I figured I'd post the rest.

Nintendo

Nintendo had the most to prove with E3 this year, especially after a complete lack of big announcements and that awful Wii Music demonstration. They started off slowly, but picked up speed quickly with two big announcements. I have to admit, I was very worried going into this show, because part of me suspected Nintendo would say "We have top-notch titles!" and then show off Wii Play 2 or something, but I'm thinking they want to just let that game die in a corner (morbid, but oh so satisfying). Anyway, all the Nintendo hate I'm seeing around the tubes will probably cause me to blog and rant, but I guess that'd only generate negative feedback.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii. All right, this looks fun, but I'm not sure about the graphics. Apparently, there are 80 levels focused on cooperative play (hopefully, they'll give us some online Mario action), so that's a good sign. The level they demo didn't look terribly impressive, and they seemed to be moving pretty slowly, so I don't know if I liked that. I'm sure that was more the people playing than anything and that this will be as "fast" as the old-school games. Word in the industry is, this game is extremely fun, especially with four players

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (I know this is out of order, but I mentioned that in my last post about Microsoft). And it has Yoshi now, which I was surprised the last one didn't have. Apparently, 90% of the content in this game is new, with new levels and various new features, along with a more challenging main game. Reggie and Miyamoto have both alluded to this game having a steeper difficulty than the first Galaxy, which I feel is a completely welcome addition. The original was excellent, but at times too easy. We'll see how this new one goes, but I'm quite excited to see a sequel to one of my favorite current-gen games.

Wii Fit Plus. Another one of the worst-kept secrets of E3 '09, this new game looks to improve upon the original formula, with new games and exercise modes (I think the number of new games was hovering around 14), including the ability to personalize your own plan. This one will also come bundled with the Wii Balance Board, but you can buy it as a stand-alone if you already have the board. I never got on the Wii Fit bandwagon, but I'm still toying with the idea. I can't say I'm excited about an update to Wii Fit, but I know there are a lot of people out there who are. This was a good announcement for some, but I'm inclined to pass.

Wii Sports Resort and Wii Motion Plus. I wasn't too interested at first, but they won me over a bit with some of the demonstrations. I still don't see myself buying Resort, but it looks like a marked improvement from the last game. Miyamoto hinted at what the new Zelda would be like later on, saying something to the effect of "imagine Zelda as you play some of the Wii Sports Resort games." Archery looked good, and swordfighting--well, I hope that doesn't go first-person. I can't imagine what else they'd do, but I'm intrigued by the prospect.

After that, it got a little dry. DSiWare. New WarioWare and Mario vs. DK. Well, it's about time some quality titles came to DSiWare. And that flipbook thing that people talked about seems somewhat interesting. I know there were a lot of people saying we'd never get it, but here it is, coming to the US.

Actual DS games. James Patterson's Murder... somethingorother. This one looks entirely uninteresting, and it was exactly the sort of thing I didn't want to see in the conference.

COP: The Recruit. ...Wow. I can't speak for the gameplay, but the graphics look really good. The DS has had a couple titles with really nice graphics, like FFIV and MP: Hunters, but this actually looks really impressive. Apparently, it's supposed to be like True Crime, which was pretty good (well, the first one was). I can't say I'm hyped about it, but it's impressive from a technical standpoint.

A fashion designer game. This caused me to sigh deeply, and I began to lose hope for the conference. Please, no more tween girl stuff. I left for a couple minutes when they started showing this, partly out of disdain.

Mario & Luigi 3. Many already knew about this, but Nintendo spilled a few more details about this odd, odd game. I haven't really gotten into the M&L games all that much, so I don't know if I'm too interested, but I guess the series has a strong cult following, so good for them.

Golden Sun DS. Being a fan of the Golden Sun games, my mood turned around when I saw this. After a few years of obscurity, it's finally back. I'd kind of been hoping for a Wii sequel, but this is about as good. I'm glad to see this, and I hope to see more on it soon. One more reason to get a DS soon.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. The title is still weird (though it makes some semblance of sense), but the trailer was decent. There's some gameplay footage, which is good, but most of the gameplay shots are very small, and that was slightly off-putting, especially with the other DS games having much larger shots. What I did see looked good. Fluid animation, fairly detailed character models. They might just pull this one off, but we'll have to see.

