Another year, another Electronic Entertainment Expo – although this time the event was on a much smaller scale than ever before. E3 as we knew it, with the booth babes and Hollywood level budgets no longer exists, and the “E3 Media & Business Summit” that ran from July 11 to 14 was an invitation-only event open to only a few thousand attendees.

Luckily for us, every tiny scrap of information revealed at E3 this year was clogging the intertubes within minutes, and everyone at Xbox World Australia was following the show closely. So what did we all think? Let’s ask the team!

Dylan “Gameboffin” Burns - Staff Writer

Microsoft showed me three things with their E3 Press Conference. First, that there are a crapload of games that I’m interested in coming to the 360 and Live Arcade this year; second, that they are not afraid to milk an ostensible link to the fan community by employing (and I suspect underpaying) Halo fans to provide a seven-minute fiddling extravaganza; and lastly, that Peter Moore cannot play guitar... not even a replica one.

So Microsoft decided to focus just on titles coming this year (except for RE5) and you know what? I bloody liked it. No more empty promises and half-arsed builds of what might not come for years. It was a succinct and hard-hitting display of an avalanche of titles that we can expect to get our greasy mitts on sooner rather than later.

Rock Band, meh; I have no real interest in being a virtual rock star when I’ve played in stinky bars to mutton-dressed-as-lamb groupies for years. Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, and heaps more, not to mention the plethora of great looking arcade games on the way – now them’s the shit! I’ll quite happily sequester myself away in a bubble of 360 goodness for the next year to come, thank you very much.

Mike “Karachi King” Hansford – Forum Moderator

E3 last year was a very heavy download time for me. Everything was brought to the Xbox Live Marketplace in glorious HD, but was unfortunately marred by the 360's inability to perform background downloads.

Now that problem has been fixed, E3 is here again, and I learnt two very important things: Six is not enough download slots, and I can download a hell of a lot in four days.

The press conference itself was fairly ordinary. Lots of talk of sales figures and a bunch of trailers that I had already downloaded seperately. Since everything during the conference was focused on 2007 games, there weren't really any surprises.

The most interesting games however, were not shown during the conference. The 400mb Too Human trailer was obviously a stand out for me (I even downloaded it twice, because the original version had sound synch issues), and even though it's months away from release, it shows a high level of polish. Fable 2 also seems to be coming along well. The game looks a bit barren at the moment, but it may just be set up that way to minimize the chance of bugs during a public showing.

I'm a little disappointed with the lack of demos (especially since most of the games they showed are coming this year), but overall, I think E3 was pretty good. I got to see more of the games coming this year, but what about next year? I guess that can wait until X07 in September.

Julian “FunkyJ” Cram – Staff Writer

I look at E3 as the future of video games, and while I appreciate Microsoft's approach to games as "you can play this, NOW!", I found their silence about next years games a little disconcerting. It makes me wonder if they are any... Well, at least any that are exclusive to MS. Because after all, I KNOW what's coming out this year, and have known since E3 last year.

I'm incredibly excited about rockband though... that drumkit looks so much fun!!!

And boy am I stoked that Krome's Viva Pinata Party Animals was shown second. Yes, I'm biased since I work for Krome, but regardless, I do think it is a BIG deal that Krome, an independent company from Australia, have taken over Rare's IP and had its game shown so predominantly in MS's presentation.

Dominic “Dominus” Rozenberg – Assistant Editor

Being an Xbox 360 guy through and through, I’ll admit that the majority of my attention was focused solely on my console of choice – I don’t own a Wii or a PS3 so there wasn’t really much point. So while I know the tone of their presentations was rather future oriented, I don’t know much about what that future holds for either company. But on the flipside, I know exactly what Microsoft’s focus was, and it was very much about the here and now.

Julian has already said that he sees E3 as being about the future of games and in many ways I agree with him – it always has been a bit of crystal-balling, filled with half-functional demos, empty promises, and plenty of hyperbole. Which is why Microsoft’s message to me was so powerful: it said “Xbox 360 isn’t coming soon in 2008, we have a killer line-up starting in August and going hard until Christmas.” Sure, there wasn’t much mention of what we’ll be playing in 2008, but frankly I’m far too excited about the things I’ll be playing in the next 6 months to be too invested in that right now.

All the key titles on display were polished and a good many were playable for those lucky enough to attend and between Blue Dragon and Mass Effect, Bioshock and Call of Duty 4, Assassin’s Creed and GTA4, not to mention Halo 3, I’m going to be a broke-but-happy-gamer in 2007. I think that probably my only disappointment was the lack of demos to hit the Marketplace…which isn’t to say there weren’t a few (including Blue Dragon!), but it wasn’t quite the gaming glut I had hoped for, particularly given how many of these killer titles were playable on the day.

At the end of the day, I liked the new, tighter focused E3 event – booth babes are great, but content is king and in that regard Microsoft was the clear winner of the event. What will the future hold for the Xbox 360 or E3 itself? Who knows, but what I do know is that for the next 6 months I’m going to be pretty close to gaming heaven.

