[Alex Arbiter 3]

"God of War 3, God of War 3."

" Final Fantasy VII remake next, please, please."

Two online viewers of Sony's PlayStation press conference at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo kept typing those short wish-lists into the chat window each time a new game was announced this week. E3 is part toy show and part film festival, the place where game publishers and console makers reveal some of their products for the coming holiday sales season and beyond.

The press conferences, which have become more like infomercials, are now carried live on TV and streamed over the Internet, and dozens of websites offer minute-by-minute updates. This year, however, it seems like many dedicated players, the ones designated as hardcore as opposed to the casual crowd, were disappointed.

The God of War fan, for example, will not get that sequel any time soon, and there was no word about an update for the most popular Final Fantasy instalment. Nintendo watchers hoping for new Zelda and Mario games and the Halo hordes in Xbox 360-land received hints and winks but not much firm news, and truly original games were scarce.

One viewer summed up the scene, in gamer-speak, as "E3 '08 = epic fail." That may be a trifle harsh, but so far this E3, which ends today, has mostly been about catching the attention of non-gamers. The huge success of Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld system and the broad reach of music titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have sparked a gold rush. The message: Go casual, young medium.

ALL TOGETHER NOW

Success leads to imitation. The video-game industry is living proof of that. Thanks to the Guitar Hero explosion, the number of music-related games on the horizon is overwhelming. There is the new Guitar Hero title, World Tour, heading to all consoles this October. It will add percussion and vocals with new drum and microphone peripherals that resemble the ones in Rock Band, and it will allow players to create their own songs. Singers will be left out due to copyright and storage issues, but the studio interface looks a lot like Apple's GarageBand software, and composers will be able to upload their tracks using the consoles' online networks.

Not to be undone, Rock Band 2 made its first appearance this week, and it's going for the archival approach: When it arrives in September on the Xbox 360 (and then later for the other systems), it will be compatible with almost all the songs from the first edition, including hundreds of downloadable tunes. There will also be new master tracks from Bob Dylan, Metallica, AC/DC and a song from the still-to-be-released Guns 'N' Roses album.

For more esoteric tastes, Microsoft spent a good portion of its Xbox 360 presentation on Lips, its response to Sony's popular SingStar series. Lips is a karaoke-style game that will interface with MP3 players such as the iPod. As long as your favourite ditty is in a shared database of songs and lyrics, the game will allow players to sing along and score points, and it will ship with motion-sensitive microphones that light up if you hit the right notes.

And then there is Wii Music. Nintendo's approach with the Wii is, as usual, completely different. Its new music-and-rhythm game is all about moving controllers around to mime playing instruments or conducting orchestras. The balance-board peripheral from Wii Fit, for example, can act as a drum pedal, while the system's remote-style controllers fill in for drumsticks. Like many of the company's recent offerings, Wii Music looks less like a video game than an activity, but that probably won't hurt sales.

LIVING-ROOM SNATCHERS

At this E3 as in the past, various executives continued to talk about people's living rooms, as in how to establish entertainment beach-heads with their machines acting as gateways to digital content. Microsoft will use a software update to completely change the 360's interface: There will be avatars, cartoon characters that represent users, and eight-person online party rooms where games can be played and downloaded movies can be watched by the whole group (for an as-yet-undisclosed fee).

Sony launched its video download service for the PlayStation 3 on Tuesday in the United States (it will be months before it arrives in Canada, a Sony spokesman told The Globe and Mail). And Sony has 300 movies and 1,200 television shows that can be rented (starting at $3) or purchased (beginning at $10 for full films). The company will also introduce a new configuration of the struggling PS3 console aimed at general electronics consumers: For $400, buyers get 80 gigabytes of storage, but there's limited backwards compatibility, meaning the system will not be able to play many of the titles released for the first two PlayStations.

THE SEQUEL XIII

Providing a platform for movies and TV shows is an easy sell compared to finding audiences for new video games. The list of titles making news at E3 has been dominated by sequels and formulas: Comic-book characters are everywhere, as are armour-plated male heroes shooting at aliens in dystopian settings with grey-brown colour palettes ( Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, and on and on).

The biggest game announcement so far has arguably been Square-Enix's decision to debut Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360 at the same time as the PlayStation 3 in North America, ending Sony's long run of exclusive bragging rights to new episodes.

And the one Wii title to really raise eyebrows was a sequel, Wii Sports: Reso rt, that did so mostly because of yet another controller add-on, MotionPlus, which will more accurately measure arm movements when it arrives next spring.

All in all, observers looking for originality were left with previously announced oddities such as Sony's Little Big Planet and Will Wright's Spore, or new ways to play some of those sequels, like Fable II's online co-operative system that lets players click on glowing orbs to jump into their friends' games.

That may be enough to keep some current players engaged, but the question many were asking heading into E3 remains unanswered: Where do we go from here?

source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...Technology/home

[Gingerlink 2]

ummm E3 was like a month ago...

[Alex Arbiter 3]

ummm E3 was like a month ago...

i know but there is still more data on things that we didn't cover