Trailer for The Conduit. I'd already seen this, so I can't say I was too interested to watch it again. If anything, I was surprised to see no playable demo. More surprising was the lack of anything on Animales de la Muerte, The Grinder or Gladiator AD. Any of those three would have been great to see on the show, and they probably would have generated a lot more positive press for the conference.

Derailing this for a moment, that was my main complaint with Nintendo's conference. They had some great games to show off, but a lot of them just didn't seem to make it into the conference, including Nintendo's own new role-playing game, Monado. Another curiosity was the lack of a new Zelda trailer, gameplay or even just a teaser, even though Miyamoto himself later confirmed a new Wii Zelda and shed some light on it and said that it was targeted for 2010. And where is Pikmin 3? This was also confirmed a year ago, and not so much as a teaser? Nintendo, really.

Wii Vitality Sensor. This struck me as extremely stupid at first, until I considered the possibility. Imagine if a survival horror game used this and, as you became more anxious, it would make the game progressively more demented. For people who don't scare easily, it might not be much of an interesting idea, but a lot of my friends are utter pansies, so I can see this sort of thing catching on there. Still, this seems like more of a niche thing for fitness games, which is exactly what it'll be used for, I'm sure.

Metroid: Other M. This was the biggest shocker for Nintendo, and for most (just look at Penny Arcade) completely turned the show around. This was the game-changer. And who would have thought that Nintendo would partner with Team Ninja to bring a new-and-old-school ****back to Metroid? Especially on a console, I figured the series would stay as Retro had done it, but I suppose Retro only has control over the Prime series. I can honestl say that Other M has me excited in a way that very few other games from any of the conferences do.

Well, that was about it from Nintendo. I have to say, I'm impressed with the way they turned it around from last year, actually making some big announcements this time around, but it's a shame they didn't show off more third-party games (for which they definitely had room), and while I'm kind of disappointed in a lack of more first-party titles here, I'm sure we'll see more on them soon. Their conference was very short-winded, but they fit mostly good stuff in. Nintendo walks with a B+.

Sony

Sony's start was a somewhat poor one, with their needless intro video set to a Queen song (at least One Vision is a good song). After that faded out, Jack Tretton discussed the PS2 for what seemed far too long. It's good that the PS2 is still going strong, but the fact that it's still doing better than the PS3 is disheartening for me.

Then, of all things, Sony showed us some charts. Not too many of them, though, so it's basically fine. Then they got into the PS3 goodies.

inFamous. Did they really need to talk about this game? Sure, it just came out, but doesn't that make it a little redundant to spend a bit to talk about how great it is? It kind of felt like a shameless plug to me, but maybe there was some other latent motive behind it.

Uncharted 2. Really pretty, and it was good to finally see something other than a trailer or screens. I have high hopes for this game, and the demo was very nice to see, especially with all the crazy stuff going on. Gun fights, helicopters, buildings falling apart and exploding... I couldn't have imagined this much prettiness going on. Uncharted 2 looks leaps and bounds ahead of the jungle-crawling of the first game. I was seriously impressed with this.

MAG. The only thing that has me impressed about this game is the scale of it. I don't think it can possibly live up to the expectations of either Sony or a lot of the people looking to play. You can rarely get ten people to cooperate in first-person shooters online, so 128 people at once is out of the question. Still, the scale of the game is the main point of interest to me, mass confusion of 256 players trying to kill each other aside. I think this has some promise, just not in the way Sony is advertising.

PSP, and a lot of it. As someone not at all interested in PSP, I found it difficult to enjoy this segment. They announced a couple of new exclusives, as well as the PSP Go (sort of; that was known about some time before the show--more on that in a sec). New exclusives include Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

And then came the tween audiences. A couple of pointless games and a lilac (pinkish, for you laymen) PSP. You know, for the girls. It's fine, though. If there can be a pink DS Lite, there can be a pink PSP 3000. There were a few other games mentioned, including Loco Roco 2, with most of them aimed at the more "casual" audience

Kaz Hirai walked out to announce the PSP Go. It's a nice-looking platform, and much sleeker than the last couple, and this model will be all digital format. Kaz talks about how they listened to all sorts of consumer feedback on it, but I'm not entirely convinced of that, considering much of the consumer feedback was about adding a "second nub" to the system. Still, it brings some interesting features to the table, like the "mood-based" music selections.

