E3 Special Report: Strange Things Afoot On the 360

So the big three have fired their collective shots across each others bow in this year’s E3 and I’ve learned something very important about myself.  I must not be a gamer anymore.

Let me clarify:  I love playing video games, but I don’t seem to be nearly as excited and genuinely dislike some of the more beloved franchises on each of the consoles.

Yesterday morning, Microsoft held their pre-E3 shin dig and announced new User Interface changes for the 360 to make the experience more in line with what we all thought we were getting when Kinect came out and everything will be controlled with gestures and voice if we so please.  The highlight of this part of the conference was “Xbox Bing” that allows you to search the Xbox universe using only your voice.  For example, if I were to say, “Xbox Bing Sesame Street”, everything related to “Sesame Street” would appear for me to peruse.

Also announced was a new app for using YouTube.  This is a great new addition to the social networking apps already available and in fact might become my favorite social networking app yet if it wasn’t for the data caps that are poised to start making me change the way I consume media, but I’ll get into that in more detail at a later date. 

 I really wish that the other apps would be updated to allow us to be able to see Twitpics or follow links since I feel that they are useless without that functionality.

Also announced was live television streaming to the Xbox, which looks interesting.

Microsoft also announced a few diversionary apps that make use of the Kinect technology that were made available immediately.  I downloaded a couple of them and played around with “Kinect Me” and “Buddy Creator”.   

“Kinect Me” (or is it “Me Kinect”?) is an app that would create an avatar by scanning your face and body and creating an avatar with your face and clothes.  It takes pictures of your doppelganger to share.  It works fairly well and it allows you to get some achievements, but it has a few shortcomings.  First thing that’s apparent is that there is not a way to edit your body type and thus, I looked nothing like myself.  I am a pretty big guy and the Avatar was skinnier than anyone I know, but at least I know what I’d look like if I were to lose an amazing amount of weight and bone density.  The second issue is the fact that you really can’t do anything with this thing except share it on Kinectshare.com, so there really isn’t a point.

“Buddy Creator” is a pretty exciting app, but it’s not because of its content, but because of the possibilities opened with the technology.  What it does is scan the front and back of an object, in my case a few plush animals I borrowed from my daughter, and inserts the object in the game space.  You create a personality for the character and provide a voice and it takes you to a rather lame game where you follow on screen directions asking you to do simple gestures.  The issues with this app is that after doing the gesturing, there really doesn’t seem to be much else you can do with the character but watch it do the bizarre action animations based on the role the app gives it.  For example, I scanned an Elmo plush and the app assigned it to a “clown” personality and this apparently means that he will walk around and poop balloons and  confetti.  The on-stage demo of this app showed 1:1 body tracking and I never could find where I could do this or where I would be able to hear my voice over work be used and I was REALLY looking forward to hearing that.  If anyone knows if there is something I’m missing, then please tell me as I love this idea, but the execution seems slapped together.  It’s pretty awesome to be able to use your own things in the game space as it was shown in the early Kinect trailers.  An interesting side bar is that I tried to scan my daughter into the game, but she came out as a deformed monster baby with my arm jutting out of her armpit.  The results were so disturbing; especially with the “Ninja” character profile, I had to delete her entirely.

There was a huge Kinect push this year from Microsoft for all of the other games announced with some really intuitive control schemes being planned for core games, like head tracking in “Forza 4” that allows you to look into turns, audible calling in “Madden 12”, and weapons training in “Ghost Recon” that looked rather impressive.

Of course there was a focus on casual games and this is why I made my previous statement.  I am not looking forward to anything but the casual games like “Kinect Sports: Second Season”, “Dance Central 2”, “Disneyland” and the like.  I mean, sure, I want to play “Halo 4” and the update of the original “Combat Evolved”, but there wasn’t much excitement behind it.

This wraps up the Xbox conference, for me anyways, as I really have no opinion about all of the stuff I don’t think I’ll ever play.  I’ll try to get my thoughts on Sony’s Conference (the Vita), and Nintendo (Wii U) tomorrow, but until then…party on dudes.

P.S. Next year, hire less over the top actors M$.  They made the games look dumb.

Sony Announces Something, ANYTHING (Updated Again!)

For almost a week now, the Playstation Network (PSN) has not been working.  The online infrastructure was apparently hacked by someone and Sony decided that the best course of action was to shut it down entirely.

I'm not effected by this whole thing since I don't have a Playstation 3 for a variety of reasons, the first and foremost being that they were stupidly expensive when they first came out and the people who run Sony seem like they have a stick in thier collective asses.  Microsoft and Nintendo have a sense of wonder and fun about them, but Sony is like that filmmaker who feels that thier mediocre body of work is way more important than trying to do anything fun with it.

It got better when they started doing the commercials with Kevin Butler, but  it seemed like any time any announcements are made, it has no life, no excitement.  It's as if they are more in love with the products that they produce and the fans should just accept what they do.

A prime example of how poorly the company regards thier customers has been the launch of the Playstation Move.  It was quietly released and generated very little excitement in my opinion as I had no idea that it was even being released until the day I saw it on store shelves. 

In contrast, when the Kinect was released, Microsoft SHUT DOWN TIME SQUARE to throw a dance party.

With all of that said, it’s really of no surprise to me as to how poorly Sony is treating this PSN outage with nearly zero transparency as to what is going on with their network.  Now there are millions of people who haven’t been able to use this service for five days and counting, but has Sony given us information about when the service will be back up?  Will people get refunds for the outage that pay for the PSN Plus service or  DC Online?  How about  personal information?  Should we report the cards we use as stolen?

The answer, of course, is that they  haven’t said.

Normally, I wouldn’t even worry about this, but what Sony DID decide to announce is almost insulting in my opinion.

Sony has announced plans to release a Playstation branded tablet.

Huh?

Does anyone really WANT another hat thrown in the tablet arena?  Apple seems to have a pretty good grasp of this market, and I’m sure HP, Motorola, RIM, and all of the others out there creating these devices will do a fine job as well, but why announce the release of a product that no one expected, wanted, and named for a product line that currently has a terrible ongoing issue?

As the axiom goes, time will tell, but I don’t see this tablet business going anywhere and I feel that this was a limp attempt to distract from the horrible ongoing troubles the PSN is having.

UPDATED
On Twitter Jason Evangelho of the incredible site www.videogamewriters.com pointed out that Xperia Play is a separate division from the division who are developing the tablet.  I'm not changing the content of the article since I still think this was poor timing, but it definitely should be noted.

UPDATED AGAIN!

Sony has finally told everyone what is going on and it's not good.

The shorthand is that on April 20, 2011, Skynet hackers infiltrated the PSN and made off with a lot of your personal information including your name, address, phone numbers, passwords, and any other information you may have given to Sony.  Sony says that they don't know if credit card information was stolen yet, but what hacker can get all of your information and tell himself to have the restraint not upload your account info?

What that means to PSN users is that if they had that info in there, you may want to monitor your accounts and change all of your passwords.

You can see the official Sony response by clicking here.

PlayStation 3 120 GB
Xbox 360 4GB Console with Kinect