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E3 Hi all. So today we have to answer a really important question -
who won at E3 between Microsoft and
Sony? Now both companies kind of gave it their all, although E3
Microsoft felt a little subdued this year, not really
bringing it's A game necessarily. Something tells me last year they
may very well have, well, lost some confidence a little bit.
Now Sony on the other hand was practically strutting and preening across
the stage like it had just won
well, every lottery on earth, to the point where it was almost E3
a little bit mmm calm it a little bit Sony eh.
Now I can only really give you gut
instinct on this one. Looking at the live apps, looking at the presentation
and considering which games are going to be the big
heavy hitters this year, well to me
it actually feels like Microsoft won E3 this year. Now E3
that's probably going to come as a bit of a surprise to many of you given how
much of a hard time I've given Microsoft over this last year,
since last E3 going through the disaster of the Xbox One launch, the balls-up of
Kinect
and just generally managing to alienate pretty much every common sense gamer on earth.
Microsoft kind of had everything to do the year to really get confidence back
into the player base
and I actually think they did it, well, pretty well actually. E3
Sure it wasn't the most confident presentation ever and
well, we can pretty much say that Kinect is well and truly dead, given that it was given
all of
what, three minutes of attention during the entire show.
But the games Microsoft had on offer this year
actually felt like games I wanted to play. Now taking away
slightly from that, you know, anything that was cross-platform etcetera
when I look at Sony what I saw was games that actually don't have release dates
this year necessarily E3.
You know - things like The Order, well it might make it before E3 next year
but it's possible it won't. There seem to be more games which were being kind of shown
off as coming soon as opposed to having any definitive release date with it.
Now Sony certainly has E3
the heavy lead right now but that also means they have the most to lose
if they become overconfident. Showing off games
way in advance of themselves, then delaying them, it's a tactic both companies have
used to
one extent or the other but Sony seems to make it almost a
kind of running joke for themselves. When we kind of look at the line-ups which are
going cross-platform but
have some form of exclusivity on the various consoles
I kind of think to myself well Sony got a reasonably good line-up in Destiny
but I'm still not impressed with Destiny enough to say I want to buy and play
that game E3.
In fact everything I've seen of Destiny coming out of E3 has kind of made me
think
it looks a little bit like a Titanfall situation, a game that is
going to attempt to reinvent the wheel but actually is going to fall short because
essentially it tries too hard. Destiny's biggest problem I think and
problem not necessarily for Sony
is that it's attempting to have fused together the
first person shooter and the massive multi-player
gaming aspect albeit with small squads and I'm just not sure it's actually going to
work in practice. The game is looking a bit dull E3
and boring unfortunately. Pretty but boring looking.
Gameplay mechanics just don't quite feel like they're going to grab you
and drag you in. Now really to say that Microsoft won
this year's E3 kind of is a big deal because
well this last year has not been good for Microsoft really. In fact it's been
downright disastrous.
So anything they could really do to not screw-up
has to be applauded and I personally think they did well here.
Sony didn't screw-up either but when I kind of get my gut instinct behind it
and I look at those line-ups, to me it feels like Microsoft has just pipped the post a
little bit more than Sony this year.
Sony came out overconfident. They've got a great line-up and they also have some
hardware aspects there E3
with their PlayStation streaming technology within the home which I actually
thought was really, really cool.
Obviously it launched in Japan last year, we're now seeing that coming to America and Europe.
It's a great idea, how useful it's actually going to be for the majority of gaming
households
that is going to be really debatable I think. Potentially for younger gaming
families
perfect but for older more seasoned gamers where we've got our
monitors, we've got separate TVs and in many respects
the actual PlayStation is already in the gaming room as it were,E3
and the need to stream that down to another room, say in the living room,
less important. But overall, I think Sony did well.
I think Microsoft just did better this year E3.