Gran Turismo looks pretty slick, but as someone who hasn't gotten into the series, I'd be lying if I said it had me wow-ed. Still, it's good to see Sony showing the PSP some good treatment, even if I don't have any interest in the system.

Peace Walker had me extremely underwhelmed, graphically. I was surprised to find that it looks like a DS title. There are a lot of PSP games with excellent graphics (Sony had just demonstrated two of them), many of them having been out for some years now, and this just does not impress me, especially given the high-quality graphics of the rest of the MGS series. And given that this is part of the main story and not just a spin-off, this is especially disappointing. I expect this is just an early build, so I'm a little less pessimistic toward it than I feel I should be.

I'm going to step back for a second and address some of the arguments I've received on the subject of Peace Walker, all of them from diehard fans of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. First off, "at least it looks better than Portable Ops." Yes, at least. At the very, very least. But that's the thing: This game isn't a spin-off, and it's something I'd have expected to be given the star treatment for the console. I'd have expected them to want to make this look fantastic on the PSP, especially showing it after two games that did.

Another argument is that "if they're cutting corners with the graphics, it's probably so they can have a lot more going on." But that is, again, the thing: Even the GTA "Stories" games look better than this, and they're open world with generally quite a bit going on. And these games came out years before Peace Walker.

New Resident Evil, exclusive to PSP. They didn't spend much time on this which was kind of odd to me. It seemed almost as though they were eager to get past it, which had me a bit disappointed.

Hannah Montana and Harry Potter. And then they brought up SOCOM and Jak & Daxter, largely getting the bad taste of Hanna Montana out of my mouth. Soul Calibur, Fate Unlimited Codes, and various other titles showed up in yet another montage.

The next bit is something I found mildly annoying: Sony fell back on FFVII once again to draw cheers from the audience with the announcement of the game being released once again for download on PSN. I don't hate the game itself, but it seems to have become a crutch for Sony in recent years.

Home. This just made me bored and disgusted, especially with how long it took to get through. Home was not very well received when it was released and time has not sweetened it much, if at all. This long-winded video did nothing to make it more interesting, and it bothers me that anyone in Sony thought this would make a viable point for their conference. I can honestly say Sony's Home video was the Wii Music demo of this year's E3, and that's not a term I use lightly. Remember, Wii Music was embarrassingly bad on stage, and for this to become the equivalent of that is a testament to just how inane it really was.

Finally, PS3 games again. Some of them were already out, which I found to be off-putting. And I'm not sure if, "Meet the new Madden, same as the old Madden," is quite what should have been going on in this montage, but that's more opinion than anything. Ghostbusters was there, which is something I am interested in, but some of the press feedback on it has kind of had me a little downcast over it.

Brutal Legend also had a few seconds in the trailer, and this is another game I'm eager to see. I think it has a lot of promise, but I'm afraid it might end up like Tim Schafer's other games and end up not selling all that well, doomed to be an obscure cult hit like so many other great games. Heavy Rain also showed up for a bit, and I'm glad to see this getting some more light shed upon it. And then there was BioShock 2, which was curiously absent from Microsoft's conference.

Assassin's Creed 2. Finally, back on full trailers and demos. AC2 looks like a great improvement over the original game. The game is considerably bigger and offers a greater variety of weapons, a much prettier setting (Renaissance Italy, for anyone unaware), and improved enemy AI and combat. Oh, yeah, and you can actually swim in this one, and the main character actually speaks with an accent. I think that alone merits special mention.

Final Fantasy XIII. A trailer this time. Not very lengthy, but it had a plot of pizzazz. I'm not sure it has me sold on XIII prime (more interested in vsXIII, personally), but it's good to see a new trailer after so long, and it's not at all a bad one.

