How’d We Do with Our Microsoft E3 Predictions?

E3 is now officially over, so it’s time to look back and see which of our predictions came true, which ones didn’t, and which ones were so far out that they’d never happen anyway.

• Halo Combat Evolved HD – Microsoft unveiled Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary in honor of the series’ 10th anniversary. It’ll be out November 15th, with a co-op campaign and a map pack for Halo: Reach, for $39.99.
• Gears of War 3 – We got a demo of the game during the conference.[/checklist]

• Gears of War Exile – Not even given a mention at the conference. We still don’t know what this trademark is.[/infolist]

• More Kinect shovelware – The entire second half of the conference was a motion-control minigame snorefest consisting of gimmicky crap that should have gone extinct during Wii’s first year.[/checklist]

• 360 Price Drop – No mention of any price drops whatsoever, despite the Target website advertising a price drop to $299.99 for the 250GB Kinect model, to go into effect the day of Microsoft’s E3 conference.[/infolist]

• Forza 4 – No gameplay demo, but we did get a trailer and a release date.
• Codename: Kingdoms – Was revealed as a Kinect-only action game taking place during the fall of Rome. It’s now entitled Ryse.[/checklist]

• Alan Wake 2 – Despite plenty of signs pointing to a reveal at E3, we never heard anything on a sequel to the psychological action thriller.
• A handheld Xbox – No one really expected it, but it’s always a prediction at every E3, no matter how unlikely.[/infolist]

• Social networking and cable streaming services – Youtube, Bing, UFC pay-per-view, and live streaming TV.[/checklist]

All in all, we did pretty well with our predictions for Microsoft. Six out of ten isn’t bad, and one of our predictions (Xbox handheld) was so out there that no one, including us, really expected it in the first place.