E3 2011 Message Board

#e32012 The Big Three make a bunch of promises every year at E3, during the big press conferences they throw at the start of the week. In 90 minutes or two hours, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo show off their newest hardware and biggest games. More »

#e32012 For the fourth year in a row, we're comparing E3 hype to gaming reality. On Tuesday, we looked at Sony. Yesterday, we investigated Nintendo. Today, we wrap up with a look at Microsoft's E3 2011 promises. More »

Over five years ago, I wrote a post on this very website about one enterprising Xbox 360 owner who velcroed a Jabra A210 Bluetooth adapter to the back of his controller, thereby freeing him from the tyranny of a wired headset. Back then, in the early days of the Xbox 360, some months before Microsoft introduced its own (terrible) wireless headset and before the PS3 was released with built-in Bluetooth headset support, this hack seemed all but guaranteed to make it mainstream. Of course, it hasn't.

Now, over five years later, when the people at Turtle Beach tell me they have something they're pretty sure I'm going to like, I make my way to their E3 booth in the very last hours of the last day of the show and they hand over one of eight prototype Xbox 360 Bluetooth Chat Adapters.

Included as part of its new XP500 headset - an Xbox-ification of last year's excellent PS3-flavored PX5s - this Chat Adapter aims to keep the XP500s totally wireless. If you wanted to use the PX5's microphone with an Xbox 360, it meant tethering it to a controller with a cable. If you wanted to go completely wireless, it meant picking up one of Microsoft's notoriously shoddy wireless headsets, which use a proprietary radio connection, similar to the console's controllers, to connect to the Xbox.

#watchthis How long ago was E3? Until yesterday, it was the day after I last did a laundry. And that's a hell of a long time. I sat there in the laundromat with my 3DS, looking at the 134 people I met at E3. I've not had a StreetPass notice since. More »

You've surely already read about what we saw during the E3 demo of BioShock Infinite, from the sky-lines to Elizabeth's tearing ability and all of the other quirks of the floating city of Columbia. But perhaps that's not enough for you. Perhaps you want to pick over the experience yourself, looking for succulent secrets and tasty hints that we game press types may have somehow missed.

In that case, you're in luck: Ken Levine says the entire 15-minute demo will be shown on Spike TV on July 7. Even before that, you can watch the full first two minutes of the award-winning demo above. Keep an eye out for our favorite part: "golden" American presidential statues that Booker dismisses with a certain monarchical reference. History! Metaphor! Meaning! No wonder this game's so impressive.

#watchthis About a year ago, PAX sought to ban booth babes (pardon me, "costumed booth representatives,") using a number of tests to determine booth babe-iness (as opposed to garden-variety sexy cosplay). One of them was a lack of familiarity with the product represented. More »

#hypecheck Hopefully you are not on the edge f your seat waiting for the next Tomb Raider. Warning: even if you are an Olympic athlete, you should consider inhaling and exhaling a few times between now and the release of Mass Effect 3. Never mind their 2011 hype. They're next year's games. More »

We were pretty eager to take a look at War of the Worlds, this fall's XBLA and PSN release from Paramount based on H.G. Wells' classic novel. For starters, we love Other Ocean's DSiWare action platformer Dark Void Zero, but there's also our affection for rotoscoping and Patrick Stewart narration to consider.

What we ended up seeing at E3 was frankly a little underwhelming. The presentation, moody and bleak, was top-flight but it seemed shallow from a gameplay perspective. The thrust of the 2D game is almost exclusively evasion, with the hero -- a British survivor of the Martian attack -- running from spotlights and lasers, ducking into ravines and tunnels to avoid detection. We saw this basic beat repeated some four or five times in a 20-minute demo, which left the game feeling droningly one-note. Other Ocean hinted that the hero we saw would eventually find a way to "turn the tables" on the Martians, so we're hopeful that'll help flesh things out a bit.

What there's no debate about is the sartorial acumen of the game's protagonist. A turtleneck and a blazer? As if Duke Nukem needed yet another reason to be embarrassed, now the poor guy has to be self-conscious about his tank top.