Final Fantasy XIV. Exclusive to PS3, so they said, but then that turned out to be a blatant lie, didn't it? Square-Enix confirmed that it was PC/PS3, and that Microsoft's console was "being considered." Well, anyway, XIV is confirmed to be yet another online game, and I'm not big into MMORPGs, so I'm going to sit this one out, same as XI. This generated some buz, but I know a couple of people who were hyped up beyond all reason until they saw that it was online.

And then, Sony did the moronic and unthinkable. They announced a Wiimote rip-off. (You knew this was coming, Pete!) And, based on their quite stellar (he says, no end to the sarcasm in his words) demo for the technology, they're now over a year behind Nintendo. This is insulting. From Nintendo, almost four years ago, it was a strikingly original concept (one that was bogged down by tons of shovelware, but daring and original all the same). From Microsoft, it was an entirely different take on motion control; perhaps unnecessary for the juggernaut that is the 360, but impressive nonetheless. From Sony, it was a blatant rip-off of the Wiimote and an insult to not only the company, but the userbase as well. Sony is capable of better than this and should do better. But I'm getting off my soapbox now.

But, on a more positive note, this controller at least showed it can make console RTS viable on the PS3, and the drawing mechanic was surprisingly good.

Shameless Mario Kart rip-off, except you can customize karts and characters. And then they showed off the track creator. That had me interested, once they got going with all the different options. Terrain, water, trees, houses, sheep, sunlight and items--this thing lets you customize everything, and I think this game might just give MarioKart a run for its money, if it can manage to be as fun and challenging.

The Last Guardian. Although this was leaked days ago (or was it weeks?), Team ICO's new project's trailer looks absolutely gorgeous. The character model of the main character seems rather undetailed, but that will almost certainly change as the development process marches on. After Shadow of the Colossus and ICO, I have to say, I'm quite excited for this game.

Finally, a demo of God of War III starts. The thing everyone wanted to see, they saved for last. The demo is, for lack of a better word, beautiful. And very brutal. You don't see much that's new, except for using harpies to reach higher ledges, but the combat is exactly what fans have come to expect. It's gruesome, it's fast-paced, and it's really pretty.

Sony's felt like the longest conference of the Big Three, but that was probably because they drew it out with a lot of things they didn't need. Home really stands out, and the talk of the PS2 and the numerous montages were another point og disinterest for me (despite a few good exclusives that Sony really didn't take advantage of like they should have). When Sony was actually showing games, their conference went well, but they bogged it down too much with the unnecessary and idiotic. It'll probably get me some flames, but Sony takes home a B-.

Let's be honest: Just about everyone does one of these things. This is my first time doing it, but I feel like I should be a conformist and get this bad boy out of the way. Because I'm sure the world (or about eight people in it) wants to know what I think.

Anyway, so, impressions. I'll probably leave some stuff out (or get things out of order), because I'm mostly going by memory, so I don't think anyone will expect a ton out of this. Keep in mind that this is just opinion, so if you feel as if I've slapped any of the Big Three in the face, just take it with a grain of salt. (Another thing; if you actually read this, forgive me if I shift tense a lot. I tend to do that when I'm not writing for any real purpose.)

Microsoft

From what the tubes are saying, Microsoft was the only thing really worth seeing on day one. I can believe it. So, it started off with a too-long-for-my-taste showing of Rock Band: The Beatles. I don't hate the band, but this really couldn't end soon enough for me. Just a matter of opinion (though one I think many people now share), but I think this stuff needs to stop. I don't like seeing Guitar Hero (for lack of a more accurate term, because no such thing exists) prostitute itself to the world, and I don't like seeing Rock Band start to fall into the same trend. Maybe it won't, but I'm worried it will.

Trailers and demos next. New Tony Hawk? Hey, it was cool to see him up there, showing off the new tech (I look like the guy, so I'm always sort of excited to see the guy I'm a clone of). I think the board has some potential to reinvent the series, but I'm not quite sold yet. From the way it's described, the thing sounds very precise, so that's a good sign.

Shadow Complex. Cliffy B. and some guy I don't know debuted a Metroid-esque Live Arcade game that looks to be pretty solid and have a fairly lengthy game with some acceptable replay value and interesting bosses. Although, admittedly, the boss they did show didn't appear all too interesting. But the game looks pretty and it seems a pretty high-quality Arcade title.

