With E3 2009 over, a number of game sites are handing out awards and winner badges for their favorite vendor. I have watched and read their coverage and it has organized bulleted points of merit for each. Sony, with their strong line-up of games, Nintendo for their surprise Metroid announcement and Microsoft for their Project Natal. Project Natal with its image recognition wizardry and flashy “product vision” marketing slick sheet shows well with gamers who voted “who do you think did best at E3?”. This is intriguing. Has some kind of veil of deception been thrown on us? Sony and Nintendo had a strong software sequel showcase that is within their core business and MS promises a device that is no more revolutionary than a Wii Motion controller with more bells and whistles.

I am excited about forward progress and I want to have a minority report TV but this is a major software corporation who is copying Miis and remotes. There is nothing to be had that tech demos and mini games haven’t already given us. If the Wii Motion Plus can give us a light saber game then there is no market left for a light saber game where I hold an even more imaginary light saber. I turn a plastic remote into a sword, this is much more exciting than turning air into a sword.

The end-game is appealing. In a living room full of plastic peripherals; wheels, musical instruments, fishing gear, dance floors, tennis rackets, guns and even skateboards are approximated and interpreted as impressionistic clutter. Natal would lay waste to these contextual inputs where only one is useful at a time and all else lay in a closet. One would get upset if a basketball team had 5,000 players on the bench. Natal would abstract away the physical implementation of these plastics and make me become a sign language yoga traffic cop. This is the future but I don’t Microsoft to take me there.

Vaporware is a steamy cloud of water droplets emitting from a hot mouth (drama!). You can polish it up because the budget is limitless. You don’t have to worry about engineering and effort because you haven’t slaved away on anything yet. Everything is possible because no one can warn us of vaporware’s eventual let down. It is hope and blue sky. Burning off this vaporware fog is as easy as asking for a tech demo.

The video that made me buy Scribblenauts a million times is one where they try to break the illusion. Where I saw promises, I now see delivery. The testers of Scribblenauts write down random words and content appears. Precognitive design has happened. An artist built a Kraken and assigned animation to it. This is delivery, this is the work done and delivered into the hands of users. Natal has to have this test administered by skeptics and be able to interpret “Einstein fights God”.