E3 08: Microsoft Press Conference

By Tyler Barber



Peace, freedom, and bacon and eggs: the opening line from Bethesda's new (and hilarious) Fallout 3 trailer cued the Pavlovian-salivation response that remained high (for the most part) throughout Microsoft's E3 press conference. Last year, in Santa Monica, Microsoft came on stage and reassured gamers that '07 was the year of Microsoft. They were hyping up surefire games like Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Mass Effect, but what we saw then were mostly trailers, not gameplay. So, to my surprise, Microsoft followed the excellent Fallout 3 demo with on-stage demonstrations of three more AAA games. Maybe you've heard of them: Resident Evil 5, Gears of War 2, and Fable 2? All of the games demoed great, and the hype was high for all. My hands-on impressions for all these will follow shortly.

After the heavy-hitters, they followed up with what was, for me, the most impressive line-up of games for E3: the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) downloadable titles (yes, the Playstation Network games are in that category too -- more on them later). First, we saw Geometry Wars 2, which instantly reminded me how bad-ass Geometry Wars Evolved was. In GW2, you now have not only new single player modes, but also 16 mutliplayer modes with both inventive verses and co-operative play. Next we saw something no one anticipated, Glaga Legions, developed by the same Namco-Bandia team that created the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition. The mid-conference low followed after that with two cock-teases: Portal Still Alive (extra downloadable stages sans GLaDOS) and a strange flash of a screen for the South Park XBLA game.

Read the full article here.