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Well after all that hyping over a 360 Wii Remote type extension it seems Microsoft were telling the truth when they said it wasn’t in their plans. I honestly thought that was just media spin and I have a great post saved in my drafts where I call for Microsoft’s hypocritical head seeing as they’ve basically spent the last year or so slagging off the Wii’s success.

But they didn’t do it and instead had a pretty decent showing of games. I was a bit bemused by the way a good half of their show was spent showing off games consumers could buy on a rival platform (*cough* PS3 *cough*) but I almost got a good sense of damage limitation from it all. Call me sceptical, call me what you will but throughout Microsoft’s show (and let me clarify I thought it was a good show) I got a sense of “me too”. Almost like, “well you have all these cool games, but guess what, we have them too”. That’s by no means a bad thing for XBOX 360 consumers at all but I’m struggling to find an experience within the 360 environment that can ONLY be had on 360 outside of Live.

Of course the planned Live updates are very good. The new dashboard looks excellent, the new party system and avatars look like a solid innovation to the experience and Live pretty much cemented itself as being a mile ahead of Playstation Network, again. I think the PS3 firmware 2.4 was intended to make up so ground and I think it did, but in terms of online experience Microsoft can rest assure that their £40 price tag for their online gaming is perfectly justified again and Sony need to go a long way to put that question back into the minds of consumers.

I’ll go on the record now as to say that Fable 2 does not interest me one iota but Gears Of War 2 looks solid, as does Geometry Wars 2 and Lips.

Can I just say on record that I can’t believe that got Duffy to perform live. How much cash do you reckon she got paid for that?

Of course the big announcement was Final Fantasy 13,493,291 being confirmed for 360 release. I’m sure Sony feel like their wife just cheated on them but Microsoft should be pretty hyped at securing that. Of course it’s nothing personal - Square Enix just want to ensure their game gets into American homes and I presume they’re pretty stoked about that themselves. A kind of win/win situation for Square and Microsoft and I’m sure Sony are the only people crying over that announcement.

I’ll be interested to see whether Sony present a bunch of multiplatform games in their show tomorrow though? If they do - we might have already seen Sony’s show a day early, if you get my drift.