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Microsoft’s press conference keyed on two words – Live Anywhere
By Michael Lafferty

Cross-platforming gaming about to get a major boost

He has not been to E3 before, but when Bill Gates walked out on the stage at the Microsoft E3 press conference, he brought with him a sense of joy in two words - Live Anywhere!

The venue was the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and what better place than a hallowed entertainment icon than to talk about the continuous growth of inter-platform connectivity through the next generation of Windows.

The best way to explain what this all means is to take the example provided at the press conference. A friend has come across a car for the next generation of Forza Motorsports (aptly named Forza Motorsports 2), and has decided to send it to you. He signs in to Live Anywhere and notices that you are on a mobile phone, using the Windows Mobile operating system. You get a message that you have a text message, and attached is a car. You immediately pull up the car and, using your mobile phone, customize it a bit and save it. Then you call it up in Windows Vista and customize it further, before using the vehicle on your 360 version of the game.

That is the type of interconnectivity that Gates and Microsoft were talking about. And with Vista due out in January 2007, with DirectX 10 embedded in the software, gamers will not have long to wait to experience the power of the Microsoft cross-platforming concepts

“Live Anywhere is a big new thrust for us,” Gates stated.

The event opened with a bang – with a level of Gears of War assaulting attendants with visceral glory and bone-jarring sound pumped through the audio system at the theatre.

Countering what Sony’s president and chief executive had said a day earlier about “the next generation of gaming does not start until we say it does,” Microsoft Corporate Vice President Peter Moore said “we are delivering the next generation of gaming right here and right now.”

Reorganization at Microsoft has put all of the company’s various gaming tentacles under one combined branch, and while Moore conceded that things were a little rough at times in the launch of the 360, he also said that “for the last six months we made it our No. 1 priority to get more consoles on the store shelves.”

Naturally, a host of first- and third-party titles were given the quick mentions, some accompanied by short trailers, but some of the other news included expansion of Xbox Live Arcade expansion, pulling in classic arcade titles such as Pac-man, Frogger, Defender, and Contra – meaning that Namco, Konami, Midway and Sega had lent support and their classic libraries to the Arcade experience.

“With these additions, we are making sure your misspent youth can stay with you as long as possible,” Moore said.

Then Moore revealed another jewel of the coming Arcade titles – Lumines Live.

While Xbox Live Arcade is “a key market differentiator, Xbox Live Arcade is the appetizer for the next generation of games,” Moore said.

By the holidays Moore said there would be more than 160 titles for the 360. Peter Molyneaux and Lionhead Studios will be bringing the next installment in the Fable franchise while Hironobu Sakaguchi is working on Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.

The Xbox Live Marketplace will get an infusion of upper-echelon gaming goodness when Rockstar releases Grand Theft Auto IV to the Xbox 360 in October 2007, and then offers episodic content.  

While Gears of War kicked off the show with a bang, Moore and Gates left the stage at the end of the conference with a video teaser sure to get the juices of action gamers pumping. The graphics were next generation and the intensity was pure Halo – Halo 3, to be precise, coming in 2007.