Microsoft opened the coffers wide this E3, with not one, but two pre-E3 events that will go down in history.

Badges? We don't need no stinkin'... well, we might need these. This is Kinect. Who knew Big Brother would be so cute?

On the Sunday prior to the opening of the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Microsoft revealed its entry into the motion control battle. Project Natal, the motion sensing project shown last E3, was revealed with the new name "Kinect", and a slate of games that require no controller at all except your body. Kinect can sense motion by tracking 12 individual joints and interpret a player's movement, as well as recognizing voice controls and even player facial expressions. Famed acrobats and performance artists Cirque du Soleil put on an elaborate show, to reveal Kinect to about 3,000 media, MVP's, VIP's, entertainment luminaries and fellow members of Microsoft. (Aaron Greenberg got an up close and personal presentation by some of the acrobats.) The 1.5 hour event was taped, edited down to 30 minutes, and broadcast over popular cable channels Nickelodeon and MTV. Families were shown enjoying games together, reaching out to friends over LIVE, and controlling the dashboard features of their Xbox 360s. Microsoft basically told Cirque they had a blank check to deliver an unforgattable show, and the Galen Center at USC was reserved for three weeks to allow for the elaborate setup required by the presentation.

A Cirque du Soleil dancer from the Natal/Kinect event, and SpaceGhost2k (this author) with Alex Kipman, Dir. of Incubation for Kinect.

My opinion from seeing the show in person is that Dance Central, a full-motion dancing game by Harmonix, embarasses Just Dance, an exclusive dance game for the Wii. I predict this will be the best selling game for the Kinect device. A virtual dance instructor appears before you with a couple of backup dancers. You choose the song, and the dancer will go through a series of dance moves that appear on a scrolling list to one side. Right now it is rumored that Kinect can keep track of up to six different profiles, and two players at once. If ever there was a party game that screamed for four players, Dance Central is it.

In the #2 spot, I predict significant sales numbers for the Ubisoft created fitness game "YourShape Fitness." YourShape places the player into a 3D environment with a virtual trainer. You can use ready-made training programs or adjust it to your liking. There are a variety of aerobic, yoga, rhythm and target games.The game scans in your body, displays a list of your physical stats, and keeps track of calories burnt during exercise. The game can do everything from knowing if you're keeping rhythm to whether your knee is bent at the appropriate 90 degrees of if you're slacking and only pulling 78 or 80 degrees.

#3 goes to Kinectimals, a Tamagatchi on steroids. You befriend a baby animal like a tiger or lion, and virtually pet it, play catch, jump rope, play dead, or run them through an obstacle course using your own motion and balance.

On the Nintendo Wii, Wii Fit is the best seller while Nintendogs is a monster hit on the DS. Just Dance has been a mainstay in the Top Ten since it released as word of mouth has spawned interest in the game. I think Dance Central will be first because it has appeal across ages and genders, while YourShape will have a larger focus on adult women, and Kinectimals will undoubtably have little appeal beyond the younger child segment. (Free advice to Microsoft: Putting some easy achievements in this game will help sales beyond the kid market. I'm just sayin'.)

On Monday monring, the following day, Microsoft landed the second of its one-two punch against Nintendo and Sony with their Xbox Media Briefing. This time, it was the Wiltern Theater that was turned into the Emerald City. Dancers from the previous night's Cirque event were there, like slowly gyrating cosplayers showing off the Xbox Kinect, next to an Elite and a controller. Little did we realize that, like most anything associated with Cirque du Soleil, there was more here than met the eye.

This year there were no worries about trying to find a good link for streaming the broadcast of the briefing because the event was broadcast live over G4TV. It started out with a demo of the multiplatform game Call of Duty: Black Ops (a demo that would be re-shown that night at the Staples Center in a concert presented by Activision, that highlighted the game with real explosions, cannon fire and pyrotechnics... IN THE STAPLES CENTER!) After CoD:BO (heh heh), Hideo Kojima presented his new Metal Gear title and its new slice-and-dice feature that generated a lot of "woo hoos!". Cliff Bleszinski showed off a gameplay demo of Gears of War 3 and Bungie presented a gameplay demo of Halo Reach that ended with a ship battle that got cheers. Peter Molyneux showed a video presentation of some progress with Fable III but no indication of how it would work with Kinect.

From then on, the bulk of the show was a more personal presentation of the Kinect device and the games supporting it. Dance Central and YourShape Fitness were impressive, but the little girl that demonstrated Kinectimals literally stole the whole show. She moved about ten million units of Kinect with her live demo. Kinect Sports, which sounds a lot like Wii Sports, is a lot like Wii Sports. Kinect Adventures is also a series of mini-games that plays like a trip to the coolest summer camp ever, with everything from rafting some super-rapids to motion games held abord moving flatcars on rails, which seemed to me to play like a Sonic game in slow motion. If it has a "Spaz Speed" level, this could be a huge hit with platform lovers, but otherwise, probably not so much. Avatar Joyride has been turned into a full retail game that felt like what you'd get if Cel Damage and Vigilante 8 had a baby.

Pay no attention to the man in the shadows, Sayla. Photo by Brad Bretz.

Don Mattrick, Sr. V.P of Interactive Entertainment closed the show by lifting the shell of an Xbox 360 to reveal the new Xbox 360S that fit inside. Smaller, and glossy black, the reveal elicited cheers from the crowd. But the Don wasn't done with surprises. He announced that it wasn't coming at Christmas or in a couple of months. It was shipping that very day to retailers and would be in stores by the end of the week. More cheers of suprise and approval from the crowd, but Don had one more surprise up his sleeve. Every person attending the event would have one of the brand new Xbox 360S consoles mailed to them after the show. A cheer rose from the crowd, and the fury of fifteen-thousand fingers flying over every smartphone in the building (as well as a sattellite building that was also filled with overflow press watching the show live), put a bullet in Twitter's head.

As we filed out, we discovered that those 360S consoles were out on those tables the whole time, under shells of Xbox 360 Elite units. Clever girl. The S does NOT stand for "slim" and for those who care, the PS3 is also not officially called the slim. That is simply a term applied to any smaller version of a console since the release of the slimmer PS2 a few years ago. A member of Microsoft said it stands for "sexy" but like the original Xbox's Controller-S, the S probably stands for "second" or "small". The new consoles are smaller obviously, but they have a removable 250 GB HDD, built-in WiFi, a quieter fan, and run on less power - the power brick is rated at 130 w instead of the 175w of original 360's.

Sexay... Not so sexay: Major Nelson unboxing the 360S at his Tweetup.

Now, to the part where I discuss how this new 360S affects faceplate collecting. It does affect it. Significantly. It's possible that the production of new plates will completely stop well before the end of the generation, even though there are upwards of 30,000,000 "original" xbox 360 consoles out there in the world. Five years from now, a release of 30,000, which is a very significant number of plates, would still only account for 0.1% of the consoles out there. While it would seem to be reasonable that plates would continue to be released, the reality is that theyv'e been slowing down even before the announcement of a 360S. I expect that we could see one more year of sporadic releases for launch events or VIP events. I am certainly going to continue making customs and trying to get them into the hands of developers and publishers. I hope that the joy of seeing your game, in your hand, on a faceplate, will be exciting enough to get them tosupport a limited production of plates.

The hardest part is that the 360S does not support removable faceplates. It obviously won't support existing plates, but the "plate" on the front of the 360S is not removable. To add insult to injury, there are two buttons that are touch sensitive that can't be obscured by a skin or a clip-on "overplate", meaning that unless you have a specially printed limited edition console, you're probably not going to have personalization options anything close to what we have with the original Xbox 360.