Ten minutes before Microsoft pulls out the high polygon-count dog and pony show, and a room full of reporters, designers, marketers, and assorted geeks is being treated to a massive screen of black text floating against a white background as green swooshes swirl like happy eels. My first thought is that the text is names of current and upcoming Xbox 360 games, but after watching for a couple minutes I figure out that they're messages from normal game-playing folks, presumably culled from a message board or e-mail. This is a shame, because I'd completely buy games called "Weevil Bang" and "Change My Litter Box." Loud music is playing because if it wasn't you might not understand that the Xbox 360 is intense and extreme and somewhere a male between 18 and 35 might not buy one.

The show begins. Some alien is attacking some other alien. The narration sounds like a generic video game plot. Overwhelming odds, desperate stand, lots of gunfire in pre-rendered video. It's "Gears of War."

I should mention here that I'm about thirty feet from a screen that's about thirty-feet high. This goes beyond "immersive" into "intimidating."

A guy with the gun is now shooting a bunch of other guys with guns. This is actual game video, apparently, and the thing looks like a speed run. Turn a corner, blam, blood, move along. The graphics, to be fair, are very nice. The guy actually visibly carries all his guns on him, and holsters and unholsters them; there's no interdimensional gun portal like on most games. Not clear where the ammo is being stored, though.

I'm sure jeans are being creamed all around me, but I'm a cynic, and this game actually sums up what I've neen of the next generation so far. It's nice, it's lovely, it's kick-ass, but it doesn't feel like much more than a minor upgrade to the last generation. Is it really much better than Half-Life 2 for the Xbox? The game doesn't seem to even care about convincing me that it's something new, just that it's louder and bloodier and more brutal.

Peter Moore comes out and says the things that you'd expect him to say: the Xbox 360 is doing gangbusters, everyone loves it, and it's only going to get better. He's wearing a green shirt, and a green handkerchief in his pinstriped suit. With his greying hair and goatee, he looks like the Riddler, post-retirement.

He talks up Xbox Live Arcade, which will feature the same games you've been able to buy in arcade collections for years now: Pac Man, Galaga, Time Pilot. But some of them will be in HD — which seems pretty pointless, is anyone clamoring for high-def Pac-Man? — and some of them will be playable online, which is somewhat more interesting. Once I get tired of getting my ass kicked by 14-year-olds at Halo, I can get my ass kicked by 40-year-olds at Galaga.

Moore has a lot of sales figures about the Xbox 360, but what's interesting is that nearly all of them are about the future. By this time next year, Xbox Live will have over six million members. By Christmas there will be 160 games to choose from. I understand that E3 is about the future, but the emphasis on projected figures whiffs of manipulation, an attempt to get people to say "Wow! Six million!" while leaving off the "eventually."

Yeah, manipulation at a media event. Big shocker.

There are many, many gorgeous videos, most of which feature very little actual game content, and some of which feature very little content at all. Fable 2 is coming out, for instance. How will it be different from Fable? From the video, you can't tell much more than it will involve flintlock guns, glowing green balls, and a cootie-catcher. Seriously. The cootie-catcher is apparently a major symbol of the challenges you will face.

The game with the most depth devoted to presentation is Viva Pi&nitilde;ata, one of the few games that isn't a sequel, a first-person shooter, or an obvious GTA derivation.

Viva Piñata is about the lives of Piñatas outside of being whacked to pieces at parties. To hear him explain it, it's kind of like SIm City for paper-mache beasties. You add plants and trees, and these atttract creatures. You can buy and trade pinata accessories via Xbox Live. My skepticism kicks in at the mention of Marketplace. I'm not looking for more ways to spend money on video games, and if I was it wouldn't be on cute hats for virtual pets.

But to be fair, Viva Piñata is extremely adorable, and more importantly it looks to have at least the potential to be a new type of game.

This leads into a speech about Xbox Live Marketplace, and how you'll be able to use it to buy any form of entertainment known to man or demon, including Madonna videos. The pi ata hat is starting to look better by comparison.

