• 8-Bit Movie Games We Wish Existed
• The Great Chain Interview
Kotaku makes execs ask competing execs questions.
• Nintendo Explains How MotionPlus Thing Go Into Remote Thing

• Will Wright Talks Team Building
Recruitment advice from one of gaming's most successful designers.
• Fan-Made iPhone Wallpapers Look Familiar
• Microsoft's John Schappert Leaves Msoft For EA, Not Being Replaced
We just talked to Schappert at E3. Now EA has poached Microsoft management talent again.

• Does Ghostbusters: The Video Game Look Better On Xbox 360?
Spoiler: Xbox 360
• Olivia Munn's Playboy Cover Looks Like This
Spoiler: Clothed
• Mario Gets Played Off By The Keyboard Cat

With the DS Lite, for comparison's sake, the AC adapter had a different proprietary connector, which was a nuisance if you lost it and happened to still have your original DS adapter handy.

For the PSP Go, there's this picture, which shows the range of accessories that mate exclusively with the new handheld's multi-use port. The old PSP used a mini-USB port. You get the picture.

Well, strike that, actually. With a little prodding and stretching, the pouch could definitely work for both models. [Joystiq]

Nintendo:
• Nintendo E3 Keynote
• Wii Vitality Sensors Turns Wii into Definitive Nursing Home Console
•Nintendo Wii MotionPlus Hands On: One Year, Three Games Later
• Why the Original Wiimote Didn't Have MotionPlus
• Nintendo: We Could Be Stuck With the Wii for 8 More Years
• Power Up Charging Stand Recharges the Wii Punch-Out Board
• Mad Catz Wiimote Feels Like the Real Thing for $10 Less
• Nyko Zoom Case: 'Cause You Don't Care If Your DSi Is Actually Portable
• Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata Says He Wouldn't Use a Mac or iPhone if Apple Was a Competitor
• Old Feuds Reunite Between Nintendo and Sega
• The Difference Between Sony and Nintendo at E3
•5 Things That Should've Been at E3 But Weren't

Microsoft:
• Microsoft E3 Keynote
• Testing Project Natal: We Touched the Intangible
• Xbox 360 Project Natal Full Body Motion Control One Ups the Wii
• Project Natal Won E3, and Maybe the Motion Control Wars
•Microsoft: Project Natal Is "The Endgame"
• Project Natal on Video
• Download Xbox Live Full Retail Games on Demand
• Microsoft Says Xbox 360 Is "Less Than Halfway Done
• Where Is Xbox Live Anywhere?
• Facebook and Twitter on Xbox 360
• Netflix Lets You Add to Queue, Zune Video Marketplace Gets 1080p Instant Streaming
• Xbox Live Spillover: New Avatars, Where's Hulu and Why I Hope You Have Fast Internet
• Halo 3 ODST Collector's Edition Controller Won't Fit in Convenant Hands
• The Xbox Needs Apps
• 5 Things That Should've Been at E3 But Weren't

Sony:
• Sony's E3 Keynote
• PS3 Motion Controller May Be the Best Game Motion Capture Yet
• Hands On: Is The PSP Go! Too Small?
• Sony to Offer New Digital Copies Of Your Old UMD Games
• Everything You Need to Know About the PSP Go!
• Sony: Dual Shock Still Defacto, Motion Control Secondary
• Sony PlayStation Motion Controller Video: How It Works
• The Difference Between Sony and Nintendo at E3
• 5 Things That Should've Been at E3 But Weren't

Aaaand that's it. Hope you liked our coverage of E3 as much as we liked covering it!

When Dean Takahashi asked about the potential threat of free games, Iwata responded, "Because of this?" as he pulled out his iPhone.

Talking about the overlap between it and the DSi, he said, "The features of the iPhone and the DSi may overlap. But if we look at our differences, the areas of overlap are small. If, in the future, this overlap becomes bigger to the extent we should call it direct competition, I have to be more careful. I can't bring out the iPhone during an interview anymore. Today, I don't worry about it."

Man that's hardcore, like Bill Gates banning iPods from his house.

