Next up, Microsoft gets my tender caresses or savage beatings.
Here’s the link to follow along: E3 Microsoft
- Microsoft’s starting off with a live-action trailer! It’s in space, so it must be Halo 4. Brave move, Microsoft! Start off with the only thing people care about!
- In-game action being shown. Looks like they might actually be running in HD for the first time ever! I find myself still not giving a crap, despite the lushness of the foliage.
- Covenant got turned into flakes of light of flower petals! Master Chief has finally achieved nirvana. Or maybe the planet is evil. I’m betting on evil planet.
- Man, that’s not fair. The forerunners have grenade-catchers-and-hurler-backers and fancy guns with floating pieces. We’re years away from floating piece technology!
- Sadly (?), no dubsteb for Master Chief. How will he ever get down with his bad self? Lame!
- Don Mattrick coming out, looking like a nebbish, unmade bed in a nice suit.
- Mattrick takes a cue from Mick Foley, goes for a cheap pop, mentioning “you the gamers”.
- Xbox is best-selling console now? How did I miss the fanfare and announcements of that!?
- Next up: the most advanced dirt-village technology available, what could it be? Splinter Cell? Splinter Cell. Sam Fisher just executed a bunch of mofos. Now he’s happily torturing a dude for info. Yay, American exceptionalism! Good job, Ubisoft! It’s like you’re not even French at all!
- Sam Fisher’s got action moves again, like in Conviction. No more panicked flailing around when you’re not in stealth mode!
- STAB STAB SHOOT SHOOT STAB! WITH KINECT VOICE INTERACTION!
- Now Sam’s got a machine gun. Ho ho ho. He still decides to break a neck instead.
- Sam’s leader of Fourth Echelon? Did I miss that in the last game? He can call airstrikes and shit now, so that’s a step up. Too bad he doesn’t sound like Michael Ironside. UNACCEPTABLE.
- Fancy pants dude comes out to talk about two kinds of Football, FIFA (the real one) and Madden (American rugby) and how they work with Kinect. Now you can yell out substitutions instead of using a menu or just ignoring that feature completely like everyone does.
- The game listens to you swear and the commentators may respond. This is the most important advancement in videogames ever: the swear jar.
- Here comes Joe Montana, presumably to yell at the Xbox. He instead confesses to the emptiness of his life without football.
- He’s telling players what to do, like in real life! MONTANA WITH THE TOUCHDOWN! MONTANA WITH THE TOUCHDOWN!
- Joe Montana just made a couple thousand bucks for pretending to know what an Xbox is. Nice.
- Demo reel! It’s Kinect Fable, a game that nobody wants or cares about! Hooray!
- Seriously, what the hell. This just looks like an on-rails shooter, a la Maddog McCree. Nobody cheers.
- Spiky hair guy, here to talk about games! Hooray, games!
- Grown men cheer for different game studios like middle-aged women for Justin Beiber. Equally as sad and awkward.
- New Gears of War game! I hope it has huge, overly-muscled dudes with sausage fingers!
- Good news, that guy from the other three games who I don’t remember the name of is in it and they’re shooting at things!
- Forza! Look at them cars doing drivings and stuff! Special Forza Horizon collector’s edition announced, comes with a Ferrari.
- And here comes the dubsteb! Yes! I was worried we wouldn’t get any in this press conference. Can you imagine?
- The head of marketing and strategy is coming out, also in a fancy suit. I bet this is going to be informative.
- He promises entertainment. Claims Bing search made it 4x faster to find things on your Xbox. That seems unlikely, given how often it finds things I don’t even ask for…
- The Bing search is now hooked up to the libraries of provider apps on your Xbox. That’s nice.
- New entertainment providers! He’s gonna mention 4 of the new ones. Nickelodean, Paramount Movies, Machinima and Univision. Can I watch Spanish soaps now? I might do that.
- More sports and stuff to watch on the Xbox. NHL, NBA, etc. Hooray, sports. *crickets* Whoa, lead balloon. Nerds hate sports.
- It’s not enough to tell us about sports. Now we get to watch a video about sports! Hooray, sports! A multicultural group of friends enjoy their sports with also a couple of ladies.
- Now let’s talk about Xbox Music. Not announced, the quiet sobbing of the person responsible for Zune music, alone at home with a razorblade and booze.
- Polite applause for music. Nerds don’t hate music as much as sports.
- The future of fitness is the Kinect. If you don’t have Kinect, you’ll just be fat forever. Look at me, I have Kinect and I’m only mostly fat. When this fitness thing comes out, I’ll be skinny. NIKE SKINNY. Hooray, Nike.
- Nike dude has weird Euro accent and weird Euro hair. I can’t hear anything he’s saying anymore. I’m lost in his hair and voice. Nike me, Nike man. Nike me.
- If you have a body, you’re an athlete. Nike wants to measure you, track you, remind you, and match you up against other people to exercise. What’s missing from my workouts is being compared to others and shamed by my slovenliness and sloth.
