E3-Zone: Microsoft Press Briefing

With last night’s big reveal of Kinect For XBox 360, there wasn’t an awful lot left to announce in Microsoft’s big media briefing at E3: if didn’t stop them from filling 90 minutes of awesome footage and games, but more than a little of it was basking in the awesomeness of Kinect.

There were few surprises: even the announcement of a new XBox 360 model (see below) had been hinted at over the last few days, and while the specs stand up, the announcement itself was tacked onto the end of some game announcements, and it did little to compare with the celebrity turn-out at last year’s event.

Here’s a run-down of what Microsoft had to say. We’re working off the dates as international releases unless otherwise stated:

• Call Of Duty: Black Ops drops November 9th, with an exclusive Microsoft deal between Activision and Microsoft, namely that Downloadable Content will appear first on XBox 360 for the next three years.
• Hideo Kojima took to the stage to introduce footage from Metal Gear Solid: Rising, a Raiden-led game which makes use of Raiden’s sword as the games primary weapon. Some gory footage followed, admittedly in typical MGS-style over-the-top fashion. The game features the tag-line “What will you cut? The blade is in your hands.”
• Cliff Bleszinski then played through a demo of Gears Of War 3 with some colleagues: I’m still not sure on the statement of gender politics that gets a girl on stage at E3…just to play as a girl. The demo highlighted the 4-player co-operative gameplay along with some new forms of locust enemies.
• Fable 3, as introduced by Peter Molyneux, takes place fifty years after the events of Fable 2 and gives players the opportunity to rise “from a revolutionary to a ruler” and deal with all their “choices and consequences.” The game is set for release October 26th.
• Microsoft then revealed their exclusive partnership with Crytek studios for the gladiatorial-styled (but little seen) Codename Kingdoms.
• Across 34 million copies of the Halo series sold and over 2 billion hours played on-line, Halo: Reach drops in September. The beta is already out and knocking around, but the footage shown highlighted some impressive space combat and cinematic melee kills.

Of course, the thing that Microsoft were most eager to show off was Kinect, and we got to see some of the finer points of the control system, including the voice and camera controls and some of the games that we can expect to be Kinect-ing with.

• Kinect will also interact with a lot of the XBox 360′s features, including Netflix, Zune, Facebook and Sky Player. Most of this can be interacted with without the use of a controller: logging in is done with a wave,  and while gestures will guide you to appropriate menus, features can also be selected with voice controls directed at the XBox (beginning with “XBox…”) This includes playing, pausing and stopping of movies.
• XBox Live will also be interacting with Windows Phone 7 phones.
• Kinect also features Video Kinect video-chat, a feature which won’t require an XBox 360 but will also work with Windows Live Messenger. This feature also showed off the hardware’s motion tracker, which turned the camera to keep individuals in focus.
• ESPN have signed an exclusive contract with XBox Live to provide content, which can also be accessed with Kinect.
• Several games were shown off with full demos for Kinect: Kinectimals, an interactive animal featuring over 40 animals and 30 activities; Kinect Sports from Rare Studios which includes soccer, bowling, table tennis, boxing, volleyball and other track & field events); Kinect Joy Ride, an animated racing game using avatars; Kinect Adventure, a mix of gaming styles including platforming that involves guiding a vehicle as a party to collect tokens. Also shown off were Ubisoft‘s Your Shape which tracks body shape and size for an intensive workout and Dance Central from MTV/Harmonix, a dance-themed take on rhythm-based music games that expects your whole body to follow the moves on screen.
• Kinect for XBox 360 will ship in North America on November 4th, with 15 launch titles.
• Microsoft have also partnered with LucasArts for a Star Wars themed game utilising Kinect controls, due for 2011.
• New Forza Motorsport content will also launch in 2011 allowing gamers to get closer to cars than ever before.

Last but not least was the announcement of the new XBox 360 console, a new, smaller design in black and with sharper angles than the current model. The new console ships to stores today and will be available later this week, with built-in wi-fi, 250gb hard drive and priced at $299.

Updated June 15th: The new XBox 360 model will be available July 16th in the UK and Ireland, priced at £199/€249.

Let us know what you think of the new design below, as well as some of Microsoft’s other big announcements, and drop back tomorrow when we’ll have updates on what Nintendo and Sony have brought to the table, including (hopefully) Zelda Wii and PlayStation Move.