I was on the red-eye flight back from Los Angeles on Sunday night so not much time for blogging today. I’ll return to regular posting tomorrow, but in the meantime feel free to check out some of the coverage of the Electronic Entertainment Expo I did last week, almost all of it for MSN.ca.
To start off with, I wrote a preview story about some of more anticipated buzz items at this year’s show. Before the show, it was looking like Nintendo’s as-of-yet-unnamed new console would get most of the attention while cloud gaming built momentum. This year’s E3 also looked like it might determine whether the recent trend of motion gaming would live or die.
Cloud gaming was also the focus of a story I did for Canadian Business magazine, which looked at how large studios are hoping for something like a Netflix of video games to emerge.
Once the show itself unofficially got under way on Monday, I pumped out a bunch of blog posts on various companies’ press conferences. Microsoft was first and the company pretty much answered the questions about motion gaming, with a whole bunch of Kinect and Kinect-enabled games coming this year.
The most interesting part of Electronic Arts’ conference was the demo of its upcoming Battlefield 3, which takes war gaming to new - and somewhat disconcerting - levels of realism.
Sony’s press conference was notable for the unveiling of the PlayStation Vita, the company’s new portable gaming device. As I wrote in the post, the company seems to be moving in the right direction with the Vita, but in the wrong one with the PlayStation 3.
Nintendo kicked off the first official day of E3 with the debut of its new console, or controller rather, the Wii U. As with many attendees, I was pretty impressed with the new direction taken by the company. I’ll have more to say about the Wii U shortly.
From there, I got the skinny on a few upcoming Ubisoft games, including Rocksmith - a game that’s similar to Guitar Hero, but which actually teaches how to play real guitar.
Rocksmith figured into a photo gallery of some of the most promising innovations I saw at E3. Truth be told, I’m sure there was lots that I missed that could have been included, but there were only so many hours in the day there.
I also put together another gallery on the 10 most anticipated sequel games, which are inevitably the big blockbusters of the Christmas season.
There were also a few interviews. I talked with Ubisoft’s Montreal and Toronto CEO Yannis Mallat about Canada’s leadership position in video game design, as well as the issue of cloud gaming. I also had a chat with Kudo Tsunoda, the creative director of Kinect, about motion gaming.
Whew. Looking back, that was quite a bit of coverage. There are still some briefings and interviews that I went to get back to, so there might be more coming. In any event, see you all tomorrow for business as usual.
