Microsoft's new Xbox is called...Xbox One (it will surely cause confusion among casual buyers for going to something called '1' from 360). How does it look like...I don't know, but it looks like a huge bulky, 80's VCR, I never saw the design coming considering how beautiful xbox 360 looks.
Don't they understand how contrast works?
The conference was boring and as a gamer it was horrible. I know they probably saving the games for the E3 (which Sony is doing as well), but they should have shown some actual gameplay on stage. Not a single live demonstration revolving around videogames was shown. Very ironic considering Xbox was supposed to be, first and foremost, a game console.
Not everything was disappointing though. Even though the actual console looked disappointing and surprisingly huge, I really liked the controller. Not a drastic change, but more subtle refinements to the already awesome xbox 360 controller.
My favorite part of the conference, glad they didn't change much from the 360
Microsoft marketing their cloud computing called Azure as a platform that can be used to offload data processing from the console and done on the cloud. Although, they weren't clear on how it will affect the way games can be designed, but still sounds promising.Their achievement system is also integrated with the cloud, and will not be static list but everchanging on the developer's whim. Not only that, it will record the moment you got the achievement, adding some a layer of personality into those achievements which I think is pretty cool.
A big issue of this conference was those were just promises. They weren't any form of demos to actually give the audience an idea how it actually feeds into videogames.
Then there were rumors to set to rest about the 'always on' and blocking of used games. Despite having the center stage, they still weren't clear on any of these. In fact, different executives were saying different things, which makes me think...Microsoft themselves were not sure how to approach these situations and were changing things on the fly. Well, they don't have much time left to set things in stone and hopefully on this E3 everything will be answered.
So how was the reveal? Depends on what you were expecting. As someone who is into tv shows, movies and sports, it was actually a good conference and provided a good argument Xbox One to replace all your devices when it comes to living room entertainment. What about the gamer? Well, coming from a core gamer myself, I felt I was neglected.
I really started to lacked confidence on Microsoft's vision from 2nd half of 360's life, but now... I almost completely lost it. I really don't think they care much about videogames anymore as they do with the other 3 forms of entertainment. But, I am willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and hope that they come out at E3 and remind us that they haven't forgotten about the people who will actually pay 400$-500$ for the system, day one. Sony will do the same and they have an army of studios just waiting to be sent in the console battlefield.
Microsoft, you really REALLY need to step up this E3.
Extra
There were some funny moments in the show. Like the clapping from the audience were actually from Microsoft employees from the back, how classy Microsoft :\
Those who watched the xbox conference through their kinect connected Xbox 360, had a very hard time doing so. Whenever the Microsoft executive would say kinect related commands on stage, the kinect from the audience would take those responses and would interrupt the stream...talk about irony! LOL
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