So if he couldn't use a Mac or Windows PC, what kind of computer would he use then? Linux? [VentureBeat]

Keep in mind, the name "Natal"—referring to a city in Brazil—doesn't really do the platform's infancy any justice. It should really be called "Project Prenatal," as the peripheral's dev kits just shipped to the first set of developers this week.

But after testing the system and getting a good look at what makes its motion tracking tick, I'm going to fanboy out a bit on the platform, as responsibly and logically as I can. Here's why I think Natal is a watershed in motion controls.

For a Motion System It Facilitates Passive Entertainment
People are lazy. If we can use a remote instead of changing a channel on the television five feet away, we'll use a remote. And I'd argue that if we can login to our preferred entertainment by just sitting on the couch (through Natal's facial recognition), we'll do that next. Is talking or gesturing more simple than channel surfing on a remote? Not necessarily, but...

Voice Recognition Is Still Promising Technology
Just because we haven't managed to perfect voice recognition doesn't mean we should write it off in every product into the future. It's getting better all the time, helped by increased processing power, and once you integrate voice into a system, it allows you to jump deeper into any tree of menus than most UIs allow. For instance, on an iPod, you have to navigate through a handful of separate screens to get to a particular artist. With voice recognition, you'd just say that artist's name.

Natal Can Support Peripherals Too, You Stupid, Stupid Idiots
If there was one thing I couldn't stand hearing again and again at E3, it was that Natal would force all gamers to mime controls in every game. Not true—at least, not for any reason made clear to me. Programmers would be free to include all kinds of controllers should they chose to. And if Natal's cameras are tracking 48 points on your body in 3D space, and its software can distinguish you from various non-human objects, I find it hard to believe that you couldn't hold an actual steering wheel to play a racing game, if you wanted to. Personally, I've grown a bit sick of tripping over plastic controllers in my living room, but I'm sure that third-party devs and hardware manufacturers will be happy to integrate and sell all the acrylic modular baseball bats you can stand.

Natal Can't Cost More Than a Party's Worth of Wiimotes
No one knows what Natal will cost. But you know what? I doubt it will cost more than $242, the amount a Wii owner needs to spend to outfit their console with controllers for four people. Microsoft was not specific as to the number of gamers supported simultaneously in Natal's multiplayer (to be fair, we haven't seen the system fully tracking wireframes beyond two people at a time). But a future in which a console's price isn't doubled by its peripherals sounds pretty appealing to us.

Natal Tracks 48 Points, Nintendo and Sony Track 1, Maybe 2 Points
Sony's Wiimote-like demo was the best physically-based motion tracking I'd ever seen. It was pretty freaking impressive to watch augmented reality replaced Sony's controller with a sword, whip and even bow and arrow. But even with two controllers, Sony and Nintendo's systems are really only tracking two single objects (perfectly) in space. So when you are swinging that sword with so much flourish, the human figure is just an arbitrary placeholder. How will you dodge? Or should I say, how will you feel like you're dodging? The D-pad, I can almost guarantee. OK...so how will you kick?

Natal Would Be Too Good To Be True...In Nintendo or Sony's Hands
Other companies could (and have) made infrared body-tracking cameras. Why are we so confident in Natal? Aside from our positive hands-on experience, Natal has Microsoft middleware/dev tools behind it. Where few third parties have wielded the Wiimote with as much finesse as Nintendo, and Sony is traditionally mute on how companies can unlock the power of their complicated hardware architecture, Microsoft launches Xbox products with the software necessary to make them work. Oh, and Microsoft is approaching Natal with 100% earnestness, calling the platform "the endgame." Sony's motion control, according to Sony, is less important.

The Coolest Mind In Motion Controls Says It Exceeds Anything He's Seen
Johnny Chung Lee, the same guy behind those crazy-awesome Wiimote mods, is working on the project. And he says this about it:

The human tracking algorithms that the teams have developed are well ahead of the state of the art in computer vision in this domain. The sophistication and performance of the algorithms rival or exceed anything that I've seen in academic research, never mind a consumer product. At times, working on this project has felt like a miniature "Manhattan project" with developers and researchers from around the world coming together to make this happen.

That quote's more than just hype—it's educated hype.

