We had the Microsoft conference, followed by EA and then Ubisoft.  I shall attempt to collect some of my thoughts in a semi-coherent review of the day's press conferences.

Microsoft

Wow.  I am feeling fairly underwhelmed.  They spent a lot of time covering the newly renamed Kinect (previously known as Natal), which I hoped they would, but didn't really have that big BEST THING EVER moment as I had hoped they would.  The name is acceptable but doesn't really feel right coming off the tongue.  I haven't heard anyone from Microsoft explain the name, but I feel it is most likely a combination of the words "kinetic" and "connect".  It makes sense, even if I don't like the sound of the word.  It also bothers me that it is spelled that way.  My mind keeps wanting to correct it to Kinetic.

Call of Duty: Black Ops was shown first.  I remember it fairly clearly because I spent the trailer complaining to myself about how lame Treyarch is and how much it irritates me that they are still making every other Call of Duty game.  They are the sad little cash in company that makes the sad little cash in games in the Call of Duty series.  The games are always full of bugs and tend to lack a decent storyline.  Needless to say, I was less than impressed with the trailer for this game.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising is the next one I can recall seeing.  It was somewhat interesting in it's use of Kinetic, but I'm not such a huge fan of Metal Gear that I will play a game with it's name if it isn't top quality.  It has potential.  I will have to wait and see how this turns out.

Gears of War 3.  Somewhere along the line I just stopped caring about this franchise.  Loved the crap out of the first game but at some point I lost interest.  It looks decent enough, I'm just not excited.  I loved Horde mode in Gears of War 2, but nothing else in it really grabbed my interest.  Hopefully there will be more improvement in this one.

Fable 3 was shown but I don't really know why.  The video didn't show anything particularly fresh that I noticed and if you've played either of the first two games I'm sure you pretty much already know what you are going to get.  I will play it for sure, but I'm not excited.

They showed some sort of trailer that looked like 300, but honestly my ADD kicked in and I found myself wondering what that video that just ended had been about.  There is a dark place in your body where you can shove teaser trailers without any gameplay or anything of value.  My mother would tell you the sun doesn't shine there.  If you aren't going to show game play at E3, don't show anything.

Halo: Reach.  They showed some game play and talked about what they are putting into the game.  It did not excite me in the least.  Honestly, it reminded me of something I've seen before.  If I could only remember what it is...oh yeah, Halo.  Nothing new, nothing exciting, just Halo.  I am so unimpressed with this showing of a franchise I once counted amongst my favourites I could almost give up all hope in Bungie.

Microsoft spent some time talking about Kinetic's user interface, including gesture control of movies and voice command and recognition.  These are not bad things, but I do wonder if I won't end up accidentally waving myself through a movie I'm watching, or screaming at the television trying to get it to pause.  Even if they command interpreter works very well, won't it have trouble hearing me over all of the explosions in the super manly non-chick-flick movies that I exclusively watch (_{you are buying that right?})?  Even worse is if someone in a movie says pause.  Will the movie end up pausing itself?

Here is where the Microsoft conference really annoyed me.  It was slightly annoying that they spent all of their time previous to this selling themselves to non-gamers, but at least that I could understand.  Microsoft spent a large chunk of time explaining how you can watch ESPN on your Xbox.  Umm, yay?  Not only did they go on and on about it, but they brought some bloody morons from ESPN onto the stage to irritate the hell out of me.  Do these guys get paid to be on TV?  That's pretty pathetic considering I'm pretty sure my middle finger has more intelligence than they do, and my middle finger only knows how to say one thing.  How many gamers care about sports?  Maybe one percent?  I abhor sports.

Kinectimals.  Microsoft showed it's Nintendogs clone (lets just call it what it is.)  It looks decent enough if that is your sort of thing.  The graphics looked high quality and user interaction seems much more interesting that poking your pet with a stylus.  The little girl they had to do the demo was cute, but other than that there was nothing interesting for me personally with this demo.  I'm not a big pet simulator fan.  I do want to play it some day so that I can try slapping a large cat around just to see what happens.  Seriously, when is the last time you slapped a tiger around and lived to tell people?

Kinect Sports, Adventures, and Joy Ride were shown.  These are not worth individual paragraphs so I am lumping them into one.  Nothing too impressive here.  These are the Nintendo Wii type games you would have expected to see.  Adventures showed the ability to take pictures of you playing (at specific points during the levels) and post them to Facebook for you.  It ends up being sort of like the photos amusement parks take just when you are in the middle of peeing your pants during a roller coaster ride.  I personally don't want pictures of my jumping around in the air posted to Facebook, but I'm sure some people will.

