New Xboxage

So E3 - is going on right now. A "grown-up" E3 without the booth babes and with Bill Gates. Shows you how important and "Hollywood" the video game industry has become.

Big new systems - Wii (worst name ever), and PS3 (most expensive system ever and I don't care if it has a Blu-Ray - useless!)

Big new controllers - Wii's handheld light activated thingy which would likely be useful for A) baseball games and B) sword swinging games, and Sony's also light activated controller which looks EXACTLY like the old controller. Thanks for the huge boost of originality Sony - it isn't not even boomerang shaped! Same controller since 1995 - lame.

Gestures in a video game - didn't take long for the 360 to jump on that train... "TORONTO --(Business Wire)-- May 10, 2006 -- GestureTek Inc., the world leader in computer vision for gesture-based control of information and entertainment systems, today announced that Microsoft has licensed GestureTek's video gesture control technology for use with the Xbox Live Vision camera for Xbox 360." You can read more about that announcement here.

And Big new games - Halo 3 and GTA IV.

I've decided Halo 3 is basically not a video game anymore. With its 2 minute trailer displayed today at E3, the fact that it is a rather linear (i.e. non-original) shooter with dramatic cut scenes and rather good sound for a video game just screams Hollywood.

So is that bad? Well for game originality it is. But in my opinion, Halo 3 is like a summer blockbuster popcorn movie. Fluffy with no substance, but which still attracts a big audience, which in and of itself isn't necessarily bad. There are indepth games out there (perhaps less than there used to be, or perhaps not) such as Oblivion which I will be reviewing later this month on NEW R4nt - make sure to stop back and check it out at R4NT's mainpage

In the mean time, check out the E3 trailer of Halo 3 here courtesty of Gamespot.

Bottom line: Sony is losing bigtime.

And I'm not the only one to think so: Wired agrees