Also, if you haven't seen Lee's video showing off the potential of headtracking in displays, do so right now. Why? Because I'm all but positive that headtracking is one of many unannounced features in Natal that will change the way we think of 3D, without a 3D display.

I don't know that Natal will render the PS3's motion controls (or Nintendo's new Wii MotionPlus) completely worthless overnight. I do think there's a level of speed and accuracy (60 fps!) with which Sony will be able to duplicate a good old blunt instrument, possibly even better than Natal. (Then again, no one has actually played Sony's prototype.)

But an idea as bold as Project Natal, in the hands of Microsoft, which has been on its game, so to speak, with the 360...yeah, it took E3 in my book. And next year, when there are some actual games to see on the platform, it damn well might take E3 again. [Project Natal on Gizmodo]

Last year, Mark said the thrill of 1:1 motion it delivered was "greater than maybe any experience I've had on the Wii aside from Super Mario Galaxy."

This year, I tried the three games NIntendo was showcasing with Wii MotionPlus at its booth to see how far it's come and, this close to the final product, whether it's really worth it: Wii Sports Resort, EA's Tiger Woods PGA 10 and Grand Slam Tennis. The former two come with a MotionPlus dongle bundled in.

Grand Slam Tennis
"What the hell do I need MotionPlus for?" was my immediate reaction. It felt no more precise than Wii Sports Tennis—it simply let the game distinguish whether I was holding the racket on the left or side of my body, so I could swing backhand and forehand style (and it didn't do that so well). The abstraction level—the conceptual distance between my actions and what happened on the screen—also didn't feel great. It certainly wasn't 1:1. Not so hopeful!

EA's Tiger Woods PGA 10
Aha, here we go. Tiger Woods PGA 10 delivers more on the 1:1 front—as you twist the Wiimote left or right, so does the club on screen, which translates predictably in your shots. I kept cutting the ball way to the right, since I couldn't keep my swing entirely straight. But I felt completely in control—I knew it was my fault and it was mimicking my motions perfectly. Score.

Wii Sports Resort
No surprise, Nintendo's own software is where it shines, where the value of MotionPlus comes through the most.

What was surprising was where it mattered the most: In the dueling sword game, while my sword onscreen mapped perfectly to my motions with the remote (with ever so slightly perceptible lag) I destroyed my opponent with high speed wrist waggles, so in actually gameplay, MotionPlus seemingly offered nothing.

Then I got to archery. Holding the Wiimote vertically, it becomes the bow. The nunchuck is where you grip the string. So, you start with your arm out and bring the nunchuck up to the Wiimote. You press Z to virtually pinch the string, and pull the nunchuck back toward you, away from the remote, like you'd prime a real bow. Release Z, and the arrow fires. It's a really satisfying experience, one of the Wii games where the motions don't feel totally arbitrary. It depends on the MotionPlus to relay precisely where in space you're holding the remote, so you can aim. So you need MotionPlus—a definite win.

Finally, I played table tennis. It destroyed any doubts I had about MotionPlus. Everything was mapped precisely 1:1. If you twisted the remote left or right as you swung the paddle, the ball would respond when you smacked it with topspin or backspin. The physics, while simple, felt completely natural, along with everything else. It was fast, it was accurate, it was a blast. I felt like I was actually playing table tennis, more than I've felt like I was playing any other sport on the Wii.

This in part due to the scale of the game—replicating ping pong 1:1 is much easier than tennis, which takes place on a different scale. But the mastery of the simulation, the fluidness means you'll never go back to Wii Sport Tennis, which feels positively last-gen by comparison. Wii Sports Resort delivers on so much of the original promise of the Wii.

What it made clear, however, is that MotionPlus by itself doesn't necessarily guarantee the experience is going to be better, just because the remote tracking is that much more accurate. It's still totally up to the developer to make use of it in a way that's actually good—so while Red Steel 2, and maybe even the new Zelda will require MotionPlus, it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to have better motion controls or be better games. It just means they can be better. Way better, even, if the developer knows what they're doing.

But then again, if a bunch of games require the MotionPlus, it's not like you're going to have much of a choice anyway. [Giz@E3]

Dear lord. Eight years with no HD and a processor that won't allow the new Super Mario Bros. on Wii to feature online play?