Modern Warfare 2 had a pretty uninteresting trailer, but the demo looked spectacular. I don't know if I'm quite sold on it, but I've been told the first was amazing and that the second looks like a solid improvement to an already great formula. The gameplay looked nicely varied for such an early point, with scaling icy cliffs and diving into gunfights on snowy slopes taking place in about five minutes, followed by a shootout atop speeding snowmobiles.

Crackdown 2. This looks cool. I've heard good and bad about the first, but it's been mostly positive. This seems like it's taking more of an action-horror take on the formula, rather than the previous game's super macho cop deal. But that sort of thing is pretty big these days, so I can't say it's bad to see big scary zombies(?) and such.

Left 4 Dead 2. If anything, I'm surprised they announced this so soon after the first game. It seemed like they could get a lot more out of Left 4 Dead just by throwing in some more DLC every couple months or so, but I'm not going to complain, either. It's just mildly surprising.

Halo 3: ODST. I wasn't bored by this, but I can't say I was wow-ed either. It looks like it could be more of an expansion to Halo 3 than an actual full game, and that kind of has me skeptical. Still, it looks like the gameplay is still fairly high-quality. And hey, it's got a few actors from Firefly and Serenity doing voices, so that kind of gives it some bonus points in my book.

Aaaaand then Bungie dropped Halo: Reach. I know this'll probably get some people after me, but that's just... stupid. I know, I'm a bad man, but come on. Can we get past this? Bungie, the thing I liked about the Halo trilogy was that it was self-contained. It was fun and flashy, if wildly inconsistent at times. It wasn't a shining testament to the first-person shooter genre, but it was good. And now I feel like it's kind of wearing out its welcome. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but let's move on.

Alan Wake. I'm honestly not sure what I think of this. I tend to be cautiously optimistic toward horror games, because they're either not very good (Silent Hill: Origins and Siren: Blood Curse--Oh, but I could go on for at least ten more...) or more action-oriented (Dead Space and Resident Evil 4). Not that action-geared horror games are at all bad. The Resident Evil series is generally pretty good, especially 4, but I'm not sure I'd really call it horror. That aside, this looks genuinely eerie, kind of in a subtle, tense way, so it makes me both want to and not want to know what'll happen next.

Splinter Cell: Conviction. I only played a demo of the second Splinter Cell on GameCube, so it's hard to say if I'm really excited about this. Interesting demo that shows off a couple of cool mechanics I don't remember the names of (I know, really nice move... but shut up...). The way objectives and titles are integrated into the enviromnents are a novelty at best, but it looks cool. It looks like there are multiple ways of killing all the bad guys with this, instead of just "sneak in or die," so that has some potential, but it also has the potential to be MGS4's somewhat lackluster combat. (Just an opinion people, no worries!)

Final Fantasy XIII. So, yeah. This is the reason people thought Microsoft wons E3 last year, which I think is tripe, but I'll let it slide. Trailer... Was there one? I was only paying attention to the battle. And I'm not knocking the game, but after XII's battle system, stationary turn-based combat kind of seems like a step back. If nothing else, it looks really pretty, and it's good to see summons back in what I assume is a plain old "super powerful attack" role. What some of the previous games did with summons (Aeons and Espers, do it please ya) was interesting, but the summons never really seemed to grow in any spectacular way, so it can be argued there wasn't a huge point to making them what they were.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising. What is it with "Rise" and "Rising" being used in seemingly everything lately? I can probably name almost thirty things in the past two years to have one of those two in their title. It's trite. It's not cool. Stop. Okay, but seriously, this is some pretty cool news. The whole "every successful franchise is now on 360" thing was a lame and inaccurate remark, but I'll forgive them, because every company thinks they're the best ever. So, we haven't seen a thing on this, but it seems like a lot of people hate the idea of Raiden already. Why? I din't know. Never played 2, so I guess I'm missing why the world hates him, but I'm guessing it's because he's not Snake. Boo hoo. But yeah, cool announcement that a lot of people kind of saw coming in some way.

