Xbox E3 2010 keynote highlights

Microsoft’s keynote at this year’s E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo, don’t you know), is probably the biggest one in the past few years, on a number of levels.  Of course, all the big titles were trotted out, including Bungie’s final installment of the Xbox franchise, Halo: Reach, which looks like it’s adding space battles.  Other big titles on display include the latest in the Gears of War and Fable franchises.  There was even some footage from Metal Gear Solid: Rising.

Although the games never take a back seat at E3, this year is all about the hardware for the 360.  First up is Microsoft’s Kinect controllerless motion capture system, which they started teasing at the 2009 E3 under it’s dev name of Project Natal.  Instead of dealing with pesky controllers, Kinect will capture full body motion, to allow you to effortlessly dance around your den like an idiot control both the console interface and a wide array of games.  The official name for Kinect, and some of the Kinect titles were leaked over the weekend, but we now know there will be a total of 15 Kinect titles at launch.  A couple of 3rd party games for Kinect were also teased, including a Star Wars game with controllerless lightsaber duels, and a Forza like racing game.  It was also announced that Forza will be given the Kinect treatment.

Beyond games, Kinect will function as a gesture based web camera, which will work either within the Xbox Live ecosystem, or with Live Messenger users.  Most media function will also work with Kinect, including the Zune software and Netflix, allowing you to use gestures to scroll through your media.  Finally, Kinect’s built in microphone will allow for issuing voice commands to the Xbox.   I think that the combination of Kinect and an HDTV would make even Rick Deckard a little jealous.   Kinect hits stores Nov 4th, but no price has been announced yet.  A Game Stop pricing page has it at $150, which is a little higher than older $100 guesses, but that’s not been confirmed yet.

Kinect wasn’t the only hardware news though, as Microsoft unveiled the new Xbox 360, which is a long overdue refresh in many peoples eyes.  The new design maintains the concave look of the original, but it is much more angular, with an almost Alienware design sensibility.  It also appears to be about 20% smaller on each side, and the power supply is much smaller.  Along with the smaller size, it’s much quieter, and the hard drive capacity has been bumped up to 250GB, though an Arcade version will still be available.  Recent iterations of the console did help somewhat with the noise, but the combination of miniaturization of hardware and power efficiency seem to have finally gotten rid of the sometimes jet pack like sound.  With the original Xbox 360 almost 5 years old now, it’s good to see that they’ve finally gotten around to updating the internals.  I’m guessing the new design should also help with shaking off the curse of the RRoD.

The new slimmer 360 is shipping immediately in the US, and should be available in most regions in the next couple of months, and will eventually be accompanied by a slim model to replace the Xbox 360 Arcade.  In the meantime, the older design will be discounted by $50 to help clear out inventory.

Of course, those journos lucky enough to attend E3 this year received the new 360 as a freebie…

[Source: Joystiq E3]