Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

The wave of news, previews, rumours and massive press conferences that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo begins next week, and I think everyone’s got a fair few expectations of what’s going to happen. These are mine, and comments on some widely-expected announcements I think are either accurate or full of nonsense.

Microsoft:

• Microsoft motion-camera. We’ve all seen the leaked shots, and it seems like the right time to do this, though the guys and girls behind You’re in the Movies! are probably going to hang themselves if this particular announcement drops.
• Perfect Dark on XBLA. This goes without saying. It’s been spotted a hundred-and-one times on spreadsheets, screencaps and mole-provided information, not to mention Rare actually having the icon for it on their NXE Dashboard, which was less than subtle. I’m hoping that was deliberate, if it wasn’t… I don’t want to be the owner of that gamertag.
• MSG4 Final Decision. Either a yes or a no, but we’ll find out. I think Kojima did fans a great disservice by not clarifying whether it was happening or not, and I think we all deserve to know so we can finally either bin that jpeg of the green “on” logo, or make it our desktop backgrounds with an MS Painted-on date underneath.

Nintendo:

• The Wii will be price-cut. For what it is, the Wii is a ridiculously expensive bit of hardware, at £179.99 in her Majesty’s kingdom. To drop the price now, during the period in which they’re announcing some pretty impressive software bundles (the Metroid Prime collection springs immediately to mind) can only mean good things for the men in Japan who are probably, at this point, wiping their behinds with cash.
• More Pokemon Games. This doesn’t really need confirming. They’ve done Platinum, so they’re probably already hard at work on the next lot of pokemon to bring the total up into the 5/600s. I wonder what they’ll call it, because at this rate they’re running out of binary opposites in the spectral realm, and the periodic table, at this rate.
• Another Zelda. It’s been a while now, and I think  Nintendo need to make up for Twilight Princess. Not a bad game by any means, but releasing it on two platforms when the Wiimote compatability felt simply tacked-on was a bad move. Personally, I’d love a return to the Wind Waker era. It was an amazing game, and didn’t deserve to be the only one sitting in a cel-shaded green adventurer’s outfit.

Sony:

• The price of the PS3 is going to drop by at least 20%. Let’s be honest, statistically speaking they’re losing money for each console they sell unless they shift a lot of software per unit of hardware sold. A price drop is, therefore, illogical in theory, but I think the sheer amount of PS3 consoles they’ll shift will more than outweigh worries about software sales. There’ve been rumours about the PS3 Slim, but I’m calling shenanigans on that one, as it’s far too soon.
• The PSP Go! will be announced. This is inevitable now, simply because we’ve seen concept screens, people have talked about it constantly when they shouldn’t have, and even the name for it is now in circulation, codename or otherwise. It’s the perfect time to drop a new handheld reveal, as it’ll stomp the DSi. That said, in all honesty I see the DSi as a step backward from the DS Lite – shorter battery life, unneccessary screen size increase, and no GBA cart slot is taking too much away from a good thing for the sake of an online store and some more memory.
• Obscene amounts of PSX titles on the PSN. Honestly, I don’t really care about anything bar FFVII, though I think the same goes for a few others, too. Not to mention the obscene amounts of cash Squeenix will make if they decide to get it up on the store.

Everyone else:

• Kojima will reveal what that weird advert was all about. Everyone’s been wondering, from Joystiq readers to Mega64, and I think E3 seems to line up with the countdown, so this all checks out, unless my math is off.
• Blizzard will withhold their new IP until Blizzcon. C’mon, did you really think they were going to let the cat out of the bag a few months away from their own big, private, Blizzard-only press party?
• Everyone will hopefully forget about OnLive. I really couldn’t care less about OnLive, simply because logistically it’s just not possible. Streaming that much content over the net is borderline impossible for most people unless you’ve got a Virgin fiber-optic hanging out of the back of that bad boy. It seems to me that they’re trying to do far too much in too small a box, and this will end up very similar to the Gizmondo fiasco.
• Capcom’s no-show due to swine flu. If this turns out to be some kind of swine-flu inspired press stunt to promote Resident Evil, it’ll be the best press event in the history of the expo. C’mon lads. Have a sense of humour.

That’s it from me in the way of E3 predictions for now, though if any develop nearer the time I’ll be sure to post them. Feel free to disagree or leave your own in the comments thread, as per always.