Microsoft was the first of the console companies to kick of E3 2004 - they had their pre-E3 event on Monday while both Nintendo and Sony America will host their events on Tuesday - today (European journalists not invited. Are we less than our US colleagues ?) .

We were supposed to arrive around 17:30 local time but we managed to come in fashionably late. Thankfully the presentations hadn’t started yet. After picking up our press badges and grabbing something to drink we mingled with the crowd - 99% nerd.

After grabbing a drink (beer, we are of course Belgians), we decided to go outside and take some pictures of the exterior of the Shrine Auditorium to give you and idea of the location --which was formerly used for the Oscar nominations (until it became too small). Five seconds later we stumbled upon a couple of our colleagues from Belgium. Since there are some who we like more than others, we had a very nice chat with the pleasant one, while we diplomatically left the others to do ... whatever. Unfortunately, we got interrupted all the time during our conversation so we decided the time was right to go in and take some strategic seating at the front of the auditorium.

Having front seats, we were in a perfect position to view the whole presentation and while the room was filling up with international press and trade people, we were looking around at the nice surroundings while green and red lights were coloring the walls and a huge screen on stage displayed the Xbox logo. While techno music was pounding from of the speakers we realised that Microsoft had prepared themselves very well for this event and that some major announcements might well get launched here…

Once everyone was in and sat down, we got treated with trailers of some of the upcoming titles for Xbox. These included Unreal Championship 2, Shrek 2, Full Spectrum Warrior, Mechassault 2: Lone Wolf, Conker: Live & Uncut, Fable and Star Wars: Republic Commando.
Afterwards, J. Allard started the first “real” presentation.

The head honcho for Microsoft’s Xbox started with lining up the features of its console, but soon headed on towards stuff we can expect in the near future. The most interesting ones are video mail and video chat. Talking while seeing the one you’re talking with isn’t a revolution for telephones alone, Xbox is going the same way it seems.

Another new service Xbox lovers will be getting is Xbox Live Arcade. Here, Xbox Live users will get the possibility to download retro games onto their Xbox and play them afterwards. The service is to go live already this fall in the US but no word was mentioned concerning pricing or anything.

Allard of course couldn’t do a presentation without giving some new information on the XNA project. Here, the new info was given in the best way possible: a demo. A while ago a “crash” demo was shown to demonstrate some of the technological possibilities this new platform offered and for E3, Allard could show a new one already which was based on the first one. With only six weeks of time, the guys that created the original crash demo managed to make a new one where 2 cars run into each other at the speed of 200mph and get smashed into a thousand pieces…

I must say that the technology is pretty amazing and powerful. Allard also managed to make another interesting announcement as apparantly Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is an MMORPG under development for Xbox Live and it already is built on the XNA platform and will incorporate the upcoming features including Voice chat. If Microsoft can pull it off, XNA may well be the technology to beat for the competition as it does look extremely promising.

Next up were a couple of trailers for other upcoming Xbox games -- but then some more interesting info was given to us by Peter Moore who started off his presentation by giving two guys from Bungie the possibility to show us the multiplayer possibilities of Halo 2. Rest assured that it looked mighty impressive. Realistic damage models, fast-paced action, lots of different weapons and some pretty cool-looking arena’s make it look like it could well become an even bigger hit than the original. The biggest news concerning Halo 2 of course came in the form of the release date: Peter Moore tattood it on his arm (doubt it was a real tattoo): November 9, 2004.

Next up was a presentation of Dead or Alive: Ultimate which will bring the Dead or Alive fighting game online. Personally I found the graphics of the characters to remain rather the same as in the previous versions but the surroundings have been improved quite a bit again. Everything is much more interactive and if the gameplay is as attractive as it looked in the demo we got to see (with tag-team fighting and such) this game might be very popular.

Then, two rolling demo’s were shown from Doom 3 and Jade Empire but those weren’t really anything special. What was special on the other hand was Forza Motorsport. It’s a new racing game which will be coming to Xbox and seemingly will be competing with Need for Speed: Underground. The damage models will be very detailed and the idea is to tune your car up to the smallest detail after which you can race it on several different circuits. The movie we got to see was mighty impressive and if they can make it real, NFS: Underground 2 will have some very big competition from this game.

Then it was the time for Robbie Bach to do his presentation. All in all he didn’t have much new stuff to say but a nice touch was the way they re-affirmed the partnership with Electronic Arts. In the middle of Bach’s speechs, suddenly the voice from EA (“EA Sports ! It’s in the Game !”) started shouting and then the big chief of EA came in, to present the lineup of games that would be going to Xbox Live and to add even more weigth to it, they had professional players of the respective sports branches EA has games of with as ultimate no-one else than Mohamed Ali who is the representative for Fight Night.

Ali’s entrance was the climax of the event and although a company will do anything they can to hype their stuff, our idea is that Microsoft is going down the correct road with their Xbox and both Nintendo and Sony will have a hard job in keeping Microsoft off their backs. The plans for Xbox look great, the game lineup is awesome and the overall picture towards the future looks bright for Microsoft.

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