Microsoft at E3 2011: Kinect and Like It

Microsoft finished up their press conference about an hour and a half ago, leaving CoNchat generally underwhelmed. Of course, for the people in there who remain avid RPG gamers, the Microsoft speech tends to be a bit of a famine, so maybe we're not all the target market for such things.

It was second in the show, but since it's the closest to Square Enix they had, we'll lead with Tomb Raider. It was a very pretty game, and looked very much like what you'd want in a Tomb Raider made fifteen years after the original, with an added little dash of bondage at the beginning. If you ever wanted to see Lara be trussed upside down, have to light herself on fire to escape, and then fall and break a rib, then, Eidos is bringing you just what you want.

Microsoft and their partners covered quite a few games, and among them were the ones you fully expected to see, starting with a full ten minutes of Modern Warfare 3, which looked pretty much like Modern Warfare 2, if you ask me. The post-Bungie Halo era moved on with both a remake of the very first game and an announcement for Halo 4. Every one of these games got a huge reaction from the crowd - call me a complainer, but I didn't see any of that stuff do anything so interesting that it demanded screams of joy. Someone thinks it's truly groundbreaking, though, or the excitement of being in the room with such a big screen really added to the impact.

Microsoft showed off their new dashboard, with an emphasis on the new non-gaming or gaming-related content to be on offer. They made a very big deal out of the addition of YouTube, and a Kinected Bing application to find games and media available for the Xbox. They also did a lot of talk about live television over Xbox, but honestly, I'm not going to get very excited about that; they still can't even give me live ESPN3 due to an ongoing dispute with Time Warner Cable that has been going on for almost a year now.

The rest was a big push to get Kinect more on the minds of not only kids and casual gamers, but the "hardcore" set as well. Games like Ghost Recon, Fable, Ryse, Star Wars (which, by the way, looked just awful, to me) and even Minecraft are looking to really make people take Kinect seriously, while a new sports game, a Sesame Street game, and a Disneyland exploration application/game will appeal to the casual and younger sets. I have to say, the last two excited me the most, but that might just be because I have baby on the brain.

What'd you guys think? Does Microsoft have anything that excites you for the next year?

Quote of the Microsoft conference came in from CoNChat, not surprisingly. It was Kappa the Imp, responding to the Sesame Street Kinect game:

[12:39] Kappa: Who else can imagine all their pothead friends going CRAZY over this