So I figured I’d start my blogging adventures with a summary of the biggest week in gaming: E3.   I’ll be going over each press conference, and then maybe writing a final entry with all the stuff that wasn’t covered during the presentations.

Most of the conference was spent pitching new Kinect titles and Xbox Live features, both of which I have mixed feelings about.   Some of the Kinect stuff looked promising, like the Ghost Recon weapon customization, the Forza 4 integration, and the Kinect Fun Labs, but most of the other stuff looked incomplete or just plain odd.   I had no interest in Star Wars Kinect or Fable: The Journey, the actual Kinect gameplay in Ghost Recon just looked weird (moving your forearm up and down to fire weapons), and the Mass Effect 3 voice commands would just make me feel like a crazy person yelling at my TV.   As for the features, I’m pretty excited for live TV, YouTube, Bing, and cloud storage, especially the latter, which hasn’t gotten the buzz it really deserves.   The only feature that didn’t really interest me was the UFC partnership, a sport I’ve never really followed too closely.

As for the games shown, Modern Warfare 3 looks about the same as you’d expect; lots of bad guys and explosions.   In fact, despite a new engine, and a (mostly) new development team, it looks exactly the same as its predecessor from two years ago.   The Tomb Raider demo looked pretty sweet, especially the “don’t get raped” quick time events.   I want to call it Uncharted with a girl, but the first Uncharted was basically Tomb Raider with a guy, so I’ll avoid that comparison.   Gears 3 looks pretty solid, although it damn well should, considering the game was supposed to be released two months ago.   I’m very excited for Halo Anniversary, especially since I wanted to go through Halo 1 after finishing Reach back in September, but never got around to it.   Online co-op and the classic multiplayer maps should be more than enough to hold me over until Halo 4 is released next year, which I’m equally pumped for.