The Wii had without question the best presentation of the 3 next-gen consoles. Nintendo are still hanging onto a few details regarding release dates and pricing, but they did state it would be available in the fourth quarter of 2006 and it would be cheaper than its rivals.
The new Zelda game Twilight Princess featured heavily in the presentation and it looks great. It was revealed that the Wii controller has a speaker to offer depth of sound, something none of the other consoles have. For example when you're firing arrows in the Zelda game you'll hear the bow string tighten on the controller's speaker, then as it flies through the air the sound will transfer over to the tv speakers. Very impressive.
It turns out that the nunchuk you hold in your left hand also has motion sensors of its own, independent of the wiimote. The developers of Red Steel describe this as having both of your hands in the game.
Wouldn't you know it, Sony 'borrowed' Nintendo's idea for the motion sensor in the controller. A good idea is a good idea, but this smacks of desperation. Their implementation of it is less powerful than the Wii's and they've had to sacrifice force feedback. Another surprise about the controller is its shape. Ditching the boomerang design that was unveiled at last year's E3, Sony have wisely reverted to a more standard PS2 shape. Despite these surprises Sony's presentation was still relatively uninteresting, a large portion of it harping on about how well the PS2 has sold and how 'cool' the PSP is.
A few of the third party titles looked good in the brief clips, games such as Coded Arms: Assault and Gundam: Mobile Unit. Another title that looked really cool was the card game for eyetoy called The Eye Of Judgement, where you place real cards on a flat surface under the eyetoy and monsters spawn on screen. Who knows whether it's as fun as it looks, but it could be the Pokemon of the future!
The final bummer was the announcement of the pricing. The good version of the PS3 will cost an offputting $599 in the USA, worse still for europeans it will be considerably more at 599 Euros. Yikes!
