The unfulfilled promises of E3s past

Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are the three companies who collectively steer the flagship known as the U.S.S. E3 Keynote. We'll be liveblogging those (and a slew of others) over the next few days ... but what about the promises from the Big Three that have never appeared? They're all guilty of it, and we're calling out three big ones.

We're willing to cut some slack to announced projects that are just taking awhile to (supposedly) appear, like Alan Wake and Peter Jackson's Halo project, but there are some things we just can't let slide. Promises were broken, people. Covenants were entered into. All that has been left behind in the wake of these smashed hopes are tears and dreams of what could have been. We'll be finding out what happened to those promises, and they have just a few hours left to make right on them.

Read on.


Microsoft
Velocity Girl

Remember Velocity Girl? We barely do. J. Allard promised us back in 2006 that "Velocity Girl" (a casual / non-gamer girl) could design her own clothing on the Xbox 360, and then put it up for sale to users on Xbox Live so they could download it and use it in a game. Then she'd reap the real-life financial benefits via microstransaction deposits to her bank account. Spiffy, eh? So what happened? Velocity Girl isn't sitting pretty on her own magical island somewhere in the Caribbean, and we're not buying custom user-generated content over Xbox Live, so this was obviously a bust.


Nintendo
Colored Wiis

Back when the Wii was the talk of E3 2006, they had a big glass display case full of things to come: the Zapper (it changed a bit), the classic controller, and ... three different colored Wiimotes. In fact, back when the Wii was still the Revolution, it was completely glossy black. So why are we we still only getting plain white these days? Colored Wiimotes have been dangled in front of us so often, that we thought they'd be old hat by now. How hard can it be to put some different hues into that plastic? Although these days you'd have to introduce colored Wii jackets as well, because a color Wiimote would look a bit weird under one of those translucent rubber nub hubs.

Sony
PlayStation Portable + PlayStation 3 integration

Sometimes poor Kaz "Riiiiiidge Racer" Hirai and the 2006 Sony Keynote are just too easy a target. But there's a big promise that we still haven't seen yet: widespread PSP and PS3 integration. Kaz showed off how the PSP would work as a rearview mirror for the PS3 in Formula One Championship Edition, although that was removed from the final build. Sony noted that you'd have to "prop the PSP up near your television" which sounded wonky to begin with. Aside from the recent Resistance: Retribution, we can't think of too many instances where PSP and PS3 games really play nice.