TGS went by relatively quietly. Somehow everybody pretty much knew what to expect from it in terms of what Microsoft were gonna show at their conference, and few secrets actually came out of it.

It's a couple of hours now since their X06 conference wrapped, and in the wake of that I find myself much more excited about the future of the 360. Splinter Cell was finally locked down as a proper Xbox game even though technology could have it otherwise this coming generation, and Banjo and Halo Wars are two brand new games that actually induce genuine excitement. Because that's rare, really. Somehow most 360 exclusives so far have been mostly sequels or games that for whatever reason you've sort of nodded and gone "yeah, naturally" about.

The Halo Wars trailer at the end of the conference was perhaps the newest, most surprising thing MS has shown in a conference since the first Halo 2 trailer in fact. It promises something rarely seen on consoles - an RTS - and a completely different chunk of history from the epic Halo universe. If Halo made console gamers play FPS, then this'll get them into realtime strategy.

I haven't had the opportunity to actually check out the Banjo trailer yet, but there's really nothing that needs to be said about this game. It's the sequel to this and this. It's everything the 360 needs to feel like it's covering all bases at this point, with Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey both being confirmed for both US and Europe during this conference.

Bioshock looks absolutely incredible too, though I'm going to need a support person or voice chat with Winnie the Pooh during my sessions with it, or I may come out severely scarred on the other end. Then again, combining Winnie voice chat with underwater nastyness might scar me worse than having those two experiences separately.

Bioshock - Almost certainly too scary!

It remains to be seen how significant the whole exclusive GTA4 episodes thingie will be in the long run. I wager if Sony manage to get some kind of network up and running, then Rockstar will almost certainly slap some *exclusive episodes* on that aswell. Exclusive content has supposedly gotten more important this generation what with the consoles being about equal in power and performance, but to me it's just vagued everything up.

Speaking of vague exclusives; Assassin's Creed was, as I'm sure you all know, demoed live on 360 hardware. It looks utterly fantastic. The notion of being able to climb anywhere is just intoxicating, and the half-confirmed speculation that it has a futuristic/sci fi twist were more or less confirmed proper at X06. It's an exciting prospect to me because it ensures that while the setting is realistic and reasonably normal, there can still be surprises in there. I think after today's conference, people are pretty much forgetting it's for PS3 at all.

Assassin's Creed - Assassinating the notion of being
a PS3 game.

To top it all off, Doom was released on XBLA and tons of news regarding new titles, along with new screenshots were relased. It's proven itself once and again that it's a success of a service, and quite honestly I think it's going to be difficult for the Wii and PS3 to top it. Not only does it have a consistent stream of classics, but also brand new, genuinely interesting stuff. You can sign me up for a Mutant Storm Empires, that's for sure.

So, while I haven't covered everything, those are probably my most thunk thoughts, so to speak. When it's all over I always feel like something was missing from these X shows though, and I always come to the same realisation - Sony and Nintendo stuff. Because ultimately, the only downside to Microsoft's X0 events is that they don't cover everything, and until Nintendo can get a decent annual Spaceworld up and running and Sony can actually say something half worthwhile during their number crunching, X0 is by far the closest thing to gaming christmas.

Apart from actual christmas of course. Man, it's october soon.