Hippies, Dancers, and laser tag (or, Me too! The Microsoft story) E3 day 1.

Day one of E3 was a little underwhelming.

It started out with Microsoft talking about tons of useless junk for “Kinect”, Microsoft's new motion control add on for the 360. The whole thing reminded me of Nintendo's conference in 2007. Remember that one? The one where the best game announced was ANIMAL CROSSI NG WILD WORLD.

It's not even that I'm a huge fan of gritty Shooters, but the Microsoft show was just weak. Kinect is impressive, don't get me wrong, but they didn't even show anything remotely cool for it until the Ubisoft show. Being able to surf Netflix without the controller is great, but it certainly isn't the big announcement you hope for, nor is the “slim” Version of the 360

The Ubisoft showcase started out pretty great, with Tetsuya Mizuguchi showing off the new Kinect game Child of Eden which looks pretty great. The show then moved on to Assasins Creed: Brotherhood, for which I am crazy stoked, and then showed off Shaun White's new Skateboarding/law of phycics breaking game. But then the show moved on to weird Kinect tiger molesting games, breathing aid games, then something they invented in the 80s called laser-tag.
The new Rayman game that was shown looks great, I'm always ready for more artsy 2D platforming! But it comes with a catch. A big one. It is being made by one Mr. Michel Ancel, the director of not only the Rayman series, but Beyond Good and Evil. So in other words, at least for now, the dream of Beyond Good and Evil 2 lies bleeding at the bottom of a well.
The Conference ended with a Micheal Jackson Dancing game that was shown off by a group of hip young adults dancing to Beat It with the head of Ubi saying that “Anybody could learn to dance like that” A point lessened greatly with the revelation that the dancers on stage were in THIS IS IT.

The Trend this E3 so far seems to be bringing out attractive young models to show off Mom games. Only time will tell what Tomorrow Brings.