Microsoft's E3 would probably be best characterised as solid if unspectacular – it walked an interesting line between appeasing (existing) hardcore and (putative) casual Xbox 360 owners, showcasing some pretty exciting games (including, surprisingly, several efforts from Square-Enix including Final Fantasy XIII, which was supposed to be a PS3 exclusive) and a radical overhaul for Xbox Live, doing away with the ugly, hated "blades" in favour of cuddly avatars.

It also copped a bit of flak for perceived plagiarism, with a karaoke game, Lips, which is suspiciously like SingStar and those Mii-like avatars and Home-like avatar-based XBL front-end.

The view from the UK

We managed to catch up with Stephen McGill, the company's UK head of gaming and entertainment, in search of a UK perspective – E3 press conferences are infamous for concentrating on the US at the expense of the rest of the world.

First off, in the personal opinion of McGill (a thoroughly lovable chap, even if he is Microsoft through and through), what were the highlights of his company's E3 press conference?

"Naturally, the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII was a fantastic signal that together with the likes of Fable 2, Gears Of War 2, Halo Wars and so on that Xbox 360 is undeniably the home of the best blockbuster games. But the biggest stand-out has to be the new Xbox experience – making it easy for friends and family to have fun together, and especially the new Xbox Live Primetime services such as 1 vs 100."

1 vs 100 – a quiz-show style game played over Xbox Live, developed in conjunction with TV company Endemol and generally something which should blur the boundaries between videogames and TV – is indeed intriguing, but far too few details emerged for us to visualize what it will be like and whether it will be compelling or gimmicky.

In-house franchises

The new installments of Microsoft's established in-house franchises will also be very welcome among the Xbox faithful, too – but a spanner was thrown into the works by Bungie, which revealed it was ready to showcase what it has been working on post-Halo 3, but Microsoft pulled the plug on its presentation at the last minute. Action-adventure effort Alan Wake, too, was conspicuous by it absence. Perhaps those games will get their chance at the Games Convention in Leipzig.