- Fat guy comes out to talk about how awesome smartphones are! Way to put fat guy after fit, Euro guy, Microsoft!
- Xbox Smartglass. The Xbox and tablet are joined up together. You can pass your movie from the tablet to the Xbox, then the tablet shows you information about the movie while you watch it. Finally, I don’t have to look up IMDB while watching!
- What will game developers do with this integration? Has Microsoft stolen the WiiU’s thunder with tablet-based shenanigans? Maybe!
- Dude says this will work with *any* mobile phone. Does this mean any Window Mobile Phone or am I gonna make my Xbox and Adroid get it on? I HOPE SO.
- Microsoft announces Internet Explorer for Xbox. Viruses to be announced in a few hours.
- IE for Xbox looks tweaked for consoles, Bing, voice and phone integration. Could be pretty rad. Bookies taking bets on how right now!
- Now, let us see more games! New Tomb Raider game looks very Uncharted. Seems fair. Every artist is a cannibal, after all.
- Where is Lara getting all these arrows from, anyway? She’s not even got a quiver! Oh, she has a shotgun, too. Magic pockets. You should always bring some if you’re planning on being shipwrecked or captured by pirates or whatever’s going on here.
- Don’t fall off that waterfall, Lara! Too late. At least she found a parachute. Watch out for those trees… nevermind. Jeez, they really like beating her up in this. Poor Lara.
- Good news, they’re going to have DLC and you’ll get it first on Xbox.
- Spiky hair is back with his sweet Atari-graphic jumpman shirt. Let’s see some world premier exclusives!
- Whoa. “Persistent, asynchronous something something”. That sounds fancy.
- Little dude climbs on big dude. Now a comet fell. Now devilman and angelman are fighting. Shoulda brought your A-game, angelman. You dead.
- Ascend: New Gods. I predict this game is about climbing on big dudes.
- Meet Iris. Iris is a motorcycle. A motorcycle that assassinates people. I don’t even have to make a joke about that.
- Gore Verbinski has made a game. The game is Tron, I think? Oh, Portal Tron. Run, little orb, run! Don’t let those cubes get you! For Kinect, it’s “Matter”. Now I’m confused.
- Here come two developers. Oh man, that’s some broken English. I’m not sure what that dude said besides his name is Kobayashi and his friend is… uh… something.
- Looks like Resident Evil 25: Leon Has A Bad Day. What’s this, cover mechanics? Third person shooter controls? Why, this isn’t Resident Evil at all! It’s some new game that doesn’t have controls that make me want to destroy the world!
- Run, Leon! Run from that rolling explosion! Raiders of the Lost Ark will never stop being an influence on videogames. I hope.
- Ut oh. Zombies.
- Chick from Xbox Live team has bitchin’ tattoo. What you got for us, lady? She says it’s rad. Now you’re speaking my language!
- Game is called Wreckateer. Animated Scotsman calls her a “rock polisher”. That’s just rude, man!
- This game is basically Angry Birds, except it has a Scotsman and siege weaponry. That means it’s RAD. Kill that castle, yo!
- Don’t worry, we won’t have to wait long to play it. It’s coming this summer. You know, for people that actually want to play it. Whoever they are.
- South Park game. I expect crappy jokes by the bucketfull. South Park: You play the new kid! Pretty clever, really.
- Trey and Matt come out, make fun of Microsoft. Nice.
- Dance Central 3: Presenting Usher… Raymond? He has a last name now?! When did that happen!? Holy crap, I’m blown away by that. Now he’s dancing!
- Wait, he just did a backflip thing! You can’t make people do that in their living rooms!
- Wow, this is still going. I don’t think this is Usher Raymond‘s target demo.
- BLOCKBUSTER GAME! Oh, Call of Duty. Wow. CoD got less applause than Usher Raymond. Unexpected.
- Yep, it’s a Call of Duty game, but this time it’s in America! So, you know, that’s something different. Now let’s see some shooting!
- Hooray, shooting! First person shooting!
- Shooting down drones is pretty easy when your gun’s got automatic target tracking. When I was a kid, we had to shoot things down with our own eyeballs!
- Your bullets can charge up and go through things. This series is going to be a sci-fi game by 2015, I guarantee it. Expect flying cars and bionics, with green-skinned chicks.
- There are drones all over the place. You have drones. The enemy has drones. Drones. Someone told them drones were the future of warfare and they listened!
- Now dude is in a plane, Protecting the president’s convoy. I’m not sure why they didn’t just take the President in the VTOL. Seems faster.
- “I’ll handle the drones!” Will you handle ALL the drones, sir? Will you?
- Drones. Drones. Drones drones.
- Drones.
- Drones drones.
- Drones.
- Droning applause.
- Drones.
Summing up: Average, Microsoft. It’s a good thing I play most multiplatform games on Xbox, ‘cos I didn’t care about anything exclusive you showed except SmartGlass. Oh well. Drones. Usher Raymond. Drones.