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.  This game managed to surprise me.  It's an exercise game that I actually want to play.  Using Kinect it measures your body, and using this information corrects your movements during exercises.  It includes activities such as aerobics, Yoga, Tai Chi, martial arts (mentioned but not shown so they possibly meant Tai Chi), and combat.  Combat as far as I can tell is really just making a game out of aerobics.  They put up a bunch of blocks on the screen and let you punch and kick them all over the place.  It looks like it will be a very interesting way to get some exercise, and it absolutely drops any interest I may have had in EA Sports Active 2.

Dance Central was shown and people seemed impressed by it.  I was somewhat impressed myself really.  This would be a fantastic exercise game for people who like dancing.  If you don't believe me, try dancing non-stop for even 3 minutes.  It isn't exactly restful.  Sure, you could just play Dance Dance Revolution or something but in that game it only matters where your feet land.  With Dance Central you use your whole body, and as a bonus you actually can learn those silly dance moves they do in music videos.  In my opinion, this game is golden (I don't mean sent to the printing presses.)

Microsoft showed a Star Wars title for Kinetic.  It looked a little sloppy and the controls looked confused.  Hopefully it will be greatly improved before launch because if it isn't then it is a fail.

Forza 3 was shown with Kinetic controls.  Driving like that might amuse me for a short while but mostly I just don't care about Forza.  It seems likely that I will very quickly decide that I don't feel like holding my arms out in front of me to use a steering wheel that I can't touch.  If I were really going to play this game with Kinetic I would probably have to use a prop.  Maybe I could use one of those steering wheel controllers as a prop.  Of course, then I can just use the wheel instead of Kinetic.

Microsoft announced it's new slim Xbox 360 model.  250GB HDD, built in wi-fi, blah blah.  Bottom line is I don't care.  I'm a hardcore gamer.  I already have more than one 360.

All in all I felt that Microsoft totally dropped the ball this year.  The conference just didn't leave me very impressed, which isn't really good when trying to launch a new type of product.  I hope the Kinect does well though as I do really like the idea of it.  All it needs is a couple top quality games with excellent implementation.

Electronic Arts

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit is the first title I remember seeing.  It looks like a lot of fun.  The graphics are sharp and the game play looks tight.  It looks a lot like Most Wanted, and that's a good thing.  I had a lot of fun with that game on the Xbox 360.  I will definitely play this game.

Dead Space 2.  Looks great.  The demo was solid with lots of game play.  It would be very hard for them to screw this game up, and it's pretty obvious that they haven't.  I will definitely play this game and I will be looking forward to it.  Dark room, surround sound, everyone is asleep or gone.  Fun times, until you are too tired to play anymore and you sit on the bed with wide staring eyes wondering why everyone else seems to be sleeping so easily.  What was that  noise?

Crysis 2.  This looked fairly interesting.  It featured strong graphics of course, and the level design seemed really interesting.  There was a lot going on in the parts that were shown and it seemed to be pretty much non-stop action.  I never bothered to play the first game but I might just give this one a try.

Bulletstorm.  The game looks like it could be a lot of fun to play.  Giving points to the player for interesting kill styles and variety is a good idea, but I'm really hoping there is a good reason to earn these points.  The older I get, the less I could give a damn about getting more points in a game than a friend has.  Hopefully the points do something for you in the game so I feel motivated to earn them.  The game has a lot of potential.

EA showed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, but failed to show any game play.  I really can't find it in myself to care about a game that I have never seen running.  Pretty CGI is not a game.  I'm skeptical of this game to begin with.  I have found over the last several years that nothing ever manages to measure up to World of Warcraft.  As much as I keep hoping for something new to come along and hit me with that interest again (like WoW did in the beginning), I always just end up bored and going back to WoW.

Overall, EA did a really decent conference.  Way more than I expected from them.  They didn't mention sports once which was awesome.

Ubisoft

Child of Eden.  From the creator of Rez and other similar games, this is pretty much more of the same.  Using Kinetic changes it up a bit but it's quite similar.  Hopefully it will be fun.

Ubisoft showed Innergy.  This game is apparently aimed at a target audience of...hippies.  Really no interest for me here.  Probably no interest for almost every person on the planet.

To let people know they are creating a Micheal Jackson dancing game they had a group of dancers get up on the stage and dance to Beat It.  This was incredibly pointless and annoying.

Ubisoft's show was a complete and utter waste of time and space.  It never should have happened at all.

To Sum It All Up

The first day of conferences proved to be mostly disappointing.  Not everything was a loss, but a large majority felt that way to me.  No matter what happens at this E3, I still plan to get both the Xbox Kinect and the Playstation Move.