E3 has arrived now and it’s already looking amazing. The convention has started with a conference by Microsoft which has included 10 new releases that haven’t previously been announced.

The first thing was The Beatles: Rock Band which was not one of the 10 games, but they had a huge section of trailers aswell as a section from Paul McCartney and Ringo Star.

The first game to be announced was Tony Hawks Ride which is a brand new skating game that gives you even more control by having a skate board controller. Similar to the Wii balance board the skateboard controller is in the shape of a skateboard with motion sensors and touch sensitive pads which registers your movements and reacts in game. Overall it looks like an awesome game, but can it compete with Skate 2?

After that it cut into the new trailer for the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 game, not entirely sure if that was one of the 10 because the trailer has already been released previously this month. Although, after that they had some unseen in-game footage which involved a guy playing live on the stage part for the new game.

The level he played sounded a bit like the sniper level in the original game because he seems to be following another soldier up an icy mountain edge. After he managed to climb to the top, it skipped a bit and jumped to some shooting where a new gun was shown off which featured a motion tracker attachment, pretty cool.

They also announced that 2 new map packs will be released with Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, exclusive to Xbox Live.

Next game up was Final Fantasy 13 which is the first Final Fantasy game to come to the Xbox 360. A small introduction was then followed by the first look at the new Final Fantasy game. Before they left the stage they announced that they will be targeting a spring 2010 release.

After that that announced that all the following game will be exclusive to the Xbox 360.

Next up onto the stage was Gears of War creators, Epic who announced that they will be releasing their first Xbox arcade game called Shadow Complex which is due for release onto the Xbox Live Marketplace this summer. This new arcade game features a whole bunch of shooting and using the environment to kill your enemies, aswell as a 10 hour long story line.

The next game was another Xbox Live Arcade game which allows you to play with your Xbox 360 Avatar. Joy Ride is it’s name and it allows you to drive you avatar like crazy against other gamers similar to the likes of Mario Kart Wii. This new game will be free to download and free to play. You can then create new tracks and upgrade your cars by buying addons online. This new game is coming to the Xbox Live Marketplace in Winter 2009.

The next few minutes were taken up with trailers for some upcoming releases. The first one was a new trailer for Crackdown 2, nothing else was said about this and it just went straight to the next trailer. The next one was a huge surprise to myself, and that was Left 4 Dead 2 which looked exactly the same as the first one, except this one has brand new characters, new weapons, including a range of melee weapons as you can see from the image, aswell as new campaigns. With this trailer came a release date, November 17th, just under a year after the release of the first game.

After those 2 came another trailer, this time for Splinter Cell Conviction. This was followed by a talk from some guys at Ubisoft who showed off a demo exclusive to E3. They explained that this new game will happen in real time and each level is like a sandbox allowing you to infiltrate each place whatever way you want to, either in the shadows where you can do the most damage, or in the light. One way you can get into the dark is by using a brand new gadget, the EMP grenade which will knock out all electrical objects within a certain area.

They ended by saying that the game will be released this autumn exclusively for the Xbox 360.

This was then followed by a quick snip it of driving from Forza Motorsport 3 which looks absolutely amazing and they say that using it’s new graphics engine, it will be the best looking driving game on every console. This then lead into an introduction to the game by one of the developers who talked about the features that would be included, for example, a video editor allowing you to share footage over Xbox Live of your racing, there will be a hufe aresnal of over 400 cars aswell as a huge online community to play against. It ended by him saying that the game will ship October 2009.

This was followed directly by Halo ODST which involved a rather long demo where the player would occasionally drop in with a bit of information about the back story and the type of character you play. Basically, you play as an ODST (orbital drop shock trooper) fighting the same enemies as the original Halo games, but these events take place weeks before the events on Halo 3. You get a range of new weapons and new features that were never available to the Spartans.

After this came a rather strange quick video which looked like it was still Halo ODST, but it wasn’t, it was a new game called Halo Reach, no real gameplay was shown, but we were told that when you buy Halo ODST, you would get a beta code to the online multiplayer of Halo Reach which is set for release in Autumn 2010. As for Halo 3: ODST, that is due for release on September 22nd 2009.

This was then followed up by Alan Wake, now this game has been in development for a very long time and now it’s finally getting close to release. They started with a short introduction which was then followed by a demo played by one of the devlopers. Alan Wake is a writer who is writing his latest book, a supernatural thriller, which begins to come to life. He has to find the lost pages of his booked and save himself and his wife. They ended by saying that Alan Wake will be released in Spring 2010.

This was the end of the major game announcement segment of the conference, they then moved onto the actual Xbox feature announcements which I will get onto in another post because this one is already quite lengthy. However, part way through the feature announcements, they brought on the creator of the Metal Gear Solid franchise to announce that the next game, Metal Gear Solid Rising, will be released onto the Xbox 360, and in a very staged way, he also announced that the main character will not be Solid Snake, but someone new.

This is post 1 of 2 for the current E3 news, I’ll be posting the second one that will cover all of the new features announced in the next few hours.

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