If You Don't Want to Read About Video Games...

...You might as well stop reading now. That's probably about all I'm going to talk about the rest of the week.

The annual E3 video game conference got kicked off yesterday and Microsoft was first up to bat with their press conference. I've shared a few items from my Reader list, so be sure to check those out as they come up. I'm sure there will be more as the week goes on. I was pretty impressed and I'm really excited about some of the new things that they're going to be doing over the next couple of months.

They showed off several new games that are coming out between now and Christmas. Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3 are shooters that are pretty highly anticipated by the gaming world. After the presser, they put the trailers up on the xbox marketplace, so I downloaded a couple of them last night. Both of these games looked incredible.

They're also releasing a ramped up version of Galaga for the Live Arcade. I love the old-school Galaga, so this is probably going to be a must have for me.

Rumors had been floating around for weeks about the new avatars, but I don't remember seeing anything about a complete dashboard redesign. The new avatars are obviously ripped from the same book as Nintendo's Miis, but I'm sure Nintendo understands. The dashboard redesign looks really nice though. It looks very clean and almost a little Apple-ish. I'm sure they took a few cues from the AppleTV.

One new feature that's hopefully going to be big for DeAnne and I, is the partnership with Netflix. Microsoft has joined up with Netflix and they're going to allow you to rent movies by downloading them to your xbox instead of waiting for them to come in the mail. It's just going to be SD to begin with, but I'm hopeful that over the months after launch, they'll begin to have some HD content. If they get to where they're doing HD, that will propbably do away with any chance of me ever wanting a PS3 as the main reason I've been wanting one was for Blu-Ray.

So all in all, I was really excited about the Microsoft press conference. They also talked about Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 4, but I'm out of time. Sony and Nintendo hold their pressers today, to look for more excitement tomorrow. I may even have to email in another mid-day post if something really cool happens. Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul