E310: A Series of Unfortunate Press Events – the Microsoft Keynote Summary
I should point out that I really hate to be that guy.
In any situation where somebody can be that guy, whether it’s that guy that points out the drunk girls boobs are falling out of her shirt at the bar or that guy who says ‘Oh he is pitching a no hitter’ in the 8th inning of a baseball game, it always sucks to be that guy. After watching the Microsoft conference at E3, however, I have no choice but to go into my closet and pull out my That Guy purple sweater and matching purple shoes and get ready to accept the onslaught of hate I’m going to have for presenting a differing and seemingly contrary opinion to the norm. So, here goes…
The Microsoft conference was absolutely amazing and accomplished everything it set out to do- from establishing the Kinect as more than a Wii clone, presenting compelling titles for their new motion sensor peripheral, and presenting enough actual gameplay and games to satiate even the most hardcore of gamers.
…
See, the great thing about writing on the internet is that nobody has to see when I can’t keep a straight face. Of course, everything I said up there was just a boldfaced lie. Microsoft dropped the ball at a level that rivals the Sony “Giant Crab” conference and the legendary Nintendo meltdown of the past. They didn’t only drop the ball, but they kicked the ball into the ocean. Then they set the ocean on fire. The only thing they actually did correctly was make a half-hearted attempt at bribing the journalists in attendance. No, the reason I said I have to be that guy wasn’t because I was going to say this went great just to be different, it’s because I have to sound like a little bit of a hypocrite. I always go on about how I can’t stand when gaming journalists rip into something just to be contrary and get some extra hits by being the dissenting voice, or when they write something solely for the point of fitting as many zingers as they possibly can into it in order to flex their wit muscles, but after viewing the Microsoft keynote I have to make sure I report it to you as I saw it- and I saw a big flaming mess. There is a fear right now that, looking back on this later, it won’t be remembered for as bad as it was. I expected to see a lot more people with their figurative heads buried in their figurative hands while this went on, especially in the immediate aftermath. Instead I’ve seen places actually praising Microsoft for presenting an engaging and informative conference. They must have been watching a rerun from a past E3, because they certainly did not see what I see.
It started off well enough, with some gameplay and discussion of Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops. There was nothing groundbreaking or unexpected with it, but seeing some gameplay footage from the title was welcome. Little did we know at that point that it would be one of the brief oasis of gameplay we would be lucky enough to see during the seventy-nine day long presentation. Bigger than the Call of Duty gameplay was the announcement that the Xbox 360 would have exclusive first rights to future Call of Duty titles, map backs, and DLC. Not a bad start.
Next, it got even better. Kojima-san himself made his way onto stage and excitement was palpable. I won’t pull any punches, Metal Gear Solid: Rising looks like one of the most awesome things I’ve seen in ages. The physics in this seemingly action-heavy game were on full display and were incredibly impressive. Raiden is shown chopping tons of things into much smaller things with a level of realism I can’t remember seeing in a game. Plus, I mean, it’s Kojima and Metal Gear.
Cliffy B, or BLAZNATS as he is known to us at Ripten, took the stage next with some gameplay from Gears of War 3. Like the Call of Duty footage in the beginning, it was what we expected. Nothing new or mind blowing, but nice to see anyway. I’m not a big Gears of War fan, but I understand the appeal it has to a lot of people and I think this did a good job of whetting the whistle of the people who are excited for it already.
Following up Gears of War 3, the gaming world’s favorite serial exaggerator took the stage. At this point I started to notice that everything seemed a little rushed. I would have liked to see some discussion about what to expect from both Metal Gear and Gears of War 3, and would have loved to see Molyneux give us more details on Fable 3. Fable is a very deep series and each game is more and more detailed than the next, so it was a bit disappointing to only get a little bit of gameplay footage and no discussion on the key elements that make the series so good. Anything with John Cleese gets my money either way though.
An actual surprise comes next, where the Xbox exclusive Kingdoms, a Crytek title, is announced. Not much is shown, but it was something I didn’t quite expect none the less.
Then Halo: Reach, and I consider going to take a piss break. I was never a big Halo fan, but I was won over a bit by the different experience offered in ODST, and won over a bit more by the multiplayer of Reach. When they said they would be showing some of the campaign I figured I would be a professional and look at it. It was, as the theme of the Microsoft conference has so far been to this point, what you would expect. It is a Halo game and looks and acts like a Halo game. That is until it goes into space. Halo: Reach will, apparently, include space battles. Color me sold.
So you might have read the last thousand words or so and are now asking yourself, “Gavin, that doesn’t sound so bad, it might be about par for the course but it certainly doesn’t sound awful- maybe even a little bit good.” That is because up to this point, all was well. Then the fucking wheels fell off. I bet you can guess why.
We finally got to Project Natal, excuse me, Kinect. Just like everybody had on the back of their mind, this is where things got bad. All the ways to control your Xbox Live experience without a control were demoed. Voice activation, motion activation, the whole nine. It seemed to work fine, but this is about video games, so I wasn’t exactly excited about being able to control my Xbox with my voice. Then Microsoft’s presentation enters the surreal.
They begin to demo the video chat abilities of the system, essentially they are showing us that the Xbox can now do all the things you already do on your computer, but they are doing it in a way that made everybody watching want to turn their badges in and go live in the woods far away from technology. A girl and her ‘twin’ begin to fumble through the absolutely worst acted segment of anything I have seen this side of Zap Rowsdower. It is painful. And it goes on forever. I think it was forever at least. As soon as Microsoft got into the Kinect, I think the days changed to nights, and the nights changed to weeks. I saw trees outside my house wilt and die before new ones sprung up around them. The circle of life circled more and more as these ‘two’ girls prattled on with cheesy dialog that somebody who never played a video game in their lives probably wrote for people who never played video games in their lives either, all to pander to people who do actually play video games. I found myself wishing that these women were performing this bizarre school play in front of the ECW Arena in Philadelphia in 1995 so that a thousand drunk mutants could scream “shut the fuck up” at them in rhythmic unison. I found myself wishing for that quite a lot from this point forward in the conference.
It isn’t even worth it to recap the next hour, because absolutely nothing happened. Nothing at all. If you were refreshing our website, or any game website really, you might have been wondering why we were all so scant on our reporting. It was because there wasn’t an ounce of news. The next hour was Microsoft showing us all the ways the Xbox can be a media center, or how we can watch streaming sports on it through their new partnership with ESPN, or how little kids can play games with tigers in them, or how casual gamers can do all the things they did on the Wii three years ago on the Xbox now. Microsoft force fed us the Kinect, and they force fed it to us hard. Whether it was a girl doing Yoga, or another awful forced acting session of two girls riding a raft, there was one thing in common- nothing they showed us were games.
Sure, they were games in a broad sense. I guess a racing game without any feedback or control over what you do can still be considered a game much the same way that pop art is considered art, but they aren’t games in the sense that the journalists reporting on E3 will consider games. They aren’t games in the sense that the people who care enough about video games that they are following E3 coverage would consider them games. Outside of the Star Wars title, which isn’t due out until well after Kinect’s launch, and the Harmonix’s surprisingly awesome looking Dance Central, what did Microsoft show us that made the Kinect seem like anything more than a gimmick? The answer, my friends, is nothing.
When you break down this conference for MS, the only way to really look at the scope of it’s failure is to look at what they had to accomplish. Microsoft chose to make this about the Kinect and put everything that non-casual gamers actually wanted and cared about on the back burner. So they had to sell us that the Kinect is a necessary piece of technology. Did they? No. The Kinect looked like it was neat, and I guess controlling menus with waves and vocals is fun, but it isn’t necessary and would probably even just get old after a while. They didn’t even have a price point that might help us decide. Then, they had to prove that the Kinect would be more than just a Wii clone. Did they? Not even close. Everything they showed us practically screamed “inspired by Nintendo” at every corner. Microsoft wants to put on a good face and say they aren’t going to let the Kinect ruin things for hardcore or regular gamers in the name of trying to capture the casual gaming market (which last I checked was already heavily captured by another companies that’s “N”ame escapes me right now) but if we are basing our opinion on the Kinect on what they showed and not PR lip service, I don’t see how this could possibly be true.
Then to end things, they had a big announcement. An actual big announcement. The new Xbox model, with a 250GB HD and built in wireless, would be shipping not next year, not the holiday system, but right now. This should have been huge, but after being assaulted by mediocrity, embarrassment, and disappointment for the last hour, it didn’t seem so exciting. So Microsoft threw the new Xbox’s at journos in the crowd.
It was the only time anybody there seemed to care. Sadly for Microsoft, they can’t send us all free Xboxs, so they may have gotten their big standing ovation moment of the conference by Oprah-ing those in attendance, but hopefully they realize that doesn’t replace the cheers they didn’t get for the products they chose to make the focal point of the demonstration above games people actually cared about.
And hopefully everybody else who witnessed it realizes that too.
Especially those of us who have to report on it.