Radio and TV on 360. Like Netflix on 360, this had me totally underwhelmed. You can make the "consoles need to branch out" argument all you want, but it'll have me convinced of nothing. "It's like I'm really watching TV with my friends!" I think is the general idea here. How about we do that? You know, actually watch TV with our friends, if at all. I'm not big on TV myself, but I'd prefer to watch it on a TV to watching it on a TV in a TV, with a bunch of those silly avatars sitting in front of me.

Facebook and Twitter on 360. ...Well, at least they had Felicia Day? You know... from Dr. Horrible? Anyone? ...Guys? (I'm not very subtle, am I?) Twitter? I made jokes about them putting Twitter on it scant minutes before they announced it. And I immediately died a little inside. But yeah, at least Felicia Day was there.

The worst-kept secret of all time, that goofy camera (I know the name, but "goofy camera" sounds more accessable). All right, but seriously? It looks like a fine piece of equipment. It's not going to light the world on fire, but maybe it'll light a fire in my hear--Yeah, lame joke. Moving on, the guy presenting it struck me as a little pretentious. "There's no waggle," he says as a girl frantically waggles her entire body with no precision or skill. That's more human error, but the timing was hilarious. The video demonstrating it was rather unimpressive, but I get the gyst. It's cool technology, and it works, apparently. And I guess it'll make my whole family come down and sit with me, and my dad will ... I don't know, be my pit crew.

Spielberg comes out and says absolutely nothing about games, just that he thinks it's the bee's knees. That's fine, but I would have liked to hear about a game or something.

Peter Molyneux explodes onto the scene with Milo, which seems cool, but I don't want to talk to a little boy unless I can convince him to join a gang and cook some fools. (I'm not really that evil.) All the obvious jokes about Skynet and HAL aside, Milo seems intriguing, but not quite my thing.

Oh, right, and Microsoft also had some Live Arcade game with avatars in Karts. You can tell how thrilled I am by how totally I'd forgotten it until thinking about something from Sony's conference. (Too obvious?)

Overall, I'd say Microsoft gets a B+. They made an impressive debut, but there were no real surprises and I'm not convinced of That Goofy Camera's ability to revolutionize the gaming world. It has some niche appeal, but the whole thing screams "casual market" to me, which is perfectly fine. A couple new titles were shown off, and I look upon them pretty favorably, but Microsoft also debuted some totally pointless features in the time they could have showed off some of the many games coming to 360 this year.

So, I finally saw Star Trek yesterday. I don't know what I can say that hasn't been said already, but I feel compelled to ramble. It was good. It was really, really good. I had only one complaint with the movie over all, and that was that there seemed to be a bit of abuse with lens flares. (Apparently, Abrams himself said he would take out the lens flares if he could redo the movie.)

The acting was really good, probably because of great casting. Chris Pine played a great Kirk, from the attitude he took near the end to the way he carried himself, and even the way he sat in the captain's chair. The guy who really stole the show was Karl Urban as McCoy. His McCoy was described to me as "so good it's scary," and that's certainly accurate.

The story was a bit dumb--mostly the science aspect, but I don't get why people are making such a huge deal over the alternate timeline story. Sure, it's not the Star Trek many knew, but it's not like the classic series no longer exists. Fans can still enjoy the series they loved, and... Okay, tangent over. My bad.

There were a lot of nods to the series I liked, but a couple moments were a little dumb. (Big Hands Kirk was sort of... not that good.) One moment I saw coming was the "red shirt" thing. There's a little setup for it, but unless you ever understood the "beaming down in a red shirt" joke, it's easy to miss. The "joke" I really liked was McCoy saying, with regards to Spock when they first encounter one another, "I like him." Anyone who watched the series knows they didn't get along much of the time.

Let's see, what else... Music was fantastic, visual effects were amazing. Guess that's all there is to say about sights and sounds.

My second semester of college ended May 14, and I guess it went well enough. I managed three A's, despite a couple disappointments in other classes. No failing grades, but I didn't do as well as I wanted to (all I'm asking is a 4.0, people). Anyway, I was going to say some things about watching Supernatural and using LimeWire, but this whole thing was pretty much supposed to be all about Star Trek.