With horrifically cringeworthy on-screen child actors, new Disney and Sesame Street announcements – Microsoft’s new Kinect vision continued apace at this year’s E3.
With the expected unveiling of Sony’s new handheld (Playstation Vita) and Nintendo’s Wii successor (Wii U), online commentators weren’t expecting too much from Microsoft’s press conference, unless the corporation had a surprise under their likely flourescent green hats.
They did – Halo 4 – yet the surprise of that announcement was temepered by the knowledge that the entire bullet points of the conference were posted and quickly removed on Xbox.com two hours earlier. We would hate to be the intern that was responsible for that faux pas right now – he’s probably being whipped in a dingy basement by Bill Gates as we write this.
Quick Recap
Microsoft’s show started with a bang, or at least it was meant to. Before Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling got to grips with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a ‘reconnect controller’ message flashed up on the giant screen, amusing audience members and online posters alike. The game itself was a stront start – sure, it looks nearly identical to every Call of Duty game of the last four years, yet the scale of carnage was appropriately amped up.
Crystal Dynamic’s Tomb Raider demo blew that game out of the water, however, with a stunning re-imagining of Lara Croft’s early years. Other announcements such as a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved and a Gears of War 3 co-op demo went down well online and on-stage.
Our excitement then reached fever pitch as Mass Effect 3 was the next game to be revealed, although only in terms of its Kinect features – speaking as your character for dialogue options or issuing commands. Not quite what we were hoping for from our first look at BioWare’s latest…
Cliffy B and Ice-T, together at last
The Kinect love-in then dominated the entire rest of the show and dragged our excitement down with it. Minutes seemed like hours as a swath of gimmicky features passed by, punctuated by on-stage child actors whose enthusiasm for Kinect Disneyland or Sesame Street Kinect could not have been more contrived. An unwelcome trend also emerged for the ‘mature’ Kinect titles Ryse and Fable: The Journey – on-rails Kinect shooters.
Microsoft had one last surprise, however, a ‘new trilogy’ of Halo games, beginning with a trailer for the imaginatively-titled ‘Halo 4′. Somehow, that debut wasn’t enough to rescue a disastrous outing for gamers, and we’re not blaming the poor sod that leaked the game’s existence beforehand for that one.
Highlights
Tomb Raider
Not a Microsoft exclusive by any means, Crystal Dynamics gritty reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise caught many by surprise and with good reason. With visuals that invited comparisons with survival horror film The Descent, the on-stage demonstrate of a cavern escape was admittedly heavily-scripted but was gripping and captivating throughout.
Unlike previous Tomb Raider installments, the Lara Croft on display was not the pneumatic, invincible bad-ass that we’ve all grown up with, but a petrified, heavily-groaning young adult that would do anything to escape the hell that she had found herself in. The worst part of this stunning gameplay reveal? The knowledge that the finished product is over a whopping 12 months away.
Gears of War 3
When Epic Game’s Cliffy B walked on-stage we were expecting perhaps a trailer for a few snippets on info on September’s Gears of War 3; what we got was an extremely welcome co-op showing with the Gears creator and Ice-T.
That’s right, Ice-T and his large-bottomed wife Coco are actually huge fans of the series and regularly tweet about their co-op sessions on the gruesome shooter. Though the gameplay section show was a little too brief and nothing particularly new (a giant tentacled boss), the latest Gears boasts the polish and sheen that we’ve come to expect from a series that first convinced many to purchase an Xbox 360.
Lowlights
Too much Kinect
The first half-hour of Microsoft’s press conference was pretty impressive but we could begin to feel ourselves grow a little more worried as the term ‘Kinect’ began to be used more and more.
Little did we know that the entire final 60 minutes would be Kinect-only – Kinect Star Wars (you can say “Lightsaber On”, just like in the mov… actually, like nothing at all), people shouting at their TV, an on-rails Fable shooter, the aforementioned child actors, unsurprising sequels to the only Kinect games that have captured the public’s imagination (Dance Central, Kinect Sports).
While there were a few neat features, and we enjoyed seeing the scanned objects making a re-appearence after the initial ‘Project Natal’ promise two years ago, Microsoft overplayed their hand in our opinion with Kinect overload. Granted, Kinect is selling like motion-control hot cakes, yet plenty of the features displayed (talking as Commander Sheperd for Mass Effect 3, holding an invisible gun in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier) looked gimmicky and embarrassing in a public setting.
A disappointing Halo 4 reveal
We accept that the Halo 4 trailer would have been a lot more exciting had a probably-fired Microsoft lackey not leaked the corporation’s entire E3 output two hours before the conference but still, Halo 4 appears to be the only meaningful core gamer exclusive for the Xbox 360 for 2012.
While we’re intriuged about the possibilities of 343 Industries efforts after taking over the franchise from its creators Bungie, the fact that the developers haven’t sought to create their own mark and instead went down the lazy route of bringing back Master Chief and naming their game ‘Halo 4‘, effectively piggybacking on Bungie’s goodwill, is disappointing to see.
That the game is part of a new trilogy only causes us to roll our eyes even more. In our opinion, a new canon Halo entry should’ve been kept as a system seller for the next Xbox console, or at least should’ve attempted to delve a little further into the series’ now gargantuan lore.
The WTF Moment:
Just skip ahead to 3.00 on the below clip and see if you can watch more than ten seconds of the ridiculously embarrassing American Football demonstration for Kinect Sports: Season 2. As one YouTube poster put it, ‘this is stuff that internet memes are made of’. Absolutely unforgettable ‘banter’ between the two guys – and not for the reasons you might imagine.
A quick word to Microsoft – people are not going to act like this in their front room. “Pass me the rock…”, “Here comes the bazooka!” – these guys would sound like idiots on the green across from your house but onstage, getting this hyped up over a video game? Sadly what has been seen can never be unseen and we apologise if you too were traumatised by the above footage.
Verdict
Hopes were high that the airtight secrecy over Microsoft’s event would lead to a flurry of new announcements, and they did. However, the game reveals were either Kinect sequels or new Kinect titles that will harness the power of admittedly enormous family-friendly franchises (Disney, Star Wars, Sesame Street).
Granted, Microsoft are just following the market but it’s worrying to see a company slide this far into the casual realm so quickly, and without offering actual new gameplay experiences or taking advantage of Kinect’s possibilities in any meaningful way, especially compared to the efforts of the best YouTube hacks we see every day.
Sadly for core Xbox gamers, it sounds as though the only exclusives you can look forward to this year are another Forza game and without doubt the biggest first-party release of the year, Gears of War 3. It’s important to mention, however, that Gears 3 was actually a 2010 title that was deliberately delayed twice by Microsoft – and now we know why.
Apologists will point to the Halo 4 trailer as evidence that Microsoft have still ‘got it’ but if anything, the clip felt as though it was hastily slapped together to appease crowds that might have booed the corporation off the stage had nothing appeared otherwise.
Fresh IP and fresh ideas next year please – we don’t want to be reporting on Forza 5, Dance Central 3 and Kinect Sports 3 in 12 months time, though we fear that our request may fall on deaf ears.
D+
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