On the HD front, Iwata says, "If we have an opportunity to make a new console, it will probably support HD because it is now common throughout the world. However, as far as the Wii is concerned, we have not found a significant reason to make it HD-compatible at this time. What is the significant meaning to the users? I don't think we should do it unless we find that reason."

Ashcraft notes that Japan stops analog broadcasting in 2011, so he's suspecting we'll actually see a new Nintendo console sometime before—so more like three years. [VentureBeat via Kotaku]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Peregrine is manufactured by a company also named Peregrine, and their namesake USB glove was shown off this year at E3, featuring a removable USB "pod" on the top of the hand (see above pic) that makes it easy to disconnect the glove before removing it from your hand. It's due for release in late fall 2009 at a $129 price point, though it's not available for pre-sale at the moment. It might work well for certain MMORPGs, enabling quick casting of spells or whatever goes on in those games as a sort of numpad alternative. Those who've used it say it actually works quite well and doesn't feel flimsy, so despite its relatively high pricetag it might find a niche audience. [PC Mag]

The controller is a plank that curves up at both ends, like a DA haircut, to make it easier to tip one direction or the other. It's like a skateboard with no wheels, made out of the sturdy plastic they use to make to non-styrofoam coolers. There are four light sensors you can see—two on the tips, and two in the center on opposing sides of the board, forming a cross—not to mention the accelerometers you can't. It's how the board detects when you do a hand grab. Along the edge are Xbox control buttons. It's a of couple pounds, not very heavy. I never felt like I going to break it, but I'm also not very heavy, about 150 pounds.

"You ever skateboarded or snowboarded?" Cody, who was running the demo, asked me. I've snowboarded. I was afraid to step on it immediately, since I figured it'd control the menu like a Guitar Hero controller. It doesn't (hence the buttons on the bottom). So I planted my feet perpendicular to the board, and almost immediately nearly fell off as it pivoted because I leaned too far forward. Leaning is how you turn. Since my balance sucks, it made playing hard.

I got back on and managed not to fall off this time. We did a trainer course, so I kicked once along the side of the board to simulate thrusting myself forward, and my onscreen counterpart zipped forward along a rail. To jump, you have to pop the board up quickly on one end by leaning back. It really does have to be a snapping motion. "Like a Wiimote," Cody offered. Turning is a matter of leaning left or right, and that was natural and easy. To do a hand grab, you have to trigger one of the sensors on the end. You don't have to go all the way down and literally touch board—in fact my knee triggered it more than once on the half-pipe section.

The carpet onstage, which wasn't luxuriously thick by any means, made keeping the board totally flat difficult, so if you have some seriously plush carpet, using Tony Hawk Ride's board is going to be frustrating, I suspect. And you're not gonna wanna play it on hardwood either, since slamming the board back on end to jump is going scuff it up like a warm of dogs on steroids ran through your living room.

I have to wonder, however, if the game's difficulty was a result of my personal athletic deficiencies or the game's—it's supposed to be designed for people who've never skateboarded. I wasn't the only one having problems playing, by far. But maybe it just has a steep learning curve—you're doing a lot more than waving a wand or clicking a button while holding another one, after all. I definitely want to play in a group for at least a couple of hours to really lay a solid judgment on this thing, more than my own skills.

In many ways, Ubisoft's new solution is like a Project Natal Lite: it's a game accessory, not a system accessory; it tracks some motion, but not much; it uses your body more for feedback than actual game control. Relieved of context, it looks pretty great, even if it fuels criticism that the Wii is become less of a gaming system, and more of a personal health appliance. Now, though, everyone will look to Nintendo for an answer—any answer—to the awesome motion gaming tech we've seen from Sony and Microsoft in the last few days. This is what they'll see. [Gametrailers via Pocketlint]

Matt Buchanan tested Project Natal today, as did I. Here is his personal take on the technology right alongside mine. We did not share our independent experiences before pasting the text below. Neither of us were allowed to shoot what was happening on screen—hence the crazy pics of our bodily reactions, and that intensely audible racing-game video.

