MICROSOFT
7/10
Everyone agrees that the new Xbox Live dashboard is slick, smart and pleasing to the eye. That’s also the verdict on Don Mattrick, whose cheeky, boyish smile is something of a departure from the lupine grin of his predecessor.
Mattrick made no mention of Moore and you get the sense of a new era, following the senior staff reshuffle at Xbox Towers. Mattrick’s team looks like the collective offspring of a departed big-personality parent; stretching their own personalities and finding they’ve more to offer than they thought. Good for them.
Because this is Microsoft we’re talking about, you can pretty much guarantee a few duff dancing-uncle-at-wedding moments in any presentation. The video of young people at a party playing Lips rang false for me. It wasn’t the absence of booze and drugs so much as the presence of a Zune. Someone really ought to have picked up on that howler.
There was also the potentially gruesome spectacle of Microsoft employees playing You're in the Movies on a faked up couch. In fact, they dodged any awkwardness by being convincingly awkward and funny in a natural way. It turned out to be a nice moment.
Microsoft had plenty of talk about, albeit not as much about hardcore games of the future as you’d hope. Apart from Xbox Live and the Party thing, there was a bunch of movie content deals including NetFlix, now, bizarrely, doing the rounds of E3 as this year’s smartest deal.
What makes Microsoft look strong is a line-up of hardcore games for the near-future that includes Gears of War 2, Fable 2, Resident Evil 5 and Fallout 3. They all impressed the hell out of me during their presentations, although Peter Molyneux might want to take some tips from a kindly sales rep about the difference between features and benefits, and, although Bethesda’s Todd Howard was an excellent host, I didn’t think the Fallout 3 demo showed off the game’s exploration and communication RPGness sufficiently; and the music was plain irritating.
We need a session at GDC next year on ‘How to Present a Demo’ because it’s a science which, as a business, I don’t think we’ve perfected.