Plus my GHIII Les Paul died.

Joystiq on a very brief “hands-on” encounter with Lionhead’s Milo: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/02/taking-a-walk-with-milo-molyneuxs-project-natal-game/#continued

BTW, here are IGN’s impressions on how Project Natal actually works. I’m interested in seeing these real world impressions. The sad thing is I don’t see anything about Milo. Peter said they were going to show him off to real people to erase some of the doubt, but I haven’t seen that yet.

Is there a better way to do it?

EA’s conference was pretty boring. Except for some stuff about EA Sports, most of the things they showed were trailers that GTTV showed last week. Ubisoft’s show was a bit more interesting, although they shouldn’t have let James Cameron talk about Avatar for quite so long, and showed the actual game. They are supposed to have it on their show floor booth, so why not show it at your conference?

Anyway, my favorite things to come out of the MS conference was the announcement of Crackdown 2 & Left 4 Dead 2, Splinter Cell Conviction looked amazing (even the gimmicky stuff), and Alan Wake also looked great, especially with how moody the game looked.

After the conference was over, I felt a bit disappointed. But then I realized that this was the culmination of two problems. Problem one, every website had absolutely crappy feeds this year. You was either a long way behind, had crappy quality, or the feed kept crapping out on you. Usually it was a combination of two of the three.

The second problem I had was the way that the event was organized. I think that Project Natal is absolutely amazing in what it can do. But if it isn’t even close to being released, and all you can show me is a bunch of what ifs and a project someone has been working on for two months, then it should absolutely not be the last thing you show. And also, when you are showing a technology that people are already skeptical about, DO NOT have a man known for over-hyping things come out to hype it up. People don’t trust Peter Molyneux to be straight forward with the technology in games and hardware.

The funny thing here is that Microsoft didn’t have the time to show off everything they wanted to. They had a Luncheon immediately after their conference to announce even more stuff. You will be able to download full games on XBLM starting in August I believe. That’s pretty big. You will also start seeing games give you unlocked clothing and accessories for your avatars, since they have greenlit third parties to do that now. Also pretty big, considering the Avatar support has been lackluster at best up until now.

Those Luncheon notes (and more) got cut out of the conference. I would have rather heard those, cut the Beatles presentation in half, and got rid of the useless celebrity appearances. Tony Hawk made sense, because he was showing off the game controller for his new game. Felicia Day made sense, because she knew what she was talking about, and presented it in a charming way. I can even buy Steven Speilberg’s appearance, given his supposed involvement with Natal. But it was ultimately pointless. However, they brought out 5 people related to the Beatles that did little more than walk out, wave, and walk away. Or look stoned out of their mind. Or some combination of both. That’s dead time. Couldn’t you have paid them a bit more to have them perform or something? Or at least not be useless when they have a mic?

But, my day ended well when I played through the whole 1vs100 session. It was a blast. We had up to 46k people on at once. Apparently over 50k for the whole event, and their “ticker stopped ticking”. Apparently they had no idea what to expect, so they still have some changes to make before the next show on Saturday. They said they would be “taking the restrictor plates off” before the next show, whatever that means.

I stick with my original prediction: 1vs100 will be HUGE. It is so addictive, easy, and accessible. But they really need to open the game up to people that have silver memberships on a system that has a Gold Membership. At the very least, if you are playing on the system WITH someone with a gold membership, that should be good. But it was a blast. Everyone I played with had a great time.