Microsoft just held their E3 presentation and of course, a few bombshells were dropped, including plenty of screens for your viewing pleasure along with a centered massive screen for the extra awesome videos and trailers. Here’s a somewhat brief play by play on what happened.
THQ, Eidos, EA, Activision and SEGA signed up to support Games for Windows – LIVE. 60 games will be coming out this holiday season that’ll support Games for Windows including Crysis, Hellgate: London, World in Conflict, UT3 and BioShock. It’ll be built straight into the Unreal Engine 3 too.
Gears of War is officially heading to PC – 5 new single-player "sections", achievements, game editor, and a new multiplayer mode. It’ll be playable on XP and Vista. One of the new sequences saw a battle with the Brumak. This thing is huge – Marcus started to shoot at both of its arm-mounted cannons and eventually at its rocket launcher mounted on its head. Pretty fast frame rates too.
Project Gotham Racing 4 – new addition of motorcycles, and locations set in Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Macau — all of which will feature dynamic weather changes. 10 locations in all. The game will ship with a shareable media aspect where you can share videos and photos with pals. The frame rates looked good.
GTA IV footage, it just showed the already released "Special Someone" trailer. By spring 2008, two exclusive 360 downloadable episodes will be out, adding, "many hours" of new gameplay.
Lost Odyssey footage. Seemed somewhat neat but nothing really jumped out at me.
Call of Duty 4 footage, both the E3 trailer and two clips of in-game footage set in Pripyat. The in-game footage blew me away; I highly suggest checking it out. You were partnered up with a fellow Russian sniper to do some scouting. After clearing a house, both of you went to a rather abandoned field but in the distance, an enemy platoon with a few tanks started to approach. You can definitely feel the tension because obviously if you stood up, you would die so you and your pal had to literally slowly crawl into the approaching army and avoid getting detected. It was pretty exciting to watch. There will be an exclusive 360 multiplayer beta too.
Resident Evil 5 for Xbox 360 and it’s coming out next year. It showed zombies, angry villagers, desert-like conditions (kind of like the film "Black Hawk Down") and more zombies. This is probably the biggest surprise during the presentation; it totally caught me off-guard.
Assassin’s Creed – Jade showcased a new video. For the game’s combat, you can use the enemy’s animations to counter attacks and blows. Also you switch weapons on-the-fly for different combos (short sword for the quick stabs at the knee and other limbs, for example). On-the-fly chases too (people can be thrown at you and you have to dodge them too). You can throw enemies into the environment for a quick break. The demo had a few glitches though (floating dead bodies). You can push around beggars if they’re annoying you. NPCs will be highlighted in white to show if you can interact with them.
Another look at Halo Wars. A live-action trailer showcasing massive armies suiting up to roll out. It didn’t really pump me up as I thought it would.
Halo 3 special edition Xbox 360 console, it’ll launch with Halo 3. Kind of funny, no one seemed interested in it.
Microsoft closed with new Halo 3 footage. Showcased forest environments along with a snowy environment. Basically the video had a little bit of everything in it — Cortana, Master Chief fighting some massive robotic spider and things blowing up.
