My inability to find anyone to take me out to E3 (the only company which took any UK journos this year was Microsoft, and they opted to take full-time staffers, not freelancers, which is fair enough) didn't exactly leave me feeling bereft.
Even though I did genuinely believe that this year's E3 would be less irrelevant than last year's one. To an extent, it was. But now that it's all over, I feel even less downhearted.
More than ever, the show seemed to be all about the big three platform-holders, and in this day and age, it's possible to tune into streaming video of their E3 press conferences, eliminating the half-hour to an hour spent fannying around when you arrive at them on time before they let you in, followed by the mad (and often unsuccessful) dash to get a seat, followed by the half-hour spent fannying around once more before anything actually happens.
Not, of course, that I did watch any of the live streams: I'm not that sad.
From this distance, it's fairly tricky to pinpoint who, out of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, 'won' at this year's E3. Although it clearly wasn't Sony. PS3 owners crave nothing beyond mega-exciting PS3 exclusives, and now that Eight Days and The Getaway have been canned, those are even thinner on the ground than ever before.
Particularly given the one surprising, sharp-intake-of-breath-causing announcement which came out of E3, that Final Fantasy XIII, touted since before the console's launch as one of the PS3's biggest exclusive games, will also come out on the Xbox 360.
Square-Enix's sudden, Damascene conversion to the Xbox 360 cause (bearing in mind that the Xbox 360 is marginally less popular than rats' droppings in Japan) was a truly startling piece of news.
To be fair to Sony, it does have plenty of games in the pipeline which will keep the faithful happy: LittleBigPlanet is a game which I await with more anticipation than perhaps any other this year (with the possible exception of Will Wright's Spore), and at least we've been put out of our misery and know that God Of War 3 is being made.
But, beyond LBP, what does the company have that will induce people to buy its console rather than Microsoft's?
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zoydwheeler
July 19th
2. elandyll - are you actually '4real'? Or are you Sony's PR manager?
Anybody in their right mind would say that Sony came out with the weakest showing? DC Heroes MMO? MAG? ...Jesus, come on... Even Wii Sports Resort and Xbox Avatars got me more excited than Sony's so-called 'exclusives'
Their strategy this generation is fundamentally flawed. The cracks are showing. It's a shame, but hey! They had their time...
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elandyll
July 18th
1. Steve, you have to be kidding right?
Nintendo was universally recognized as having the weakst presentation and nothing new or exciting to show. MS fared little better, with very little software to actually get excited about (Gears 2 and Fable 2 were about it). Heck, without the Square-Enix surprise, their show would have been a bust.
Sony on the other hand?
Resistance 2 was huge, but we also had LBP, Motostorm2, InFamous, the God Of War3 anounce, and of course at the end the big surprise: 256 multiplayer FPS "MAG".
That is on top of the new 80Gb PS3, The video DL service available on the same day, New PSP, etc.
My only complaint ... no new RPGs and no talk of WipEout HD. But you have to leave something for Liepzig and the TGS :)
The BBC review and many others agree, Sony had it, MS not quite :)
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