E3 2010 Round Up

E3 2010 is now over so it's time for look back at the week of gaming madness now there is time to think without being bombarded with new information. The coverage this year has been fantastic. A big thanks to all the major sites who have the capacity to report the news live. Technical problems where fairly low for the most part. Gamespot had problems with the first press briefing from Microsoft so I had to watch the feed from Game Trailers instead. Other than that things all went smoothly. The amount of raw data that goes in and out of that place must be enormous!

It's become a tradition for people to rank the pre-E3 press conferences. That used to just be the big three (Microsoft,Nintendo & Sony) but in the last two years that seems to have grown to include Ubisoft and EA. To me they were all slightly disappointing as they didn't really feature the games I'm interested in personally. Sony was the best in terms of presentation. Nintendo was probably the most exciting with lots of announcements and information. Microsoft didn't have lots to say that wasn't about Kinect. EA had the most impressive selection of games. Ubisoft had an annoying presenter. So I'm going to go with the following order (best to worst): EA, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft.

There where not a lot of surprise announcements this year, just more information about things which we already knew were coming. The new trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic was awesome. More game play footage from Fallout: New Vegas is looking great I don't think there will be any disappointment there. New information on Portal 2 showed a lot a new features which should be really fun. It looks like it's going to be harder than the first one and a whole lot more mind bending. I'm still not sure what I think about Rage. ID and Bethesda both have a great reputation for games and it looks amazing on the new ID tech 5 engine but it doesn't appeal to me enough to get me all excited about it. On the other hand Civilization V looks brilliant and all the changes they're making seem to be good ideas. No more 'stacks of doom'!

The biggest news of the year was probably the fact that the 3DS was ready and working and will be going into production soon. Nintendo have worked their magic and come up with a way to make a 3D screen that doesn't need glasses to see. They've been pretty tight with security so far. None of the cameras at the event were allowed to take photos of the screen while it was switched on but written reports from the people who got time for a hand-on session all said it worked well. There is not a release date for it yet so while it may be out in Japan by Christmas I expect it probably won't be available here until next year.

I'm going to give The Old Republic, Motion Controllers and the 3DS their own dedicated posts so look out for those.