E3 2012: Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgment & Resident Evil 6 Trailers

Microsoft kicked off E3 with an impressively diverse display of Games and Media Services in a good, if unsurprising line-up. Firing the big gun early the show kicked off with a Halo 4 demo. This looked incredible and gave the first glimpse of the games new enemies the Forerunners played live on stage. You can see the trailer below; Ubisoft then took to the stage to demo the next instalment in the long running Splinter Cell series, showing Sam Fisher moving through a terrorist camp and dealing death like only he can. Again this looked impressive and looked like it built on the foundations laid down by 2010's Splinter Cell Conviction. Then EA Sports showed Fifa 13 and its new use of the Kinect device. Don't worry you won't have to kick and sway about in front of your TV. For this game instead Fifa will take full advantage of the voice support that Kinect offers allowing you to sub players, change formations and tactics totally on the fly. Then Quarterback legend Joe Montana was ushered on stage to show the same type of feature being used in the next addition to the Madden franchise. Trailers for both Fable the Journey and the new Gears of War game, subtitled Judgement, came next. The Gears of War game will be a prequel and takes us back to the immediate aftermath of Emergence Day and it seems to star Baird. Shockingly this was all we heard about Judgement on the show. You can see that trailer below; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBwB5JBMILA&feature=player_embedded A pre rendered trailer for Forza was next. Again this was short and it was the only thing we saw of the game on the press conference. Video content was then discussed the NBA and NHL and going to be coming to Xbox Live, like the UFC content from last year I imagine this will only be relevant to our US readers. Xbox Music is coming and apparently this is the music service that Xbox has always wanted to provide. They show an ad, but provide very few details. Nike then demoed their entry into the Kinect fitness market. It looks very comprehensive and interacts with other applications that Nike have, for example your phone may remind you that you have a work out scheduled. Xbox then unveiled Smart Glass, a system that uses your existing tablet or phone to continue certain activities such as watching movies but it also allows you to use the device during some games, for example during the press conference a tablet was used to adapt a play in Madden. This is not unlike the touch portion of the Wii U controller and so could be used in a similar fashion. Microsoft then announced that this tech would be used to launch Internet Explorer this fall on 360. Tomb Raider was then shown and looked an awful lot like Uncharted, as the focus seems to have shifted away from puzzles and towards combat. Xbox will be getting DLC first. You can see a six minute gameplay trailer below; Next for our consumption was the offerings for Xbox Live Arcade. From the creators of Toy Soldiers comes the God Of War. Like Acend: New Gods it's coming out in 2013 from the creators of Ms Splosion Man comes LocoCycle it appears to be a racer. Resident Evil 6 was the next game to appear and it looks impressive, densely packed with action and zombies although the scares do seem to be well and truly gone. You can see the Resident Evil 6 trailer below; Next came the Kinect powered Racketeer a 3D angry birds style game coming this summer. Harmonix showed off the latest in their Dance Central line of games and this was topped off with a performance from Usher whom has apparently been working on some of the steps for the game. The presentation was capped off with a live demonstration on the upcoming Call of Duty: Back Ops 2. This was typically over the top with explosions and vehicular sections focusing on the near future setting and this closed the presentation. So what did I think? I thought it was mostly good, there were after all no embarrassing kids or kinect mini game collections. True, Kinnect had element in the sports games with voice work and the popular Dance Central gets another entry, but apart from that Kinect seems to have been downsized to more bite sized arcade style experiences. This is welcome as Kinect games, in my opinion work best when used in smaller doses. Media definitely seems to be Microsoft's new baby and with the success of the apps I for one can't blame them for expanding in this direction and can see them using the 360 to test out new ideas for their next console. Halo 4 looked very impressive, managing to sprinkle in enough new touches to feel fresh while remaining true to the Halo formula and reassuring fans of the older games. The shock for me was the lack of talk about Fable the Journey, Turn 10's Forza and the new Gears of War. Fable in particular was shown last year and news has been very slow since. With Peter Molyneux recently leaving Lionhead I would have thought that Microsoft would have taken this opportunity to show that all was well but all that was shown was a rendered trailer with a player throwing fireballs into the game. This reminded me of the early Wii trailers so I hope this game turns out for the best. The downside of the conference was the lack of surprise. Now don't get me wrong I was not expecting an announcement of a new system but much of what we saw here was expected and I'm concerned that the game used to close the conference was Black Ops 2. This is a game that will no doubt sell by the bucket load but it is also a game that will be available on other systems and was used in a spot that has previously been used to highlight exclusive games. Did Microsoft not have anything unexpected to show or did they expect the announcement of getting DLC first to be a good enough ending? Personally I'd have ended with Halo and began with Black Ops, and I'm not even a huge Halo fan. Did Microsoft do a good job? Are you excited? Bored? Worried? What Games do you like the look of? What were you hoping to see? Let me know what you guy thought of the conference below.