How Natal Works
The test system was an ordinary Xbox 360, connected to small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig. There are two cameras—one RGB, for face recognition and display video, and one infrared, for tracking movement and depth. Why infrared? The eye doesn't see infrared light. And when you combine an infrared camera with an infrared emitter (also part of Natal), a room is flooded with a spectrum of invisible light that works in the dark.

Natal also has its own internal processing system handling an unspecified amount of the heavy lifting behind Natal's cleaver image and speech recognition. It breaks the human body into 48 points tracked in real time, and it can sense your whole body in Z space, or depth. In fact, on a heat map that measured depth, my hands appeared hotter than my shoulders—because they were closer.

Natal is so smart, in fact, that, if your room is narrowed by a pair of couches, it can signal to a game to narrow the level. It can see about 15' x 20' of a room, according to project leader Kudo Tsunoda's informal estimation.

Breakout
Matt: My first taste was talking to the father of Project Natal, Kudo Tsunoda and watching as his simple, small hand gestures were mapped perfectly onto the screen. He started up the ballsmacker demo you might have seen in our liveblog, knocking a swarm of balls into wall with every part of his body.

When Kudo gestured to me try it, I jumped right in and immediately started smacking at balls with my hands and feet and knees and arms and head as one ball exploded into many, like a virus, until I was doing sad white ninja jerking and jumping movements. Kudo didn't tell me how to "set it up" or what to do. I just did it. You have to realize, Kudo towers over me. I didn't have to calibrate it to my body size, or stand in a weird way for it to adjust. It just worked. Well, until I broke it at the end—it froze up after a few rounds and had to be rebooted for Mark. Hey, it's an early tech demo, so don't read into it. Until that point, it worked remarkably, incredibly well—better than I expected, honestly. The bright fluorescent lights were turned off and on, and Natal didn't flinch. My real movements translated exactly how I expected them to—the precise position, velocity—90 percent of the time, no matter how ridiculously I moved, and some of the other 10 percent might've just been my own bad timing. But the result is a remarkable sense of control. Immersion.

Mark: Microsoft loaded the 3D Breakout demo we saw at their press conference. I stepped up to a white piece of tape right after Matt, and given that I'm 4 inches taller, Natal needed to account for my larger size.

After about 10 seconds, the blue, ghost-like figure filled in. And he was both taller and bigger-handed than Matt's avatar. Natal noticed that I'm a bigger guy. It made no adjustments for the fact that I'm also better looking.

The first thing I noticed was a slight lag I hadn't intended. It's not horrible, but my avatar moved a hair more slowly than I did. That didn't stop me from reaching up, spiking the imaginary ball at a wall imaginary bricks, and then flailing around to keep up with 2, 3, 4, 5 and more spheres flying at me at once.

My avatar recognized both my pitiful kicks and swipes. And while my avatar never left the ground when I jumped, this turned out to be but an animation limitation within Microsoft's tech demo. My wireframe preview image and heatmap did leave the ground. Besides, this is nitpicking. On the PS2 I played Nike Kinetic, something a bit similar. And I always wanted to be having fun. But on Natal, even in a stuffy windowless room surrounded by Microsoft execs, I was having fun. (Disregard my stern, focused face in these pictures.)

Burnout Revenge
Matt: The Burnout racing-game demo was a little more abstract—in one sense, I almost wished I had a wheel to turn, a pedal to press, because I wanted the feedback. I had trouble getting used to "pressing" the gas, which you do by moving your right foot forward. I threw myself off-balance by taking a ginormous step toward the Frankenstein's lab of demo equipment along the wall (upon which I could see myself represented in infared, covered in boxes like smallpox). But turning my air steering wheel, I felt completely in control. A lot of that was the software—it registered even the smallest pivots of my elbows that sent my forearms right or left—but the way it responded exactly how I expected it to is what made it feel so natural. Which is the real key here. It feels natural.

After I hit full speed on a straightaway, I tried to do a 180. I crashed into a wall and died. Normally, that'd make me bad. But I couldn't stop smiling that I'd held the future of gaming control in my hands—and it was simply air.

Mark: As soon as Matt crashed, I greedily jumped in, asking him if it was OK but not waiting for him to answer. I wanted to play Natal more, and I've played a ton of Burnout.

