Did this year's E3 seem kind of.. boring to anyone else? I realize the show was scaled way back, but with the conferences and the media coverage and the Live Marketplace Bringing It Home content, the trappings of E3 to the outsider at least seemed the same. But what actually came out of those sources wasn't terribly impressive.

I had planned to write about the conferences, as I have done in the past, but there was so little to them that there wasn't much to say. Microsoft deliberately avoided showing footage of Fable 2 or Halo Wars so we could instead get an extended pitch for Goddamned SceneIt (that's the full title). Nintendo breezed past the core gamer titles (Reggie briefly mentioned the Smash Bros. Dojo updates, as if to say that since we're getting info from the Dojo blog we don't need to get anything from him) to spend the bulk of their time showing off WiiFit, which will undoubtedly make them billions of dollars and only further prove that core gamers are absolutely unnecessary to them now. But as with Microsoft, it's not simply that they didn't have new games to show, but that they chose to avoid the subject. The first NiGHTS trailer was released the day before the conference, yet no mention of the game was made; even Mario Galaxy was only touched on briefly.

Despite -- or more likely because of -- the embarrassment last year, Sony had the strongest showing of the three, random Chewbacca cameo and Jack Tretton's nerves aside. The self-satisfied swagger of the previous year was nowhere to be seen, with Tretton even going so far as to cap off the evening with

We know that all of our accomplishments bring no guarantees for the future. We want to continue to earn each and every consumer's business, and we're dedicated to bringing them the very best entertainment experience possible.

Thus, Sony's conference was a pretty straightforward roll of game footage peppered with some talk about Home and a smaller PSP. It wasn't a knockout, but was at least pretty solid, and managed to actually show new games that grabbed people's attention, something neither Microsoft nor Nintendo bothered to do.

The show itself maintained the trend, remaining mostly concerned with games we already knew about. Many of the biggest titles this year were also the biggest titles last year. There wasn't much in the way of major surprises or announcements outside of WiiFit, a smaller PSP that will load a little faster, and Sony's pretend price drop (a move that doesn't make sense for about a thousand reasons, but I think everyone else has pretty much covered that by now). It's not unexpected to have a kind of lull the year after two console launches, but surely one of the big three could come up with something. At least throw us a new Brawl character, for God's sake. I'm not suggesting that there was absolutely nothing of interest at E3 this year (hey, at least Professor Layton is coming stateside), but it was all low key enough to make me wonder whether the show was necessary at all.