Microsoft
These guys are the home to all the franchises I could give a shit about. Fallout 3, Fable 2, Gears of War 2. Stuff I don't enjoy on a console that I'd need to repair three times. Xbox Live is getting a Portal sequel, but that seems unlikely to show up as a genuine exclusive. The 360 is headed toward third place, end of story.

And ho ho ho, how about the Mii Too avatar thing? What a colossal joke. How must the 360 fanboys feel now that their console is just as gay as the Wii. This is typical Microsoft... copy somebody else's super-successful feature, and do a shitty job at it, just so they can theoretically remove a bullet point from a competitor's feature list.

After all the laughing, all the It Will Never Work from the Xbox camp, after the Wii was revealed, they sure have done a fantastic job at switching the business plan to better emulate Nintendo, eh? Somehow, someway, the 360 is now just so casual. Look, 360 Avatars playing Uno! Holy fucking shit! Get in line now, families! It's an obvious soulless fraud.

The absolute best thing to come out of Microsoft's presser was the Netflix deal. If you subscribe to Netflix and Xbox Live, you'll be able to download/watch your movies via your 360. This is a fantastic move, and like Apple TV, will be ultimately heralded as ahead of its time. Of course, if the 360 had any significant market share among the US population, this might actually mean something. We all want the cable companies to shit themselves; we all want to break out of their No Competition pricing schemes... things like this inch us ever so closely in that direction.

And what happened to the price cut? I am so confused. So Microsoft intends to blow out the remaining 20gig models for $300, and then once those are gone, revert back to pushing the new 60gig model as the new standard at $350? As Dubious Quality noted, that's in effect a price increase! Meanwhile, there's the Wii still impossible to find in stock at $250.

Also, nice job ripping off Apple AND Sony on the new Xbox Live menus. How do these assclowns sleep at night.

Nintendo
Speaking of sleeping...

For months, Nintendo has teased a major game for the fall, and as I predicted, iiiiiiiiiiiiitttt's Animal Crossing! Now, I fucking love Animal Crossing, and it is in fact super-popular the world over, but it does seem slightly disappointing that this is it for 2008 as far as big Nintendo first-party franchises are concerned. Animal Crossing: City Folk will sell like crazy. You will need to pre-order it. But it is a very polarizing game, and if you don't like it, you don't have a big new Mario or Zelda or Starfox or whatever to fall back on. Betcha we finally get both EarthBound and Mario RPG on the Virtual Console this fall.

Although Nintendo did pack a trojan horse in with ACCF: Wii Speak. Animal Crossing will come with a little speaker/mic doohickey that sits on your sensor bar and enables live online voice chat. We should expect some kind of Friend Voice Chat Channel, I should think.

Private to Nintendo: Re-release Smash Brawl with tuned-up online play and Wii Speak voice chat and I guarantee we'll all go buy the game again.

Weird news... a new little Remote plug-in will help improve the Remote's motion sensing abilities (you mean it was bad before?). This peripheral will come with - wait for it - Wii Sports Resort, a Wii Sports sequel that they would have been stupid not to develop.

The final Wii game revealed was Wii Music. Sigh.

THEY DID NOT MENTION FATAL FUCKING FRAME. (At least not in any reports I read.) I hope it's on the show floor. If not, then I can't forsee an American release this year... and that is unacceptable.

So that's a whole list of exactly what we expected, and when your E3 conference delivers nothing particularly surprising, that's a problem. The millions they will make off of Wii Music and Sports Resort and Animal Crossing will make up for the lack, I'm sure.

Oh, one surprise: GTA on DS. GTA: Chinatown Wars was mentioned, but I did not see if it is 3D, top-down, 2D, RTS, sandbox, or what. It takes place in Liberty City, and that's about all I know about it. The PSP GTAs were kinda crappy by all accounts, so it seems unlikely that the DS can fix that. Chinatown Wars may be nothing more than a GTA-themed minigame collection, and wouldn't that be hilarious.

Sony
Best in show, but not by much.

Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank downloadable mini-sequel, Infamous, and the games I don't care about, God of War III and Resistance II. Sony also has a movie deal, but it's not as cool as Netflix on 360: movie rentals/purchases coming to the PlayStation Store right this very night. (At lousy prices... I guess $6 to rent an HD film is ok, given that blu-ray disks cost $25 to $30, but $4 to rent a SD movie is terrible. I can buy most newish DVD releases for $15 or less.) At least this is happening now. Maybe by the time Netflix actually shows up on 360, Sony will have a decent enough library to compete.

Home is still in process. God, just can it already! Sony has not done ANYTHING to convince people that they need this, other than to repeat that it will be free.

PS3 is getting its own News and Forecast Channel. Ahem.

DC Universe Online! The debut trailer looks cool, if a little MMO-plastic and staged. Full of fan service though. Will this be a monthly cost game? Because I hate those. But I really want to be a Green Lantern.

The big finale PS3 game was an untitled war something-or-other. I don't get it.