Megaton News

Sony dude Jack Tretton was on Gametrailers live E3 coverage just now, and when asked if this year meant fiscal year ending in March 2012, or this year ending December 2011, Jack clarified that the PSVita will not be hitting America or Europe until 2012, but should be coming out in Japan by the end of 2011.

This leaves Nintendo in the clear for this year with the 3DS, Nintendo does great every Christmas, and this year they will have zero competition on the portable front.

The list of games for the summer of arcade this year include the Giant Bomb shilled Bastion, an iPhone to Kinect port Fruit Ninja Kinect, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, From Dust, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

Perhaps the least exciting lineup ever? Yes.

Day one of E3 brings us gifts from third parties, first off Ninja Gaiden 3, the first mainline Ninja Gaiden without Itagaki, and it’s bloodier than ever. Graphically it looks like it might be a bit improved over the Sigma games, but not by much, especially given the canned nature of this trailer.

Microsoft has never been able to keep the lid on their news, and this year is no exception, via images on their site they released everything they’re announcing at their E3 conference, and it’s pretty much all Kinect stuff, except for the Halo milking.

Halo 4 is coming, surprise.
As heavily rumored, they’ll also announce a Halo: Combat Evolved remake for the Xbox 360.
Kinect Sports Season 2 is the sequel you’ve all been waiting for.
Dance Central 2 coming to the Kinect
Last.FM becomes Kinect enabled.
Kinect Fun Labs is for “crazy, cool new gadgets” presumably this is where they try to capitalize on Kinect stuff people have been making on the PC. So far this includes: Kinect Sparkler, Kinect BobbleHead, and Kinect Me
Ryse is the Codename: Kingdoms game, and it will be a Kinect thing, a “cinematic, action-packed” Kinect thing.

So this Microsoft event is going to be just as disappointing as had been expected, at least they released this early so there’s no need to sit through it.

A Forbes representative John Geudiosi spent some time with Sony’s E3 lineup, and felt free to blog about an new God of War game to be shown off at the Sony E3 press conference. He describes it as a new God of War 3D adventure, but he was probably just shown the game on a 3D TV or some such garbage, the game will likely be nothing more than what you’d expect out of a God of War 4.

Do you like Kinect? Well you better start loving it, because that’s all you’re getting from Microsoft for the rest of the life of the Xbox 360. Kotaku is reporting this list of games for the show floor, and aside from the third party multiplatform games there’s absolutely nothing to get excited about.

Tomb Raider
Forza 4
Star Wars Kinect
Gears of War 3
A Halo related title
Codename Kingdoms
Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster
The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor
Alan Wake: Night Springs (Kinect compatible)
XCOM
Hitman: Absolution
Modern Warfare 3
Spelunky HD
Ghost Recon rail shooter for Kinect
Dance Central 2
Kinect FunLabs XCommerce
Kinect Sports: Season 2
Toy Soldiers: Cold War
Fable: The Journey
Raving Rabbids for Kinect
An Unspecified Double Fine game
Hybrid (XBLA shooter)
Roller Coaster Kinect
Rise of Nightmares for Kinect.

In addition to this list Geoff Keighly has been tweeting about the Batman guys, and the Mass Effect 3 guys being at Microsoft’s event, but again nothing we don’t know about already, isn’t on every capable platform, and that’s worth seeing.

It looks like the 360 is done as a source of new and interesting exclusives, it’s time to move on to the next console generation if they want to retain any of the core audience that their platform was built on.

Just a reminder the Microsoft E3 press conference starts at 9:30am Pacific Time this morning.

Microsoft’s Kudo showed off Disneyland for Kinect to some french press who quickly put it online for all to see, and surprisingly it’s a collection of mini games, look forward to a Microsoft for soccer moms at E3.

He also showed off this Star Wars Kinect demo for E3, and it’s proving not too popular with gamers, but gamers aren’t too popular with Microsoft at the moment either.

BioWare released this E3 preview trailer for The Old Republic, shows off a little bit of everything, even the vehicles, and some cute little space battles. SWTOR looks OK I suppose, but it doesn’t look much better than Star Wars Galaxies, which was novel fun at the time, but not worth any real investment, and this looks to be more of the same, just another DC Universe Online.

1. Super Smash Bros.

2. Super Smash Bros. Melee

3. Super Smash Bros. Brawl

I rest my case ladies and gentlemen of the internet. This however doesn’t have to mean that a new Smash Bros. game can’t show up at this E3, Nintendo is going to make at least one for the Stream or the 3DS, it’s inevitable, but the picture is an obvious fake.

Somebody somewhere was kind enough to provide this early look at Capcom’s upcoming answer to Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. This trailer focuses on the team for the Umbrella corporation, I assume Capcom will release a couple more trailers before the end of E3 focusing on the other sides of the fight.