Burnout showcases a few important points for Microsoft. First, it's a real game that's been on the 360. So Natal doesn't weigh down on the processors so hard that you can't play games. Second, it requires fine motor control.

I raised my hands in the air, mining a steering wheel. I hadn't given the system any time to scan my body after kicking Matt out, but I stepped by foot forward, signaling the gas all the same. The car accelerated. I twisted my arms. The car turned just the right amount.

Microsoft had clearly tweaked the Burnout code a bit, forcing the car to feel a bit more like a powerful sedan than a street illegal beast out of some Fast and Furious sequel. And I'm guessing that Natal's ever so slight control delay was masked by the feeling of a looser-driving steering wheel that we find in more standard cars.

So I floor it, growing confident as I wave through traffic and slowly build speed. I reach maximum velocity, throw my foot back to break, cut the wheel and toss the car into a spin. Yes. This feels right. Just right.

Holy shit.

But Natal can't work this well. It just CAN'T. I need to break it, teach this Microsoft prototype a little humility. What if I stand on my tip toes and steer eight feet in the air?

The car handles fine.

What if I kneel on the ground and steer?

Yup, it still works, save for a moment when my knee shifted and I tricked the machine—a fair mistake, even by my highly ridiculous dork standards.

Closing Thoughts
Matt: Project Natal is the vision of gaming that's danced through people's heads for decades—gaming without the abstraction of controllers, using your body and natural movements—which came more sharply into focus when Nintendo announced the Wii a few years ago. I haven't been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft's keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that'll happen soon enough.

Mark: 2010...or maybe even 2011...is just too long to wait. I want Natal now.


Kudo Tsunoda Testing Natal:

The touch strip on the neck used to be analog but now it's completely digital, so Activision says it's now "100 percent accurate." The strum bar has also been redesigned internally, so it's way more durable. I didn't actually get to hit it to see if you can feel how much more solid it is. But hopefully the DJ Hero turntable is a pretty nice indication of the quality of hardware we should expect this generation. The whammy bar has been subtly redesigned as well, and now you've got some fake chrome tuners instead of fake plastic tuners.

I've always preferred the Guitar Hero guitars to Rock Band's since I think the latter's strum bar is too squishy. What were you hoping would change with the new guitars?

It's grown up a bit since the initial reveal sprouting a glossy black panel that docks on either side of the main turntable. It holds the mixer, effects dial, euphoria button and hides the usual Xbox buttons behind a small panel up top.









Here's how you play the game, with someone much better at spinning tracks than I will ever be showing us how a DJ Hero kills it: We didn't get to use the controller to play the game, but we handled it after the demo, and it felt remarkably solid—weighty without being heavy, the plastic adequately resilient, and not too cheap feeling. The spin action itself is super smooth and effortless, with a light wrist flick sending into a fairly zoomy spin. The Xbox buttons are hidden up top in the dockable half, to reduce the complexity of the controls as much as possible. Yes, it is wireless. Interesting trivia bit: All of the DJs in the game wear Monster's Dr. Dre Beats headphones.

Guitar Hero already destroys my hand-eye coordination past medium—with buttons, spinning things, effects dials, mixers, I already know there's no effin' way I can handle this game. But I'm going to try because it looks like it makes you even more like a DJ king than Guitar Hero makes you feel like a rock god.

Price Cuts
The financiapocalypse has yielded no price cuts for ailing gamers from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. A PS3 still hurts at $400, a real Xbox costs $300 (with downloadable retail games on the way, you need that hard drive), and a Wii still costs $250. Not to mention the true price of owning these consoles—$60 $80 for a complete Wiimote (can't forget MotionPlus, which Miyamoto said yesterday could be required for the next Wii Zelda), $50 a year for Xbox Live—also remains unchanged. This is undoubtedly part and parcel of this generation's extended lifespan, but parts and manufacturing prices have fallen, so they're all presumably recouping more money than ever on their consoles. If they're serious about picking up new gamers, they need to make it affordable.

PS3 Slim
Sony inevitably slenderizes every console, and the PS3 is an effin' monster. The PSP Go shows they're still very much on board on the shrink ray as a way to generate sales. The PS3 costs them less than ever to make—just think how much more they'd save if they didn't have to pay for all of that extra plastic? (OK, maybe they'd have to pay more for the smaller guts.) But we've seen possible branding for it, just maybe. Are they saving it for motion controls?

