Quick thoughts on MS's E3 conference... at least the parts I got to see. Thanks for GameSpot crashing AGAIN during E3. You know, there's a pattern forming here...

Fable 2 looks interesting, the new orb feature is neat. But will it be used? I mean, unless the game world is small, how often are you just going to happen to run by someone on your friend list who's also playing at the same time? Either way, I'm still picking it up.

Gears 2 I'm also picking up. Of course, I never really doubted that, so nothing's changed. But still, riding a brumak? Sign me up.

Lots of business stats, lots of patting themselves on the back, lots of TV shows and movies to download that I never will because they're so crazy expensive so it doesn't matter to me... ok, moving on. NetFlix thing is something I didn't expect, but since I don't watch movies at a high rate it's not for me, so meh.

The Avatars? Ugh. They're ripping off the Mii, they're ripping off the XMB, and they're doing a Home-lite... and they're making it REQUIRED for everything, totally designing the dashboard around it. What the hell? I don't use my Mii whenever I have the opportunity not to. I like how Home is a separate program that I'll only have to boot up when I want to use it, but I can stick with the XMB the majority of the time. Now I'll have a silly avatar that not only will dominate my dashboard, but be featured prominently in some games. No thanks! Can I cancel that update please? Oh, and that billion dollars of sales on XBLA for a half a billion pieces of content? I hope you didn't buy any gamerpics or themes, because MS just gave you a big ol' middle finger, and a "thanks for your money, we appreciate it, now will you buy new hip clothes for your avatar?"

There's a rule that every year, at least one company has to have a segment in their E3 presentations that will be mocked for years to come. This year it was, again, Microsoft. I thought that Jeff Bell doing some ebonics trash talking with Reggie Bush, trying to sound hip and cool and just like one of the frat boys, was embarassing. I was literally burying my face in hands I was just that embarrassed to WATCH it. But man, this year took the cake. I hope those execs who did that horrible horrible movie game gets a couple extra million of stock options to make that humiliation worth it. Also, what do you call an advertisement that begs you NOT to get a game? An un-tisement? An anti-tisement?

The Guitar Hero moment was nearly as funny as the Ridge Racer one. Dude yells out Guitar Hero, everyone's favorite game, hoping for a lot of applause... not one single person did. Repeat that later with the Metallica announcement. Ouch.

Lips is... hrm, MS copying yet another staple of their competitors, this time SingStar. GS cuts out from the presentation at this point to show a dancing Master Chief, likely due to licensing reasons for whatever poor singer is singing. Based on what I heard of her, I think a Master Chief dancing to generic music was much better to see and hear.

Portal XBLA is neat, but already announced earlier. The Banjo original coming to XBLA is neat though. Getting both.

Lots of Square-Enix stuff we know about, followed by the megaton of FFXIII coming to the 360 outside of Japan. NeoGAF was down for a few minutes after that. Literally.

In the end, the conference, personally, was a big negative for me. I already knew I was getting Fable, Gears, Banjo, etc., and already knew I wasn't getting RE5, VP2, etc., so nothing changed my opinions there. The new party game copies are stuff I'm staying far far far away from. Especially that movie game. Oh, yes, ESPECIALLY that movie game. There's two new Arcade games I didn't know about yesterday that I'm getting, but that's it. I mean, I already knew about Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean 4 and such. And I knew all along that even if FFXIII was coming to the 360 that would change nothing since I get PS3 multiplats anyway. In the end, the only bad thing that could happen from this is if the game is lessened to make it work with the 360 (the multiple disc things, lower audio quality, whatever), or if the 360 gets some exclusive stuff (which would REALLY piss off the people who got a PS3 for this game). So for the price of two Arcade games, I'll have my dashboard rearranged to Mii Too. Yay?

I also have no idea what MS's direction is now. I think it's... whatever everyone else is doing. They paved the way with an online service with Live, and that was the console's identity, both this one and the last one. Now? Their focus is just copying the features and other gimmicks of their competitors, hoping to gain their audience. The Mii-ripoff avatars, the XMB-like dashboard, the little vitual community-like interface on the dashboard... it seems all their new R&D is to just emulate what their competition is doing. Really, if you like the Wii, is having avatars really going to have you jump over to the 360? And couldn't they have put some effort into making them look a LITTLE different? They're literally HD versions of Miis, right down to the same exact art design. Let's make yet another music game, let's make a game like the EyeToy stuff from last gen, so on and so forth. MS just seems content to ride out this generation as is, to not try to do anything new and exciting. Just going for status quo, to make their console more like everyone else's.

Also, Too Human demo landed today. NeoGAF 1, Dyack 0.