What You Didn't See

With the curtains drawing on E3 for another year, how did your predictions for the show work out? As anyone who read last week's column will no doubt have noted, my own insistence that predictions are a mug's game turned out to be painfully accurate - with the list I offered of things to watch out for being hit and miss, with an emphasis on the miss.

In fact, casting an eye back over the various predictions for last week - my own included - it's clear that there's another story to be told about E3's conferences and announcements. Many commentators have bemoaned the fact that this year's show simply hasn't produced the fireworks we'd hoped for - but the really interesting thing about this year's E3, I'd argue, is what you didn't see.

There are a few really blatant things that you didn't see - for instance, you didn't see Bungie's new Halo game. That seemingly came as a surprise to Bungie as much as it did to the media. The developer had launched an ominous looking countdown on its website which eventually fizzled into annoyed nothingness when Microsoft took the last-minute decision not to unveil the game at E3 after all - leaving the announcement of a cross-platform port of a game we already knew about two years ago to be its biggest conference announcement.

Additionally, we didn't see any sign of Microsoft's motion controller. Now, I confess that I'm not entirely clear how well into development Microsoft's Wiimote-challenging efforts are, so it's possible that it's simply not ready for the limelight. Equally, it's plausible that some clever bod at the company looked at a script for the press conference and realised that if another copycat "lifestyle" element was introduced, the chances of Don Mattrick being pelted with finger buffet sandwiches by outraged hardcore gamers would increase exponentially.

More surprising from my perspective is the fact that Sony's motion controller wasn't in evidence either. Whatever about the development status of Microsoft's peripheral, Sony's version is definitely well down the road - it's easily come far enough for viable prototypes to be kicking around in the labs. Whether it was a last-minute exclusion from the Sony conference or not is hard to say, but either way, it may have been fortuitous. The company's big selling point for its motion controller was to be how much more accurate than the Wiimote it is, enabling true 1:1 matching of actions to the screen. Unfortunately, Nintendo had shown off a Wiimote add-on block that does exactly the same thing all of half an hour previously.

Actually, once you start delving into it, there are all sorts of questions to be asked about the Sony conference. Where, for a start, was the new game from Fumito Ueda and the team behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus? Ueda's previous titles may not have been commercial dynamite, but they cemented the PS2's reputation as the home to quirky, beautiful games which enthused the hardcore and delighted older audiences. Equally, where was Siren: Blood Curse? Launching in a matter of weeks, it's an ambitious use of the PlayStation Network distribution system and the best survival horror game of the generation to date, with huge appeal to the large and diverse audience attracted by horror gaming.

The PS3 could do with a dose of that right now - instead, with Sony announcing lots of first-person shooter games and Microsoft crowing over Final Fantasy, the two companies seem to be locked into a death-spiral, grimly determined not to do a damned thing to differentiate their offerings until the bitter end. Everything you do, I can do... Well, pretty much the same, actually.

There's plenty more we didn't see at E3 - a show which, this year, seems to have raised more questions than answers. We heard that the Mario and Zelda teams are hard at work, but we've got no idea what they're working on (frankly, the fact that "Nintendo is working on a Mario game and a Zelda game!" was considered a viable headline is a stinging condemnation of the week's conferences as a whole). We know that Microsoft has redesigned its Xbox 360 interface to incorporate Mii-style avatars, but the whole value of the Mii concept lies in its clever integration into a wide range of Wii software - Microsoft has a lot of explaining to do about the planned uses of it's Xbox Miis (Xiis?) before they start to seem like a worthwhile move.

One other thing we didn't see was any sign of a proper reconciliation between Sony's various territory organisations. While some European and Japanese software made it onto the roster at the main Sony event - which is fairly strictly a Sony Computer Entertainment America shindig - the announcement of a new PS3 model for Europe was relegated to a SCEE-specific event at the end of the week. Some big European games (such as Killzone 2) also joined Japanese titles like Siren on the list of titles curiously absent or relegated to a brief trailer glimpse at the event. Its fortunes may have improved in the past year, but Sony's market is still under siege from two exceptionally strong competitors - this really isn't the time to be presenting a fractured face from the media, or burying any of your line-up.

There is one final thing that wasn't in evidence at this year's E3. Following the news as it emerged over the course of the week's events, it was extremely hard to see a strong case for the event continuing to hold pride of place in the industry's calendar. One of the biggest problems with the old E3 was that top publishers had stopped bringing their key games to the show, believing that individual showcase events could provide a better environment for major announcements or hands-on play. The new-look E3, it seems, hasn't solved that problem - and with the platform holders seemingly also choosing to move major announcements away from the show, there must be a lot of journalists and analysts coming back from Los Angeles today who are wondering if the expense associated with covering the show is actually justified.

E3 stands on increasingly fragile ground - it's increasingly apparent that if even one of the platform holders drops out, the whole event will have trouble sustaining its appeal. What I was looking for this year as evidence that all three platform holders are truly committed - that they aren't just going through the motions by saving up a few weeks' worth of announcements and popping them all onto a convenient stage. That, most of all, was something I didn't see. On the strength of this year's performances, it's hard to see how E3 can avoid becoming even more diminished in importance in the coming years.