The wait is finally over and Microsoft has shown their hand at E3. In '08 they shocked us with a 360 trailer for FFXIII and in the following year they unveiled Natal (which is now known as Kinect), so what surprises did they have in store for us this year? Nothing. It was actually quite disappointing.

In all fairness, I missed most of the multiplat segment on account of Glitchspot's stream f***ing up. The only part I caught was Metal Gear Solid: Rising's "cutting" demo. I understand Call of Duty: Black Ops made a showing as well, but I haven't given a crap about this franchise since CoD4 and even then it wasn't that good. Multiplat games just don't seem to "wow" me as much as the exclusives do.

Regarding MGS:R, cutting down and collapsing structures on top of enemies is cool and all, but this mechanic as it pertains to normal combat seems rather gimmicky. The bit with the watermelon at the end didn't do much to dispel this impression, either. Furthermore, this game is starting to look more and more like a straight forward action game rather than a stealth game. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but if they're going to call it Metal Gear, it should play like Metal Gear.

From there, they showed us their exclusive line-up. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything unexpected with the exception of a new IP by Crytek named Codename: Kingdoms. Admittedly, they made headlines with Crysis as far as graphics were concerned, but that was with high end video cards. I highly doubt they can pull off the same feats on MS's console or for that matter, any other console.

The rest of their line-up consisted of new installments of their long-running 360 exclusive heavyweights. I'm sure anyone that's familiar with these franchises would find them interesting, but I never really got into them. As such, this was my reaction to this segment:

Gears of War 3 - Four player co-op, yeah, yeah...

Fable 3 - ... yeah, yeah...

Halo Reach - Whoa, space combat!!!:shock: I mean, yeah, yeah...

It pretty much went downhill once Natal or Kinect or whatever the hell MS is calling it rolled out. I'll try and give a quick run down of what was shown, though forgive me if I can't be bothered to remember their names. The first was a collection of minigames which you'll get bored of in five minutes. Afterwards they showed an Eye-Pet clone. Like Eye-Pet, it's serves as an alternative to tying a steak around your child's neck so the dog will play with them. They also showed a blantant Wii-Fit ripoff courtesy of Ubisuck. It wasn't all bad since I got a good laugh out of the shoddy hit detection (I swear that last kick was dead on, but it didn't register).

*enter rage mode* :evil:Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I don't see how tripe like this even qualifies as entertainment, let alone games. Wake up, MS! If anyone wanted to play this crap, they would've bought a goddamn Wii. Same goes for you, Sony! Eye-Pet's a piece of crap! Dropping Eight Days and Getaway 3 in favor of that was a crime against humanity.:evil: *exit rage mode*

Now that that's out of my system, let's move on to something that didn't suck. By "didn't suck", I mean it at least qualifies as a game. The demo they showed for Dance Central was probably the best Kinect stage demo present. That's probably not saying much, but it does seem like a pretty decent game. If DDR's your thing, this is probably right up your alley, although given what kids listen to nowadays, I doubt I'd want to dance to any of it.

From there, they droned on about all of Kinect's features. Maybe I'm being a little oversensative, but that bit where one of them said "no controller to learn" was downright insulting. Do people really find a controller with only ten buttons that intimidating? I'm typing on a keyboard right now. How many buttons is that? For that matter, how is figuring out a controller's button layout any harder than figuring out what movements register and what they do?

So, this year's E3 MS conference was disappointing. I was at the point of praying they would make some surprise announcement at the end. Even just announcing that they would help Square-Enix ruin the Final Fantasy series a little further by paying them to port Versus XIII over would at least have made this somewhat entertaining, but I guess that's asking too much.

In closing, I'd like to say one last thing concerning Kinect's voice recognition technology. In fact, I've been wanting to say it ever since they demonstrated it -

Shout at your 360 all you want. Those three red lights aren't going anywhere. :D j/k

And now I bid you adieu. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.