Zune, Zune, Zune
We really expected more ZuneHD to be a part of Microsoft's E3 keynote, given the barebone announcement that left us parched for more details. ZuneHD wasn't mentioned once.

Also, Microsoft promised "at E3 next week, attendees will see firsthand how Zune integrates into Xbox LIVE to create a game-changing entertainment experience." Um, we must've missed that. Zune Video Marketplace moved onto Xbox Live was all we caught. When we asked Xbox Live's Marc Whitten yesterday where Zune audio was, he pointed at Last.fm. And about what we can expect from deeper Zune integration, we got a more or less canned response that they'll be continuing to grow the service and move toward more integration. Not very satisfying.

Live Anywhere
Nearly three years later, and one year after being assured the project is still alive, Microsoft's Live Anywhere—the service that'll let you tap into Live from anywhere—is still nowhere. Which is absolutely baffling, given everything Microsoft's added to the Live service since the New Xbox Experience and all of the "cloud" work they've been doing. Live Anywhere fits perfectly with all of that. There's really no good explanation for why Live Anywhere is still MIA.

But we asked Whitten where it was, just for good measure. He said they're focusing on the living-room experience here at E3, and since that extends onto other devices, it's for another time and place. Ooooookay. Maybe when we see that deeper Zune integration?

A Bigger, Better Wii Balance Board and More Wii MotionPlus Games
While Nintendo didn't fail to come through with a new piece of potentially gimmicky hardware (notice they didn't even have a game to go with it, and Miyamoto himself was vague on WTF it's for), Wii Fit Plus is the same old Wii Fit from a hardware perspective. We hoped a Wii Fit Plus would come with a Balance Board Plus—a smarter board that's even bigger for people who don't have Japan-sized feet. It's one new hardware peripheral we wouldn't have minded one bit.

A year after announcing the Wii MotionPlus, the game pickins for it still look a bit slim. Nintendo announced a handful of titles yesterday that'll make use of it, like Sega's Virtua Tennis 2009 and the new Tiger Woods Golf from EA (which'll have it bundled) but it's disappointing they didn't have more to show at this stage of the game. During yesterday's Q&A, Miyamoto said that it might be required for the next Zelda on Wii, depending on how widely it's adopted—so whether we see it used in more games may very well be dependent on how well it does with the initial load of titles. So it's odd there isn't well, more of them to start to really get the ball rolling.

So that's what we really missed at E3—well, all that and Hulu. What did you guys really hope to see?

The statue/model/robot is on display at E3 outside Ubisoft's booth for the corresponding video game which will release alongside the film. Up until now, specific details and visuals from the film have been pretty scarce.

For those unfamiliar, Avatar is a 3D film set to take place in the 22nd century. The basic premise is that humans visit a distant moon full of giant blue aliens using genetically engineered "avatars" that they mentally inhabit (I'm not making this up). Cameron says the film was inspired by all the sci-fi books he read as a child.

If anything, the movie will be interesting. For now, feast on the images, and be sure to check out more over at [Collider]

Asked about Sony and Microsoft's motion controls revealed earlier this week, through a translator he said that Nintendo's policy is to actually do development and figure out how the hardware is going to be used with software before making an announcement.

Oooo smack talk. But he admitted it took them a while to finish Wii MotionPlus. He also said that until it reaches that level of completion it's impossible to make any sort of judgment about them.

Talking about the vitality sensor, he said it's a device he's interested in because it's a different kind of interface, versus something you do with your own will—you step on to a Balance Board, but can you control your own pulse? He's thinking of something like that, that's hard to control, controlling it through something like yoga.

And what about Wii Speak? If they have a game that lends itself to using Wii Speak, that's something they're always looking for. Translated from PR speak that means approximately nothing.

Though, what the hell does that lead to? About 10 years ago, he used one of those gimmick gadgets that lets you control a robot with your brain waves. So he and Iwata put it on and put this on and were thinking about how to use it—like a new Pokemon game. "New devices open doors to new creativity." In other words, the Wii peripheral parade won't ever stop. Ever.