One of the most refreshing moments of this year’s E3 was a trip out of the noisy, smelly Convention Center to a nearby hotel, to sit down and play Serious Sam 3. Refreshing to be away from the noise, but also to just be sat playing a game (on PC, no less) that’s so focused on being a game.

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#watchthis You've seen the best E3 2011 had to offer. Now see the worst. The very worst. Oh good Lord is some of this bad. More »

#3ds Katsuya Eguchi, creator of Animal Crossing and producer of the next game in that series, mostly talked to me about Wii U at E3 last week. But surely he had some news about Animal Crossing's forthcoming 3DS installment? More »

#wishyoudbeenthere They call it E3, which isn't that cool a name. More »

#easports EA Sports president Peter Moore brushed off the suggestion that the PlayStation Network outage did particular damage to his label, which has in the past two years seen significant revenue growth through its downloadable content, especially in its popular Ultimate Team offerings. More »

#adventuresinlosangeles If there's one thing I don't want to talk about regarding E3, it's video games. More »

I'll admit it: my excitement about a new version of Cave Story to play on the 3DS was tempered a bit by fears that it wouldn't turn out right. To put it more directly, my excitement was tempered by the first screenshots of Cave Story 3D.

But upon playing the remake, it was immediately evident that developer Nicalis had been paying attention to the reaction to those first images, and is working to make something that reinterprets the environments of the retro-style original in a more palatable -- and more parsable -- way. It is not ruined by the 3D graphics.

#weirdestcontrollerofe3 Things were getting weird last week when the cheerful game developer and digital media artist Hye Yeon Nam started gluing a sensor to her tongue, weirder still when she had me glue one to mine. More »

This year’s E3 was packed with booth babe babes, making our time at the Los Angeles Convention Center one filled with titillation and excitement. We’ve collected together a gallery of the sexiest booth babe babes we saw as we made our way around, so you too can enjoy their camera-wielding hotness. Enjoy!

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#whatitwas E3 2011 is over. Kotaku already showed 3,444 blinks from Kotaku's E3 2011 photographer, Isaac Viel. More »

#listentothis The announcement last week that AT&T will be the exclusive 3G provider for the hot new PlayStation Vita did not go down well. More »

Via our exuberant American chums at G4, come some E3 leftovers in the form of Hawken footage, which I’ve cleverly reblogged below. Once again it’s looking seriously impressive, this time showing off a “Siege” game mode, where players have to gather resources to launch battleships against opposing bases. Only the battleships can destroy the enemy base, but they themselves are vulnerable to attack, too. The piece is presented Adhesive’s talented art lead, Khang Le.(more…)

#e32011 No, he can not tell you anything about the Rush Hour. Sorry! More »

#goty Website Cracked ran the same joke last year, but this year, it's even funnier. Or, depending on your point of view, sadder. More »

In addition to our video rundown of Power A's Batarang controllers, we also managed to snag some hands-on time with the rest of the company's current lineup. The star of the show was definitely the Pro Pack Mini Plus for the Wii, the successor to Power A's previous Pro Pack Mini. The Pro Pack Mini Plus improves over its predecessor with built-in Motion Plus and color changing LEDs. The $40 package, which includes a remote and nunchuck, felt great to hold, with comfortable form factor and rubberized coatings.

As E3 comes to a close, the guys decide to blow off some steam.

Before I get started detailing what Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Online Edition is, I should mention what it isn't: an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive. I was under that impression, and so I was a little surprised to notice that, as I spoke with Capcom's Seth Killian, we were totally playing on a PS3. According to Killian, it's definitely coming to PSN, simultaneous with the XBLA release, and always was.

That non-exclusivity is a good thing, because I'd hate for anyone who likes Street Fighter 3 even a little to miss out on all the love poured into this collection. There might be too much love in here.

#e3 The long-awaited Half-Life 2: Episode 3 wasn't really at E3, but YouTube master of digital manipulation FreddieW shows us what could have been... though, surely at least eight people would have lined up for the game. More »