
10:32 AM — No, it’s Call of Duty: Black Ops.
10:33 — Mark Lamia, head of Treyarch, begins the show with a demo of Black Ops. As the new de facto leader in Call of Duty game creation, Treyarch has a lot to live up to. The demo shows our heroes digging their way through a trench. This is not “Modern Warfare!” This is serious. An enemy soldier knifes our friend in the throat! Bad times. Rats in the tunnels. Oh, the stench of death is all round. It is 1968 again. Laos is a hellish place but super fun looking if you have guns, which we do.
10:36 — Killing! So much blood. So many dead soldiers. Our merry band of rogues gets to the choppa in time. We fly into the beautiful blue sky, holding hands, waving at our friends, like at the end of Grease.
10:38 — All of this killing is probably supposed to set our minds at ease after the trauma of Kinectimals last night. I know I feel better.
10:39 — A bridge is destroyed. America wins! Demo over. Don Mattrick takes the stage.
10:40 — Mattrick announces an exclusive multi-year deal with Activision: In 2010, 2011 and 2012, all game download add-ons and map packs for all Call of Duty games will launch exclusively on Xbox 360. That’s a pretty big deal.
10:41 — Mattrick introduces Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima to talk about MGS Rising.
10:42 — Kojima is premiering the first footage of the team’s first Xbox 360 games. Kojima says he’s going to “pass the torch” to Shigenobu Matsuyama, the producer of the game. Matsuyama is the one who’ll be showing off the game.
10:44 — He says the game is themed around the Japanese phrase “zan-datsu,” which means “cut and take.” The trailer begins. A giant crazy suited monster that looks like a rounded Cylon is stalking through a building. Suddenly, Raiden appears! He cuts him! He cuts him up good! Big explosion of white gross stuff. Raiden takes his… his spine? He takes something from him. The game features desctructible objects — you can cut cars, buildings, people with your sword. You can aim the sword and cut things up, Raiden slices a watermelon into perfect little wedges. Looks pretty cool.
10:45 — Microsoft exec Phil Spencer introduces Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games for a Gears of War demo. Spencer says that everything we’re going to see for the rest of the conference is exclusive to Xbox 360. That means no Final Fantasy Versus XIII announcement, I guess.
10:50 — Whoo! Killing locusts! Skewering them with bayonets! Blasting them into tiny giblets! Four people are playing at once. They look like they are enjoying themselves, I guess. Giant tentacle monsters pop up from the gorund! The characters calmly talk to the tentacle monsters, explaining their point of view, and everyone goes away and lays down their weapons and has tea together. Just kidding! Blood everywhere.
10:53 — “Did we fry that bitch?” asks one of the game’s characters. Yes you did. Peter Molyneux takes the stage to show off Fable III. Promises “great British humor, and we know what that means.” Fart jokes? The game ships October 26.
10:55 — Fable III trailer concludes, Phil Spencer back on stage. “We are constantly looking to partner with talented independent developers.” Who shall this be? Microsoft Game Studios is partnering with…
10:57 — Crytek! Crytek is making a game codenamed Kingdoms. It, uh, looks like a God of War clone. There’s a main character who looks like Kratos or the guy from Gladiator or the guy from 300, right down to the chains on his wrists.
10:58 — Bungie is on stage to show us the campaign mode from Halo Reach, which will ship in September.
11:00 — I don’t want you to be shocked or anything but in Halo Reach you run around on a mountain and shoot aliens. This is not a live demo, it’s taped. Chaos ensues, as you’d expect with four player characters and a boatload of enemies.
11:04 — Demo ends with footage of the player flying a spaceship! In space! In a dogfight over the planet. I wonder if that’s actually a major part of the game. Mark Whitten takes the stage to talk about Xbox Live.
11:05 — He talks briefly about, and shows a slide of, the technology of Kinect. It has two depth sensors and an RGB camera, and the base has a motorized tilt feature. A Microsoft engineer is here to demonstrate how it works. He waves at the screen and it signs him in, because Kinect’s facial recognition knows who he is. There’s a special Kinect menu screen that he can navigate just by waving his hands around. He can also use his voice. “Zune,” he says, and it opens up the Zune movie store.
11:08 — Watching Alice in Wonderland, he can use his hands to scrub forwards and backwards in the movie. Same thing with the voice controls. “Xbox, pause!” he says, as if he were training a dog named Xbox. “Xbox, stop! Xbox, play music! Xbox, roll over!”
