As you can probably surmise, there was an utter lack of Corp staff in Los Angeles this year. It seems that life has happened to us in amusing and interesting ways. Certain of us are moving to foreign countries for the summer, getting married or spawning nooblers and the like and as such expendable income was rather hard to come by for us.
Oh, and Somebob was trying out new and interesting medications as US Healthcare's guinea pig, so he was right out too.
While I actually did my job over the week I scanned site after site for any really interesting information and the only thing that crossed my mind was that, well...this was a console year.
If you've ever been to E3, you know that it tends to see-saw back and forth between PC and console gaming, and this year was no different. Last year was pretty console-centric, but we still saw shadows of what was to come with PC gaming, whether it was Tabula Rasa or Hero's Journey, Prey or FEAR...hell, even some of the Stargate titles were pretty entertaining to check out.
This year, it was the triumvirate of tooting horns: PS3, 360 and the WIIIIIIIIIIII. Ahrm. Sorry.
Somehow, some way, the biggest and best hype that the PS3 had reserved for it was totally deflated. They apparently thought they'd emulate the Microsoft tiering idea, putting their gimped, HDMI-less core system another hundred dollars higher than the "premium" 360. You still get your gig-ethernet (is anyone really running gig networks at home?) and built in Bluetooth, but you also lose the MemoryStick Pro/Duo slot, so sharing anything directly with your PSP from a core system is right out unless you purchase the upgrade.
On top of that, despite the "gimmick" of the Nintendo Wii-mote, Sony decided to hurriedly add motion sensing to the PS3 controller while removing the rumble, saying that it interfered with the sensors.
Well, that or Immersion is kicking their ass in court and they removed it so they could limit what kind of financial damage they'd be in.
Then there's the 360. Aside from the HD-DVD player (external, but usable, and apparently there's going to be an HDMI port on it), the thing that makes me giddy like a schoolgirl is Dead Rising. There's nothing better than cuttin' up some zombies with a chainsaw, or axes, or...well, anything you have laying around is fine, I guess. Which you can do in this game.
There were some other games. Prey, for example, is going to be a 360 release as well, as is Huxley, an MMOFPS (yeah, like Planetside) for both the 360 and the PC.
Oh, and some unoriginal-ass sequel that nobody's really interested in at all.
The real winner? The WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. After all, who could buy press like this? They demonstrated that sprinkling a little Nintendo fairy dust goes a long way in getting that press: whether it was Miyamoto-san conducting an orchestra on the Wii, or playing tennis by actually swinging the Wiimote, announcing that the DS is more popular than any other handheld on the market today...Nintendo's in a great position to make serious strides this generation.
So, yeah. What I gleaned from everything I've read from E3...consoles will rule the market, but everyone wants some sort of successful MMO because WoW makes moneyhats, so why can't they?
Oh well. Read it and weep.
Me, I'm getting a 360 as soon as I can slice my way through hordes of zombies. It's what made Dynasty Warrior great, right? At least we're not so worried about finding flowers this year.
