The Philippine Online Chronicles

The Electronic Entertainment Expo was this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and each major gaming hardware publisher—Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo—held press conferences showcasing their plans for the future. Over the next few days, we’ll examine each company’s lineup for the coming months. Microsoft was first to present at E3, and we’ll take a look at their Kinect-centric conference after the jump.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 kicked off the show, being played live by Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling. A few seconds into the "Hunter Killer" mission, the Xbox 360 controller died. I’m not even kidding.

After laughing it off and resolving the issue, Bowling played for nearly ten minutes straight, showing off an underwater sequence involving placing a mine on a submarine, then entering it, then killing everyone inside. Some of it was even in slow motion!

This was followed by an above-water boat chase sequence straight off a Bond film, with lots of explosions ending in an air extraction over a war-ravaged Manhattan. Standard modern FPS stuff—nothing revolutionary, but all very solid. The transition between setpieces was impressive, as there were no loading times, made even more impressive by the fact that the level began underwater and progressed above.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be Activision’s main moneymaker this year—just like every year—and will launch 8 November 2011 for most platforms, with timed exclusives and DLC for the Xbox 360.

After a brief introduction by Microsoft’s Don Mattrick expounding on the merits of interactive entertainment, the Xbox, and the Kinect, Tomb Raider was up next, showcased in a live demo. This next installment in the franchise is a prequel, telling the origin story of Lara Croft. Lara’s been shipwrecked on a mysterious inhabited island, and must rely on her survival skills to explore and escape. It’s got a different feel from older games in the series—most screens of Lara show her injured and dirty, and one quick-time event in the live demo (as pictured below) showed her pulling out a bone that got lodged in her stomach.

It’s very claustrophobic as well. Throughout the demo, Lara crawls through a cave system while being chased by the natives of the island, solving environmental puzzles in order to escape. She eventually reaches topside, where she discovers that she isn’t the first one to get stranded on the island—the camera pans out to show remains of several sea- and aircraft. Open environments, visceral combat, and survival experiences were touted as strengths of the game, and from the demo shown, it looks like Tomb Raider is shaping up to be a title to look forward to when it launches in the third quarter of 2012.

EA Sports’s Peter Moore then took the stage to talk about some of EA’s offerings on Xbox for the next year or so, mentioning that the next installments in the Tiger Woods, Madden NFL and FIFA franchises will include support for Kinect.

Ray Muzyka, BioWare co-founder and CEO, showed off Mass Effect 3’s Kinect functionality, which includes voice commands for dialogue—say the line, then Commander Shepard will continue along the dialogue path you chose—and for tactical commands for party members in battle.

All of it seems a bit superficial and impractical, as it does seem to be easier to make the choice using the controller you’re already holding anyway. Ray Muzyka tags Mass Effect 3 “Epic. Awesome. Fun.” We’ll see if that’s actually true when the game releases 6 March 2012 for the HD consoles and PC, with Kinect support of course exclusive to Xbox 360.

Next up was Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft co-founder and chairman, who introduced Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, a “core” game whose Kinect functionality was showcased. In what was easily the most impressive use of Kinect shown by a third party, a man manipulated virtual guns by waving his arms around and saying things.

If you’ve seen Iron Man, it’s very similar to the sequence where Robert Downey, Jr. is in his futuristic lab creating his new suit—seeing the components individually then assembling them with a wave of his hand. Every part of the gun can be customized, resulting in over 20 million unique weapons. You can use either gestures or voice to select parts, or use voice commands to have specific guns. Saying “optimize for close combat” results in a more compact gun; saying “optimize for range” gives you a longer barrel; and saying “randomize” gives you a surprise. Once you’ve chosen your weapon, you can test it out on the firing range, holding an invisible gun in one hand and opening and closing your other hand to shoot.

It was all very impressive at the show, but in practice the Kinect functionality will wear off in a few minutes—finetuned customizing will be much faster using a d-pad and buttons, while the actual game itself, a third-person shooter, will use a controller anyway. Still it’s a nice way to show off Kinect to your friends. Yves Guillemot ended Ubisoft’s presentation by announcing that all future Tom Clancy’s series games for the 360 would leverage Kinect. Look out for Future Soldier for all major platforms in the first quarter of 2012.

The first third of Microsoft's press conference covered third parties, many of whom show strong support for Kinect. Granted, most of it doesn't change gameplay in any significant way, but at least Kinect owners can do more things with their peripheral. Look out later for part two of the Xbox conference coverage, where they talk about how Kinect will change the Xbox Live experience.

Microsoft E3 2011 Press Conference Coverage:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Images courtesy of Microsoft's live stream of the conference.