Michael “Darksheer” John – Staff Writer

E3 2007 missed me this year; like an abandoned traveller wandering a lone highway, my thumb was left forever pointing west. I'm still rather confused about the entire affair. With the absence of the whole shock-and-awe spectacle, miles and miles of gamer impression, footage of fans clambering to glimpse the latest in video-game-hyper-reality, I find that E3 2007 has left me feeling lowly and limp. And perhaps this is an odd thing to say. We still heard the latest gossip on extravaganzas like Mass Effect, Halo 3, and Resident Evil 5, however their impact didn't seem to resonate like the brass bell of previous years. Perhaps not only is it important to find out about this stuff from the press, but equally important to see the fans having a good time and shaking hands with the creators of the worlds we like to explore. Perhaps this tragic move away from a people’s event has left a cold spike in this gamer’s heart.

In addition, I suspect the decentralisation of the event taking place across multiple hotel lobbies, and obscure locations like airport hangers, reporters had a hard time covering the whole kit-and-caboodle -and I'm sure developers felt a little weary with all the extra travel, too. While several websites did their best to report the news, I couldn’t help feel that the activity was a little more difficult to accomplish than previous years.

On the plus side it was great to see Microsoft focusing on titles coming out over the next year. While it is always nice to see what's coming years ahead, it is even nicer to know you have several special treats just around the corner. One of the things I didn't feel was undervalued in terms of having titles to look forward to. Clearly, Xbox 360 gamers will have a lot to keep themselves busy with in the coming months. All I can say is “bring on Mass Effect!”

As for the future of E3? Well from the receiving end it will have to do something different. By the time E3’s megabits reached my neon screen everything felt a little jigsawed. Perhaps the logistical orienteering of this year's event dampened its overall impact. Perhaps the lack of big-top sideshows and carnival antics made things fizzle a little. But! Perhaps the most important reason why E3 2007 lost its footing was because it missed the gamers, who provide just as much excitement and entertainment as the games themselves.

Shane “Spagman” Bryan – XBW owner / Editor in Chief

There was an E3 this year? Sorry that’s a bit harsh and flies in the face of the seriousness placed against it by all those big overseas gaming sites I guess. Honestly, it snuck up under my radar and I tried streaming as much as I could at the last minute but the internet connection at work was giving me shit and kept cutting out all the time. Every 30 seconds or so I was on MSN hassling Dom with questions such as “was that Viva Pinata, what’s Peter Moore doing now?” etc etc

Like Karachi King I used about 75% of my monthly bandwidth grabbing all the trailers and the Ace Combat demo during the event and it was great that all these games I was watching previews for are mostly actually coming out this year and not ‘late 2008’ etc. The Ace Combat demo didn’t disappoint and while, as is the case with pretty much all flight games, the ground up close looks much worse than say from 10,000 feet, I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to soak up the full career/mission mode and take it online in November.

It was good to see some in-game screenshots from the single player part of Halo 3 and have it confirmed that visually there is an improvement over the multiplayer beta we just had. Like a lot of you I’m looking forward to Halo 3 but my super-hypo-meter™ isn’t going off the chart just yet and this is probably due to a number of reasons.

Everyone I know is going mental for Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, and who can blame them. After the letdown of COD3, a Battlefield 2 style game filled with modern weaponry full of the quality and arse kicking online play of COD2 will give Halo 3 a real run for its money and may even win. Stranger things have happened and every new screenshot I see makes it look even better.

The other game is Grand Theft Auto IV. Tattooed to the arm of the Peter Moore last year and forever into our minds.. Sure it comes out a month after Halo 3, but with so many games due out in the final 3 months of 2007, gamers on tight budgets are going to be fickle about what they spend their money on. Come on Rockstar Games, you could have given us at least a hint of the episodic content or a few new screenshots.

Other games I’m pretty excited for are PGR4 (if they can nail the bikes handling while retaining and expanding on the Kudos system and let’s hope there’s some new and cool locations, unlike Forza 2). Assassins Creed is a definite purchase as far as I’m concerned and I’m keen to see more of Frontlines: Fuel of War as it comes from a great development team keen to prove themselves but won’t hit store shelves until next year.

A few of the guys above have mentioned their likes, dislikes and utter hatred for the upcoming Rock Band game and I’m in a little bit of each camp. Sure I see the need to push the genre forward, but I see plenty of issues awaiting those that chose to indulge and end up arguing with their mates about who wants the drums, who gets to play guitar etc. The pictures released of the guitar controller look fantastic though and the news out about there being whole albums was great, and Metallica fans were given something to smile about.

So for me, E3 2007 was ok. It reaffirmed what we already knew, that there’s plenty of great games on the way and we better all start saving. There were few surprises, less hype, less sniping between the big players and as they say, less can be more.