Disappointing E3, Did This Year Start a Trend?

A trend seems to have started at this year's, no (significant) new games were really announced. Aside from that Mario Kart Wii announcement, which wasn’t really all that surprising, there wasn’t a new game announced with any importance to us gamers. The new Wii Channel was promised by Miyamoto months ago and we finally get a name for it. How is this news? Release the channel, don't name it. That channel should honestly have launched this week, not been named. Nothing new came out of Microsoft or Sony's conference either, just a bunch of news about the upcoming holiday games that were all announced a few years ago. And maybe that’s what E3 is becoming, just final info and dates for already announced games. I certainly hope this isn't the case because that would be a real shame.

Looking around at various news sources, the two biggest pieces of news seem to be the "dropped" price of the PS3 and the new game announcement by Nintendo, WiiFit. As a gamer I'm not really all that excited for the game, if you can call it that, but moreso in the technology that could be used in a more traditional game. In the end this is a media event and the media craves new things, they crave what we like to call "news." They could honestly care less (at least the mainstream media) about slightly upgraded visuals in Game X, or how Army of Two uses aggro technology. They want new, and that is not at all what we got this year.

In the end, I was quite disappointed in this year's E3. Could the reason be the fact that games are so complex these days that it takes 3 years to make a game look decent? Could it be that last E3 was a major system launch year so they announced everything they had to show up the competition, leaving nothing new for this year? Whatever the reason, as a gamer, I wasn't all that satisfied.