Surprisingly, I personally found the final conference, Sony's, to be the most entertaining. The fact that it didn't show that much that was actually new doesn't take away from it being the most well put together, executed and paced. Sony constantly kept it going by talking less and showing more. Kudos for overcoming the PSP GO leak by revealing those amazing motion controllers (well probably amazing anyway). The sword and shield demo made me dream of what things like the Elderscrolls series could actually become one day.
It's a much better formula than Nintendo's "let's speak for awhile after every little announcement, and let's be sure to speak alot during them." Cammi and Reggie might have commanding presences, but they fail to get you into what they're selling. The announcements of 2 new Marios and a fantastic new Metroid trailer were really the only saviors here. Nintedno's conference was all over the place, jumping from Mario to Wii Fit to DS to some weird finger device, unexplained... but it was certianly better than last year's debacle or Ubisoft's complete-waste-of-your-time show. Minus points on not only no Wii Zelda info, but no new info for SPirit Tracks either. Zelda was entirely ignored -- BOO!
And Microsoft had a very strong hand the first day, but Sony's conference took a lot of its thunder away. Aside of wasting too much time focusing on The Beatles Rock Band -- hey I love that band but Ringo's and Paul's appearance felt so forced and unnecessary -- the announcement of MGS finally coming to 360 was nearly shattered the next day when we learned that MGS: Rising wouldn't be 360 exclusive and that Kojima appeared to be much more heavily involved in the "official" sequel for the franchise on PSP, Peace Walker, and actually had something to show for it. Project Natal was the untouchable silver lining, because if Peter Molyneux is telling the truth, it aims to do very unique things with motion-recognition technology. I suppose if you're a Halo fan, two new announced games for the franchise is certainly something to be excited for... but I'm not.
So this is my list in order of best to not:
- Sony
- Microsoft
- Nintendo