So, it seems amongst the hardcore gaming community, Activision has been a great source of ire and anger. Now, don't call me an Activision fanboy or defender, I haven't bought an Activision game in ages. Now, to my main point. (which will probably make some of you angry)  I don't think Activision has gotten a fair deal from us. The IW situation was handled very poorly, I agree, but the truth is that none of us TRULY know what was happening behind closed doors, so I don't think it's fair to prop up Kotick and his company as agents of Satan. Let's not forget, what was so great about MW2 in the first place? The story made no sense whatsoever, the multiplayer has tons of hackers that IW has yet to patch, and they cut out dedicated servers for the PC version. We all make the IW team out to be the innocent artist being crushed by "the man" but we have to remember, West/Zampella were being paid millions of dollars in salary to work on MW2. Now, I agree that royalties should be paid, but we have to remember that these guys are millionaires, they're not exactly starving artists. I think we should wait until we have the facts all sorted before we make judgements, and, let's be honest, Activision is a business. They have a responsibility to their stockholders to maximize profits. If that means pumping out new CoD or Guitar Hero games every year, than that's how it'll work. We don't have to buy them.

So, I'm going to do a short roundup of E3, with my take on some stuff. This won't be doing anything differently from everyone else doing the same thing, but I'll try to make it short and sweet.

-Nintendo had the best presser, bar none. Don't call me a fanboy, but I may have to sell my first born child and my soul to Nintendo for not only giving a glasses-free 3D platform, but putting Starfox, Kid Icarus, Metal Gear, Ocarina of Time, Street Fighter, on that platform. I don't even own a Wii, but Reggie had me really excited for Kirby's Epic Yarn and the next Donkey Kong game. I haven't even mentioned that we had a new Zelda in there as well. 

-However, Sony's press conference did not disappoint me. Killzone 3 looked gorgeous in 3D, despite the fact I'll never buy a 3D TV, the addition of Kevin Butler and his new sidekick Marcus was quite amusing, and of course, Portal 2 coming to PS3 with Steamworks has me quite excited for PS3 games to experience the awesome that is Steam. However, I was quite disappointed with Sony not mentioning Last Guardian or giving any time whatsoever either in the press conference or otherwise to the upcoming Persona 3 reboot on PSP. P3 is one of my favorite RPG's, and I was quite disappointed to not hear anything about the PSP release until yesterday when I saw a listing on Amazon.

-Microsoft has lost me. I understand they want the casual market with Kinect, but I don't think most of Microsoft's target audience even knows what Kinect is. Not to mention the fact that telling your average soccer mom or grandparent about Kinect in the first place will freak them out because the technology involved in the device seems intimidating. (I've tried this with my family) However, I was very excited to see Bulletstorm, which looks like a great relief from the current state of shooters. I'm not much of a Gears fan, so I can't really give an objective opinion of Gears 3's showing, but I'm interested to see what Epic can do with the Unreal 4 engine and the 4 player story co-op. The way Microsoft used Kinect in the press conference didn't really make sense to me, I mean, I don't know anyone who uses their 360 for chat or social networking, especially not video chat. What really made me cringe, however, was the ESPN segment. Who is going to want to watch sports on their 360 when they can watch regular ESPN programming on cable, or TiVo? If Microsoft wanted to do this, they should have put this as a press release pre-E3 or sometime after, because I honestly could not care less about sports trivia on my console, or watching sports on it. The only sport I watch is baseball, and I've got an MLB.com account for that. I don't need ESPN on my 360. I think it was a complete waste of time that MS could be talking about how their going to actually give a shit about PC gamers in the future. 

-Something that surprised me about Nintendo's 3DS showing was that the new Pokemon games were not available to play. Pokemon has been a consistent Nintendo cash cow, with millions of fans, (myself included) I'm surprised that they didn't show Black/White on 3DS. From the screenshots I've seen of Black/White, 3D would work quite well.

A quick list of games I'm excited about from E3:

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

Rock Band 3

Kid Icarus 3DS

Skyward Sword

Bulletstorm

Civilization V

Old Republic

MGS Rising

Portal 2 (On the subject of Valve, where the hell is my Engineer update?)

Dead Space 2

Ocarina of Time 3DS

Kirby's Epic Yarn

Donkey Kong Country sequel (I can't remember the title)

Child of Eden

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (The game itself is meh for me, but I'm interested to see how                multiplayer works)

LittleBigPlanet 2

One last thought: I'm hoping Kevin Butler and Marcus the PSP spokeskid get some kind of flash game made after them. I'd play it.