11:09 — This year, Microsoft is bringing Xbox Live, with friends, avatars, achievements and all, to Windows Phone 7.
11:11 — A Microsoft person named Laura is here to show us Video Kinect. You can talk to your friends via video chat, whether they’re on Xbox Live or MSN. You can watch videos together. “Hey, that’s the Last Airbender!” says Laura’s sister, who she’s chatting with. “Wasn’t there a videogame about that?”
“Yeah, my coworkers played it just to boost their Gamerscore,” says Laura. Ha ha.
11:14 — Video Kinect will also be made available to Microsoft’s Live Messenger Network.
11:15 — ESPN is coming to Xbox 360, bringing college football and basketball, NBA, MLB, soccer and all that sort of sports thing. The hosts of ESPN Sports Center are on the video screen telling us that we will have access to 3500 live events. The hosts appear live on stage to demo the ESPN feature.
11:18 — That 3500 number is the number of live events that will be aired on the service in the first year of its operation. “Xbox, replay!” he says to the robot dog camera. It jumps back to the beginning of the touchdown play in the football game that’s currently playing.
11:20 — You can play trivia games while you’re watching the game, telling the Xbox the answer using the magic of your voice.
11:21 — All this craziness will be available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers at no additional cost.
1124 — A tiny girl takes the stage to demonstrate Kinectimals, aka Nintentiger aka this girl has more stage presence than every Microsoft executive that’s ever been on stage before. She plays with the tiger in what is surely a completely faked demo.
11:26 — Rare comes on stage to demo WIi Sports. I mean, Kinect Sports!
11:28 — The first event is the hurdles, in which you actually have to run and jump. “Chariots of Fire” plays. Did they really license Chariots of Fire? That would be awesome. Here’s a video showing all the rest of Kinect Sports.
11:30 — Boxing! Soccer! Volleyball! Now, Kudo is going to show us all Mario Kart, I mean Kinect Joy Ride. Steer just by pretending to steer with your hands. Boost by punching! I don’t think she’s actually playing, either.
11:34 — Some other guys pretend to play Kinect Adventures. They ride carts, white water rafting, etc, moving their bodies to collect points.
11:36 — Ubisoft’s exercise game, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. Exclusively for Xbox 360! Because, you know, nothing else would actually be able to run a Kinect game.
11:39 — Okay, looks like this person actually is playing — the body on screen is reacting perfectly with her movements in front of the camera. We’re going through a demo of the features of the exercise game. You are represented on the screen next to a virtual coach, and it can tell where every part of your body is. The game has low-impact workouts and high intensity ones as well. Looks a whole lot less aggravating than Wii Fit and the like, since you don’t need to stand on a board or strap a controller to your inner thigh first.
11:43 — Time for Harmonix to get up on stage and show off Dance Central. The game’s producer Naoko Takamoto is very good at dancing. She is really getting into it. The game challenges you to dance to hip-hop music like “That Girl Is Poison” while you do all sorts of the hot new dance moves that the kids do today at the discotheques. CEO Alex Rigopulos takes the stage.
11:47 — Music includes Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface.” 600 different moves, 90 different routines — some taken from the original music videos. A training mode lets you use beginner moves and work your way up to more complex routines, says a game producer on stage. Icons on the screen show you how to move. Michael Pachter’s prediction of geeky white guys learning to dance is coming true on stage in front of us.
11:49 — Phil Spencer comes back on stage to announce launch date. Launching “this holiday” starting in North American on November 4. 15 launch titles. Including Midway’s Game Party. Now showing LucasArts’ exclusive Star Wars lightsaber game, the same video we saw at the Cirque party last night. It won’t be out until 2011. And doesn’t have a title yet.
11:50 — Turn 10 Studios on stage showing a version of Forza Motorsport that runs with Kinect, letting you steer with your hands. There’s a mode where you can check out your car by walking around it and looking at it, the camera tracking your movements.
11:56 — This, too, will be available in 2011.
Don Mattrick comes back out on stage. Is it time for some announcements we haven’t already heard about? That would be cool.
11:57 — It’s the new Xbox 360. Brand new slimmer, smaller casing. “Whisper quiet,” says Mattrick. Same price as the last one: $299. Hmm, it doesn’t really look like it has a removable hard drive. Shipping to retailers TODAY, says Mattrick. Available in stores later this week.
11:59 — And apparently everybody in the audience gets a free one. Today. As we leave the event. Standing ovation from the guy behind me. And that’s the end of the show.
