Microsoft E3 Press Briefing 2009

Work at home days can be a lot of fun. While banging through some SAP training materials I had the chance to watch the live stream of the Microsoft E3 press briefing. This year, the G4 video feed (from justin.tv) seemed to work reasonably well after the first few minutes of the briefing.

Anyway here's some of my highlights:

• Modern Warfare 2 - Looks awesome, at least for the single player game. I did enjoy the original Modern Warfare single player quite a bit so I’ll have this one on the stack of “games to get eventually”.
• Joy Ride - free, looks potentially fun, at least for those family game nights when I get the clan from across the country together to play.
• Left 4 Dead 2 - zOMG! I love playing the original Left 4 Dead, even though I don’t often get the chance. Might be too soon for a sequel already but I’m still inclined to buy it.
• Splinter Cell: Conviction – Looks really cool, interesting story set up. That said I’ve never played the other Splinter Cell games so I don’t have that much interest in this one. I’ll probably pass, there is neither time nor money to play everything.
• Forza 3 – Wow this looks like a great racing game. I’ve only really dabbled in Forza 2, having picked it up used at Blockbuster for $7 a while ago. Still I’m surprised to see burnout style deformation and acrobatics from a game with real cars and physics. Very cool.
• Halo – I’m going to buy Halo:ODST the day it comes out, the same is true for Halo:Reach. I didn’t get to watch either portion of the presser though as I was needed elsewhere. Both kids and work have the impeccable timing of needing my attention during the part of the conference I really wanted to see.
• Metal Gear Solid – So the rumors are partially true. Not at all surprised. MGS is not my kind of game really, but as an Xbox fan it’s great to see it come to the platform. The same can be said for FFXIII
• Social Networking – I don’t tweet, I don’t have a Facebook account (yet) and I’ve never used Last.FM but both seem to be the realization of Sony’s “console as a living room computer” vision. Seems like Microsoft blocked them with the Xbox, knocked them down with the Xbox 360, then curb stomped them with the Natal project.
• Natal / Motion Control – This just looks cool. Definitely better suited to living room and big screen play, but I’ll buy one and see how well it works with my desk and 24” monitor rig.

All told, the press conference did what it was supposed to, left me wanting to spend a bunch of my money. The only thing that it didn’t do was leave me wanting to buy a Zune HD for the port-o-gaming. Maybe xYz is next year’s big project.