DC's Daily Discourse 5: E3 Predictions confirmed!: Microsoft

Alright so Day 1 of E3 is over and Day 2 is starting up now. I'm going to recap the big moments of Microsoft's press conferences and see how close my predictions were. Spoiler: I was right, as always. So lets get to it!

Microsoft:

There was no video package, no elaborate stage act, no introductions. The lights went down and they jumped right into Infinity Ward & Sledgehammer's live gameplay demo for Modern Warfare 3. Over 10 glorious uninterrupted minutes of 20 million customers salivating. To me it looked like what I expected in another military shooter campaign. Sure it was pretty but my history with military shooter campaigns isn't a happy one so I, like most people, am more interested the multiplayer which won't be profiled.

Next was a healthy live demo of the Tomb Raider reboot, ya know the one where she's covered in dirt and blood and her boobs aren't superfluously large. It actually looked pretty good which wasn't what I was expecting. Odd how I want to compare it to a visceral Uncharted when originally Uncharted was touted as 'Dude Raider' before it was released. Food for thought.

Peter Moore comes on stage, which he remarks feels familiar for some reason, and chats up the new EA sports franchises adding Kinect support: FIFA, Madden, Tiger Woods and a 4th unnamed franchise. Also, something called Sims 3: Pets...

Bioware comes up to live demo Mass Effect 3 with Kinect voice support. Now you can control your squad mates through voice commands. Also, you can navigate dialogue trees by saying your options aloud and having Shepard respond accordingly. These features show promise but they look more gimmicky than anything else and certainly aren't any more efficient, if not less efficient, than using the controller.

Tom Clancy Ghost Recon gets a bold teaser trailer and an extended tech demo highlighting impressive new Kinect integration. You can customize your weapons piece by piece via hand gestures and voice commands. Also you can actually play the game using just Kinect. This is the first time I think anyone has seen a working demo of first person shooting without the use of a controller to navigate the game just as you would with a controller. Also announced was Kinect integration with future Tom Clancy games. I couldn't care less about Tom Clancy but the demo was very impressive for future games.

Xbox Live is getting another overhaul this year. A new interface will be introduced which is very similar to Windows Phone 7 and the Windows 8 tech demo. It's tile based, completely Kinect supported and very easy to navigate, a bit improvement for sure. New features coming include YouTube, Bing integration, and partnerships with UFC and live television partners. Bing will make it much easier to find anything and everything on Xbox Live whether it be movies, TV shows, music or games. They're all nice touches and should be a lot of fun to play with. In addition, something they didn't mention on stage, Xbox Live is getting Cloud support for game saves and profiles so your xbox live profile will be easier to migrate. Why they didn't mention this is uncertain.

Cliffy B and Ice-T present a Gears of War 3 live demo which looks just as awesome as it has for the last 2 years. Nothing new here, just acknowledging it's there and still coming out.

Ryse, some medieval Kinect action game from Crytek gets a teaser. No clue what the fuck it's supposed to be however.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is announced for November. It's a completely remastered version of the first Halo with online co-op and 7 remastered multiplayer maps that can be played alone or downloaded for play with Halo: Reach. Halo is still using the original engine with an additional engine handling the new graphics. This means it'll play just like it did in 2001 and even includes an option to revert to the original graphics at any time. It'll be budget priced as well. Sounds like a great value to me and if Sony's going to do it then why not Microsoft too?

Forza 4 gets a teaser and October release date. That's about it.

Peter Molyneaux talks about Fable: The Journey with a live demo and teaser. It's a Kinect action game and I'm not certain but it looked like it was on-rails.

Minecraft gets its console debut exclusively on Xbox this winter as a Kinect game. Meh.

Disney's licensing some games for Kinect. The first shown is a virtual Disney Land with Kinect Adventures style gameplay but with Disney characters and locales. For a kids' game, as evidenced by the children tech demoing it, it looks pretty impressive.

Kinect Star Wars has a showing and demo. It's a lot meatier and much better looking than that piece of crap they showed last year. However, it looks exhausting to play, just watching the guy playing made me winded and a bit sore. Also the presentation looked a bit Teen friendly. Here's the thing, I'm not a Star Wars fan, never have been and probably never will be, but when I see this game I'm a bit disappointed. It looked fully functional, responsive and the lightsabre hits actually looked like right. But, and it's a huge but, this isn't for the true Star Wars fans at all. Hardcore Star Wars fans don't like cutesy graphics, they liked the Empire slaughtering people, Luke getting a limb cut off, a space opera with gritty violence and energy weapons. Also, and lets be fair, they're typically not in the best physical condition to be jumping around and swinging their arms. True Star Wars fans will ultimately be disappointed but hey, it's functional.

Kudo Tsunoda, Microsoft's professional douchebag, (seriously! who wears sunglasses while speaking at a press conference!) talks about various Kinect goodies. Kinect Fun Labs, which to me looks like Kinect meets Google Labs, launched the day of the conference and is a collection of excellent ideas born from the community SDK tinkers out there. Also, Kinect Sports gets a sequel with more...sports, and Harmonix announces Dance Central 2 which has simultaneous multiplayer dancing.

Microsoft ended by introducing the start of a new Xbox trilogy. At thing point I was getting ready to be taken aback. Would this be a great new IP to expand the Xbox brand beyond it's Halo & Gears of War dependency? Nope! It was Halo 4...I facepalmed.

My Predictions:

Everything I said was right, more or less. Don't believe me? Go look it up!

D.C.