E3 08: Nintendo & Sony Press Conferences

I can sympathize with these poor chaps above, they're the core gamers and just look how excited they are. It's almost palpable. Let's dive right into the other two conferences.

Nintendo once again took the casual money making route, I can't really fault them for what's bringing in the mad cash. If I had a home and portable console that printed money, I too would do what they did. Alas, since I don't have it as good as they do, and I haven't really been a huge fan of the way games are going on their console, I found myself mostly bored and pondering exactly just how much dust I can expect my Wii to gather in the next coming months. Madworld is slated for 2009 so I can't look forward to that, I think all I have is Megaman 9 and perhaps some VC titles like Super Mario RPG.

So what did they announce? Shaun White Snowboarding kicked it off, I don't have a balance board so scratch that off, also it didn't look all that thrilling and fun. Wii Sports Resort, which also is slated for 2009, not that I'm looking forward to throwing Frisbees to a dog anyhow. It comes with Wii Motion Plus however which is supposed to make Wiimote movement in games 1:1. To be honest, some demonstrations looked 1:1 but some of them didn't. Also, thanks for further segmenting your market Nintendo, now 3rd party developers have to ask themselves if they want to utilize the Wii Speaker, the Balance Board, the Wii Zapper, the Wii Motion Plus, perhaps pull a Samba de Amigo and come with peripherals of their own. Like what the hell guys? I won't be picking up Wii Sports Resort but I'll look into the Wii Motion Plus if and when a good lightsaber game is created or the Mario and Zelda teams show something off that utilizes it in a way that excites me. I'm not a fan of Animal Crossing so the new Wii title did nothing for me, I find no pleasure in decorating a town and chopping down trees and fishing. I definitely don't want to do it with other people, I would feel terrible having dragged them into the mess with me.

On the DS front nothing exciting, another Guitar Hero game which apparently is selling like hotcakes so good for those guys. A GTA title is coming out, but I've yet to see the DS pull off a completely 3D game that I enjoyed thoroughly. Finally the man himself, Miyamoto came out and there was all this darkness and fog and smoke and everyone was thinking Kid Icarus, but no, the big unveil was Wii Music. Everyone they had out there playing and messing around with their products were all so damn cheery, so I thank them for the Diabetes. Hopefully they're cooking up a Post-E3 Wii Insulin product for me. It also ships with a new peripheral for the Balance Board, some comfy Diabetic Socks. Thanks Nintendo!

Enough about them let's move onto the next disappointment, the Sony Conference. First off, Resistance 2 looks fun, although the demo intrigued me the first couple of minutes and then watching whoever was playing mozy around a building and a bridge while just shooting bullets now and then at the Leviathan dried up that well. As sad as it is, I give them props for making the charts and bar graphs the most interesting by using LittleBigPlanet. That game could revolutionize business meetings across the globe in a few years time.

They focused on the PSP which I zoned out during, then they talked a little bit about the PS2. I think the only title I'm left wanting to play for the PS2 is Persona 4. There was some PSN discussions, they're getting TV and movies like XBL, and there's a nice looking Ratchet and Clank game coming out in August I believe for $14.99. What else? Gran Turismo TV, I guess if you own a PS3, GT5:Prologue, and are a fanatic of cars, you'll enjoy that. Then it was time for more PS3 trailers, they treated the crowd to a CGI teaser for God of War 3 which surprised nobody that the game was in development and because there wasn't any game play shown I didn't get any excitement from it. They also busted out a trailer for inFamous which looks cool, I was a big fan of the Sly Cooper games. Finally they showed off a game which I hope for now is tentatively titled Massive Action Game. I'm guessing it'll be a mix of SOCOM meets Battlefield, they showed off what I believe was a CGI trailer so once again it didn't get me all that excited.

It seems as if the Internets are praising Sony for their conference but I was really disappointed in it. Still not enough games were shown off, especially in the exclusives department. What's Jaffe up to? Where's some footage of God of War 3? What's the ICO/SotC team up to? What happened to White Knight Story? Enough CGI/game play trailers, get someone out on the stage, put a controller in their hand, and start playing something that woos me and gets me pumped for the PS3. They defended their lack of titles because they have a 10 year cycle in mind for the PS3, so they went on about how you never saw the best PS2 titles until Year 3 or Year 5 or Year 7, etc. Lastly, drop the damn price, stop keeping the price at $399.99 and just cramming more things into the box to try and entice us to nibble at that price.

I guess I'm declaring Microsoft as the E3 winner just because what exclusives they have coming out this year showed more promise than the trailers I saw for Sony's stuff. Nintendo isn't even on the radar for me at the moment. Last year was about amazing 1st and 3rd party titles all being jammed into my temples during the 4th Quarter, I think this year is going to be just as good but is all about the 3rd party games. I'm not complaining and neither should anyone else, since that's the case it should be win-win whether you own a 360 or PS3.