Kotaku
It
s about 11 p.m. and I'm sitting in a bus waiting to be driven back to the hotels. I say hotels, because I seriously doubt they'll be stopping anywhere near the pit at which I
m staying.
The Microsoft press conference was surprisingly good. Besides announcing that the Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible and launch in North America, Europe and Japan simultaneously, the Msoft biggies had some other surprises up their sleeves.
There will be more than two dozen games ready for the Xbox 360 at launch and another 160 are under development. The press conference showed off a few minutes of Project Gotham Racing 3, Gears of War, Call of Duty 2, Kameo, NBA 2K6, Ghost Recon 3 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. There was also an Electronic Arts montage of six titles with a bit more details on Need for Speed Most Wanted.
The montage showed some pretty interesting footage from The Godfather, Fifa 06, NBA Live 2006, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Madden 06.
Surprise guest Yoichi Wada, president of Square Enix, took the stage to announced that his company would be making games for the Xbox 360 and that Final Fantasy XI would (re)launch on the next gen Microsoft console.
The press conference also delved a little deeper into some of the new, unique things the 360 will be able to do. Project Gotham Racing 3, for instance, will be able to host audiences. The idea is that you could have tournaments and people would actually sit back and watch the top drivers compete for first place on Gotham TV.
Another cool feature they showed was the ability to purchase movies and music through the Xbox 360. But this was more of an aside, so they didn t go into how exactly it would be done. Still, very cool.
All of this adds up to Microsoft s new gaming philosophy of attracting casual gamers and gadget freaks to the Xbox 360 while still maintaining their hardcore gamer fan base.
I can definitely see the market headed in that direction, and this sort of fluid ability to be both a game machine and multimedia device will help them along.
