THE DEATH OF GAMINGZ LULZ

I was going to do a blog about the World Cup, then I decided that as much as I can rant about how poorly England played last night it's not going to change anything. One of two things can happen, they win against Slovenia and go through to lose in the Quarter Finals to an infinitely better team (Serbia...), or the Draw/Lose and go home to be ridiculed for the worst showing in a tournament since, well, the last World Cup I suppose.

Instead I am going to ramble about on of the other passions in my life, gaming. A tiny expo happened this week, it's name was E3, and some very interesting (although not wholly innovative) things happened. Firstly Microsoft decided to go mad and add a proper motion control system to it's console, which was met with a great underwhelming sigh by the majority of gaming critics. The worst kept secret in gaming, "project natal" is being tipped as the death of gaming by one "credible" source on the internet, basically it's the wiimote system crossed with the eye toy. I don't really know what to make of it, it looks like Microsoft saw the Wii as competition and decided to cash in, which would be no surprise to me, or anyone really. I've always viewed the Xbox 360 and the PS3 as separate entities to the Wii, the former being for serious gamers who want to blow stuff up and gain hit points and the later as something you break out when you want to play some party games. So for Microsoft to do this, plus add some Kinect only titles to the whole situation, makes me wonder where the future of gaming lies. If this is it, I pray to all that is holy the serious gaming companies actually make it so serious gamers can have something to like about it, and not just families.

On the plus side, they are releasing a new Xbox 360, complete with a rather massive 250Gb of memory and the rather wonderful addition of Wifi! all for the same cost as a normal (well probably the elite version) Xbox. Wifi is something I think Sony are going to have to add that to their latest version of the Playstation because I think Microsoft have latched on to something good by adding this. Although they'll lose profits on their ridiculously over priced wireless adaptor, if I wanted to pay £59.99 for an adaptor I would hope that it would connect me to a "super internet" that has unlimited bandwidth and 2,000,0000Mb download speed. Also, the amount of retards on Xbox live who think swearing is an acceptable way of disagreeing/putting your point across/saying thank you, I would expect Microsoft to pay for that for me...

Another good thing about the Microsoft presentation was the announcement that Fable III is coming out in August *Squuueeeee*, although I can see Peter Molyneux fucking it up, he tends to do that with his games....

Nintendo produced the most impressive presentation, announcing new games from the Zelda, Donkey Kong, Metroid, Kid Icarus and Kirby series PLUS Goldeneye for the Wii. I loved Goldeneye on the N64, it was wonderfully fun to play and I can't wait for it. Also they showed off the 3DS.... Something that looks cool, but whether it'll actually be any good is another matter entirely. The fact that they put in a slider so you can turn the thing off doesn't really show confidence from Nintendo, unless of course you are of the persuasion that the 3D element is merely a gimmick that they added on to a normal DS console. It'll be fun, anyway.

Can't be arsed talking any more

Love 'n' Stuff

Ash

xx