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E3 2006 Postmortem - What it means for the Xbox 360
It’s all over but the shouting.
If, in the aftermath of this year’s E3, you’ve managed to catch a glimpse of Microsoft Xbox head guru Peter Moore, you may have noticed a Cheshire sized grin on his face, and it’s there with good reason. By any definable standard – this was a very good show for Microsoft’s flagship gaming machine, both in what you can see now and for the foreseeable future.
It seems callous these days to label a market share competition between corporations a “war,” such as is commonly done when discussing the Xbox 360 and the upcoming Sony Playstation 3 consoles. If people are going to go there, though, let’s be clear what this E3 indicated: the war is over before Sony even got theirs out of the holster. Unless the unthinkable happens, the Xbox 360 is going to remain the premiere gaming console for the next three years, and that’s great news for the early adopters and fans of the system.
By now, everyone everywhere has seen or heard something about everything that appeared at this year’s entertainment expo. The titles were spectacular as you might expect, with a widely varied range of play styles available in a variety of titles. A few stood out, and as a guest correspondent for Xbox Nerds, I hope to elaborate further on some of the best of what I saw (but here’s a hint: the best game I saw was by LucasArts, and it rhymes with Schmindiana Bones.)
The point here, however, is that everyone who has already bought an Xbox 360 made the right call. I don’t think Xbox fans are rooting for the PS3 to be a failure, if only because everyone who plays games wants the best possible experience and the best possible games, and some of us will end up buying both machines anyway. It’s just that we all plunked down our hard earned dollars at some point, and for those of us who don’t get both, we don’t want to think that the next great game (think Grand Theft Auto, Halo, whatever) is only going be available on the other system. We’re invested in rooting for platform dominance. If the PS3 is great too, that would be fine, but don’t make it so much better that it means that the best games won’t be on the Xbox. And from what I saw at E3, that’s not going to be the case.
First of all, comparing apples to apples, Electronic Arts booth was a great place to see what titles programmed for both machines were shaping up to look like.
(As a quick aside for those living under a rock, the simplest way to describe the difference between the PS3 and Xbox 360 is the high def resolution capabilities – the PS3 can display 1080p images, while the Xbox 360 tops out at 720p. This has the potential to be a much better picture, but as anyone who has a high def TV who has bothered switching a signal from 1080 to 720 and back can tell you, it’s a subtle difference at best. Long story short, the PS3 should look slightly better than the Xbox 360 – and over a year later, that shouldn’t be surprising. And of course, there are other major differences – the DVD drive, the processor, etc. – but it all comes back to resolution and how things look.)
But here’s the surprising thing – if you looked at the two Madden displays, for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 – there was no noticeable difference. None. They both looked fine, considering where they are in their development cycles – but neither was… better. The same was true for the basketball games. And the hockey games. Everything looked great, equally great. So there won’t be any defections from the Xbox platform for visual reasons – the machine more than holds its own against the newcomer.
So what about titles? Is there anything that I can only get on the PS3 that would make me regret getting a 360? In short, not really. Giving credit where it’s due, Grand Turismo HD looked great, Warhawk is a beautiful flyer with a robust visual atmosphere, and Resistance: Fall of Man is a high concept shooter with an intense pace. Heavenly Sword didn’t do it for me, it looked like a “crouching tiger” influenced hard to play version of Tekken. And for their “can’t miss” concept title, Mobile Suit Gundam, I thought that it looked okay – very nice foreground textures, but the background looked barren and underdeveloped. I can accept that it may only be this one level, but why pick this to show off your title unless it was representative?
Worse for Sony, it seemed like every title they had on display had its equal or better looking counterpart on display for the Xbox 360. You want Gundam? Try Chromehounds, another mech warfare game. You like Turismo? You should already own Project Gotham Racing. Can’t wait for Resistance? Take your pick: F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon), or Dead Rising. And N3 – Ninety Nine Nights should satisfy any Heavenly cravings.
And scariest of all, it looked like every title we did get to see for Sony was running on a PC based developer kit rather than on the machine itself, whereas the Xbox 360 titles were running on the existing machines. It makes you wonder how close the Sony “apples” really were to coming to market.
All that’s left is to observe one of the biggest “quiet” announcements of this year’s E3 – that Rockstar games has abandoned the exclusive license with Sony for Grand Theft Auto, meaning that people itching for that title will get it as soon as it comes available… on their Xbox 360. (And if you can’t wait, Saints Row looks like a similar, suitable pacifier to hold everyone over).
The reality from this year’s E3 is that Microsoft is sitting pretty. They have the top gaming machine already on the market, with an open pipeline of great looking games coming, and their primary competition announced a high price point with fewer games. a
Peter Moore has every reason to smile these days, and if you’re a fan of the Xbox 360, so do you.
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