E3 2015: MS Press Conference

With every year that passes, Microsoft has been inching closer and closer to earning their reputation back for gaming prior to the 2013 “always on” PR disaster. With this year’s press conference, a lot of interesting things will be coming soon to the green box.

For starters, Microsoft seems to be finally acknowledging that its past is something worth of value and deserving of a second chance. With this, they are planning for 360 games to be playable on the Xbox One -- both downloadable and disc based games. I was impressed when they said 360 games would run natively on the console and would include access to Xbox One features like screenshots, DVR, etc. The one caveat to this is the game studios would need to approve a 360 game for to run on the Xbox One. So you’ll need to wait for a blessing from a publisher or developer before you can play them.

I love me some classic gaming compilations like Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection and Namco Museum, so it was cool to hear that Rare would be celebrating their 30th anniversary by stuffing 30 of their games onto one anthology called Rare Replay. Spanning across a magnitude of consoles like NES, N64, 360, it’ll include certain games such as Battletoads, R.C. Pro-Am, Perfect Dark, Viva Pinata, and Banjo-Kazooie. Personally, I would be interested in playing Blast Corps.

When it comes to hardware, the Elite controller seems interesting. With it, you can swap out the thumbsticks, insert what looks like paddle shifters at the back of the controller for racing games, trigger sensitivity settings, button remapping, and a funky looking d-pad (which appears can be swapped out for a more traditional d-pad). It will be available for both Xbox One and Windows 10.

Other hardware announcements included them saying they are partnering with Oculus so that their VR headsets will come packed with Xbox One controllers. In relation, Microsoft demonstrated their VR/augmented reality/whatever headset called Microsoft HoloLens by showing it working with Minecraft. With it, they had the person with the headset on logging into another player’s world that was using a Surface tablet. With the headset, you can view the world the Surface user created from a bunch of angles that can zoom in and out of buildings and above and underground, too. It was a really neat tech demo, but not much value other than that.

I didn’t see much for games that caught my interest during the stream with the exception for games like The Division and CupHead -- which I believe were games I mentioned during last year’s E3 press conference. Hopefully more interesting games will come out of the ID@Xbox program, but overall it was a show from Microsoft that demonstrated that Xbox is all about the gamers, and I’m glad to see that the press conference proves that notion.

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