The Xbox-360-specific portion of the show ends with Moore first showing off his Halo 2 tattoo, then pulling up the other sleeve to show off a Grand Theft Auto IV tattoo. The point being that GTAIV will be available on the Xbox 360 at the same time as other consoles. I gotta give him props for the tattoo thing. It's incredibly stupid, but the guy has commitment to getting you to buy some damn games. On the other hand, you'd hope he'd at least save his skin for exclusives. Apparently GTAIV will have some exclusive episodic content, but that sure wouldn't be enough to get me under a needle.

Then we're on to Windows Vista, the operating system spoken of in myth and legend. There's only so much you can say about this, because game quality is limited by the hardware more than the OS, but the news is apparently that instead of "PC Game," in the future PC games will be labelled "Games for Windows" with branding and trademarks and such things as make marketeers happy. They don't say, but I assume you're going to require some sort of approval. I can't really see Porn Panty Sex Lust Hunter 3 under the "Games for WIndows" trademarked logo.

And then another video of another FPS. Don't get me wrong here, I like games. I like first-person shooters. I'm sure I'll play several over the next few years. When you get down to it, not every game can invent a new genre, and you wouldn't want it to. If everyone just said "Oh, they made DOOM, so let's not be copycats" you wouldn't get many of the excellent shooters of today. It just feels a little silly to watch a video of a game, when it's how it feels in your hands that matters. It's like trying to figure out what sex with someone is going to be like by going through their wardrobe. Sure, it's exciting to see the crotchless panties, but crotchless panties in and of themselves don't make for a quality lovemaking session. Unless you're into that sort of thing. I'm losing track of the metaphor here.

Eventually they show a trailer for the upcoming Shadowrun game. If you're not familiar with Shadowrun, it's for people who hate it when elves don't have machine guns. It's set in a cyberpunky future where magic has reawakened and the creatures of legend live along side technology, and — well, the point is that the elves have machine guns.

After another game ("Alan Wake" which is a "psychological action thriller," which is much better than a physiological action thriller. My internal organs get enough excitement as it is.) we get to the capstone of the presentation, the big news, as presented by the big cheese, Bill Gates.

Once Bill starts talking, the presentation gets incredibly dull. He says he's a PGR3 addict, and his kids play the arcade. I guess that makes sense, I never imagined the Gates family killing hookers and cops in GTA: San Andreas. He basically talks up everything Microsoft does, from the Xbox 360 to MSN Messenger. It's like the bit in the credits of movies where they end up giving "special thanks" to half of Ohio. But then I realize — he's getting to a point.

The point is this: "Live Anywhere." Your gamertag is now your key to pretty much anything Windows touches: messaging, marketplace, so on and so forth. Presumably eventually your tag will be tattooed on your forehead and right hand, and then the Beast shall rise and armageddon will begin, but you'll be able to buy a backpack for your living Pinata before Christ returns.

Apparently there will be communication and sharing between your PC, your XBox, and your cell phone. Like, you can start a game on the Xbox 360 and continue it on your cell phone. Yay, I guess. And you can schedule a remote download from your PC that ends up on your Xbox. Also yay I guess.

They're calling this "True Integration." As soon as you turn on your box, you're on Xbox Live, connected to a world of information and entertainment. You can see who in your friends list whether they're on the Xbox, a PC, or a mobile phone, and what they're doing. So you'll see your buddy and it will show a PC and say "Playing Porn Panty Sex Lust Hunter 3." And then you can play Shadowrun cross-platform and get your ass kicked because he has a mouse and you have a game pad.

Another example, you buy Zuma on the Xbox 360 and you can play it on the mobile phone. And you can either download a little mini music video for your cell phone or tell your Xbox 360 to download the high-def version remotely. In short, Xbox Live will be less like a game-matching service and more like an insane stalker who wants to kill you and make a soup out of your eyeballs.

When I see stuff like this, I immediately think "shotgun approach." It seems obvious that most of this stuff will be completely pointless for most people and will die on the vine like the PS2 HD or the Dreamcast mini game player attachment. But, I have to admit, you don't need everything to hit. If, in the middle of all this ridiculousness about your cell phone telling your Xbox 360 to download a Madonna video, there are just one or two features that become completely indispensible, that actuallly make next generation gaming more than last-generation gaming in HD, then Microsoft is looking really, really good.

And finallly, just a little bit of Halo 3 footage. Like every damn thing on the Xbox 360, Master Chief is shiny. Salamander-shiny. Can body armor sweat?

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