This E3 was weird on another level. I played fewer games this year than I might have ever played. I saw demos of games, I watches tech clips, and saw pre-recorded footage of games, but it was rare that I was able to get my hands on a game and play it. That troubled me because that overall indication from publishers and developers was that their 360 games weren't ready to show. We learned from a handful of developers that Microsoft was late in delivering Test Kit Updates -- there were supposed to more hefty updates prior to E3, and their weren't -- which may have contributed to the under-delivery.

Of course, all of this is in the context of E3's importance. It's not at all terribly long-term. In one month, Microsoft could deliver a buttload of awesome movies of Perfect Dark Zero, which could wipe out most people's memories of the horrid screenshots posted earlier. It's all relative, and Microsoft will no doubt work to give us newer, better news, screens, and movies this summer. In fact, I know this for a fact, from an internal source at Microsoft. Count on it.

On a different subject, there were a lot of games I liked. I saw Black and liked the look of level 6, the one level they showed us. Nearly everything blows up, and it's visceral, intense, and a giant fist to your senses. The best looking Xbox 360 game I saw was Epic's Gears of War, hands down. Perfect Dark Zero looked good, way better than the screenshots we saw, and even though the framerate was low and only two characters were on-screen, the backgrounds, textures, character models, and the environments all looked great. There are some great ideas in there, including the weapon stealing, the secondary weapon options, and the expanding/contracting levels.