E3 2010: Day Two

The second day of E3 is over and I have to say after some disappointments yesterday I thought today went very well indeed. Yesterday’s stuff like Gears of War 3 and Halo: Reach still look awesome and there were some bits of today’s conferences which were more interesting than others but overall I really liked what I saw. While most of yesterday’s press conferences seemed to be a matter of throwing up some big blockbuster trailers and then filling out the rest of the time with what was planned for casual gamers the conferences today seemed rather different.

Of course in the year of E3 which seemed ruled by motion controls I think many were expecting Nintendo to be placing more emphasis than ever on what they would be doing for the casual market and while they definitely showed some titles that were not aimed at the core gamer I never felt bored during Nintendo’s press conference. There was nothing there that I’d call a “blockbuster” title but Miyamoto, Iwata and Fils-Aime consistently hit high notes all the way through their presentations. Of course Nintendo are known for their continuation of classic franchises but I was still surprised at just how many memorable Nintendo series’ were given new games; Zelda, Mario, Kid Icarus, Fire Emblem, Donkey Kong, Kirby. Nintendo know how to dish out fan service but that didn’t stop them from showing some really interesting new stuff in the 3DS as well and the list of third-party companies they’re working with is very impressive.

When Sony began a particular lengthy session of their press conference I thought it was doomed to head downhill into an endless presentation of the Playstation Move, even if the Move did seem to have some better applications than the Kinect has so far, but they pulled things back around and got to talking about what will appeal to core gamers. Medal of Honor once again came out looking good and Little Big Planet 2 looked amazing but the real moment that blew me away was GLaDOS’s hijacking of the event. With Valve seemingly having pulled out of E3 I had disregarded the possibility of any appearance of them at the event, let alone the appearance of Gabe Newell and a fantastic-looking trailer for Portal 2. I was very pleased indeed.

There’s only one day left of E3 now and while the press conferences are over there’s still plenty of chance for journalists to report back on the quality of the large number of demos out on the show floor, as I write this I know that there’s even a Halo: Reach event going on. I will post a proper in-detail write-up for all the press conferences in the near future but as E3 has raged on it’s seemed the amount of announcements, trailers and demos to comment on has become near infinite. Thank you all for reading and I hope you’re enjoying E3 as much as I am.

-Gamer_152