While Microsoft may be swimming in cash, it is not the case that everybody in the Microsoft Game Technology Group goes to E3.  Take my group, for instance.  Apparently, there was a requirement that one person be left behind, and they picked the person that doesn't do any real work   On the brighter side, I get tons of email and information about what is happening at E3, and I thought I'd share a few highlights.

Gamespot has a great interview with one of my coworkers at E3, Rich Wickham.  Rich talks a lot about the renaissance we will be seeing in PC gaming over the next couple of years, plus discusses how we're moving toward a "cross platform" gaming experience between the Xbox360 and Windows Vista. 

In other news, it was interesting to see the comparisons different people made between the major announcements from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft at E3 this year (great article by ExtremeTech here).  Not too surprising (at least to me) is how quickly the novelty of "motion sensitive" controllers wore off on a lot of people.  Microsoft did this over 6 years ago, and while the initial response was good, in the end there just wasn't a strong demand for it from consumers.  It will be interesting to see what Nintendo does there.  I continue to be underwhelmed by the PS3.  True, I work at Microsoft, so Sony is our big competitor, but so far, this console hasn't impressed me.  By volume, it's larger than the original Xbox.  It weighs 11lbs (lots of heat sinks, no doubt), and has a price tag that will no doubt keep initial sales low.

Frankly, I really think we finally have things "right".  Sure, it's still gonna take a year or so to stabilize, but I'm stoked about how we're enabling people to have a gaming experience on a broad variety of devices.

And I don't care what other people are saying, I think Shadowrun is gonna rock   I think it's a great combination of an FPS that adds magical elements.  For those of you that are hardcore Shadowrun "pen and paper" players, my advice is to think of the game as something that contains elements of Shadowrun gameplay, but isn't meant to duplicate the RPG experience that you're used to.  But I've talked to the FASA people, and they promise to not make it suck as bad as those last 3 Star Wars movies