This week is E3, or the Electronics Entertainment Expo, a.k.a. the biggest nerd orgy around. For one week all the video gaming developers and publishers get together in an undoubtedly awful smelling auditorium and show off all the cool shit they've been working on. Today marks Day 1, with Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft delivering keynote speeches. Being a giant nerd myself, I've taken on the responsibility of reading poorly written liveblogs, tweets, and other communications from the gaming world and summing them up for you, the sophisticated ObscureCraft reader. You're welcome.
To start things off, they showed a demo of Rock Band: The Beatles. It looks pretty neat, with three part vocal harmonies, graphics that change based on the era of the song being played, and DLC. Also Microsoft apparently paid absolute truckloads of money, since "All You Need is Love" will be Xbox exclusive downloadable content. However, to try and avoid the karmic backlash they're donating all the money to Doctors Without Borders. Oh and Ringo and Paul were there to say the game was great and not play it or sing or do anything interesting.
After that, they showed off some neat games mostly involving shooting things and driving other things, and if you're the kind of person who really cares about the details you won't be relying on this so whatever. Then Alan Wake, which is a neat looking horror-ish game that's been in development for so long that the first concept art was actually done by Leonardo Da Vinci. However this time they swear it'll be out next year. Sure.
They also announced a lot of dumb garbage that nobody cares about, like Facebook and Twitter integration. Why would you want to do any of that with a controller on your couch? There's also '1080p live, no wait, no download' content on demand but I don't even understand how that would work so I'm assuming there's fine print somewhere. And they're hooking into last.fm which will actually be pretty awesome if it lets you use it while you're actually playing games.
Then they went into some crazy-ass Minority Report shit. To compete with the Wii, they revealed Natal, which as far as I can tell an incredibly beefed up Wii sensor bar that includes a video camera and sound recognition. It can recognize speech, faces, and movement without requiring any kind of controller at all. So it will supposedly instantly scan your face and log you in appropriately. You can use Minority Report gestures to control menus, including Netflix, and shout commands wildly, much like the Suze does now, only it will actually work in a way that's not 'someone in the room just does it''. Supposedly. Basically if any of this works I'd be amazed. They showed off some demos that sure seem to work, including a particularly amazing one called Milo that is pretty clearly the birth of Skynet.
No video yet but it's a small child that talks to you, recognizes your face, and can even tell by your voice and facial expressions your emotional state. It appeared to understand conversation clearly but that's almost assuredly just a slick prepared demo since language recognition is still a ways off. He's hanging out by a pool, and the demoer reached out to the water, and it showed her reflection, and then splashing around in it. They had Steven Spielberg out to talk about how it was the best thing since he invented sliced bread too. So basically if it works, it'll be amazing, but that's a huge if and we're porbably seeing the next hilarious flop live..
