E3: The Big Three Wrap Up

Now that Nintendo and Sony have their E3 press conferences over and done with, I'd like to take a stab at evaluating the whole deal.

In short: Microsoft has a nice handful big hits returning, Nintendo plays it safe and fixes their WiiMote and Sony floods the shelves with titles. Microsoft and Sony pull up chairs to Nintendo's motion control table. Nintendo focuses on WiiMotion plus. Microsoft gets more social with Facebook/Twitter support. Sony grossly overcharges for the PSP Go.

Microsoft is coming back this year with sequels their biggest titles. Halo: ODST, Left 4 Dead 2, Dirt 2 and Forza 3 are all on my to-do list. I wasn't excited about them going into the motion capturing camera to control games. When it's your main control scheme, like Nintendo, developers have to make it work to sell games, but when it's an add-on, your developers are going to phone in the coding and muck it up. Microsoft might get one or two wide-audience titles in that hard-core gamers pick up for fun, but I don't see it getting much more play than that. And I could care less about Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM support. I'm actually going to tell myself not to use them because of how ridiculous it is to use a home entertainment center for those. It's exactly why I never use the Opera browser on my Wii.

Nintendo is fixing their Wiimote controller with the clip on WiiMotion Plus, finally bringing one-to-one movement to their controller instead of counting on gestures to control games. Tennis and golfing games are going to get a great benefit from this new tech, as well as all the swashbuckling sword lovers out there. I do plan on getting Wii Sports Resort and possibly Red Steel 2. Also, the four player New Super Mario Brothers Wii and Metroid: Other M have peaked my Nintendoing interests as well. Personally, the WiiMotion Plus should be a free upgrade or only add $10 to the price of the games it's bundled with. We'll see how that goes when the games come out.

Sony I'm a little rough on. I don't own a PS3 or a PSP, so I have to approach all their products as if I'm looking to buy a game + a $300 system. That's really hard to do when you have a library of unfinished 360 and Wii and DS games at your disposal. The franchises that I used to love from Sony are replaced from equally good 360 games, and if they aren't exclusive titles, then I REALLY don't care about Sony. I do, however, like to read about the new Gran Turismo and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus follow-up, The Last Guardian. I'm sorry Sony, your just not in the cards for me this generation. Neither is your $250 PSP Go. I'd rather have a 16GB iPod Touch. But you slap in some decent support for media (without requiring Windows!) and a nice app store and I might have to get my people to call your people (read: My wife and my bank account).