E3 Day One: Microsoft

Boasting strong showings for Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty 4 and Resident Evil 5, tonight's Microsoft press conference in Santa Monica demonstrated a solid Xbox 360 line-up for the rest of the year, but failed to deliver the shocking hardware or software unveilings that often characterize E3 briefings.

Host and Microsoft VP Peter Moore began the evening's presentation by promising that every game shown that night would be releasing before the end of the year, and proceeded to show the eager crowd exactly what we can expect to be playing before 2008 rolls around.

THE HALO 3-THEMED X360

Confirming that Mass Effect will ship this November, Moore opened with a trailer showing gameplay footage from this eagerly anticipated Bioware-developed action RPG. Thanks to its history with the Knights of the Old Republic series, Bioware's console RPG credentials are second to none, and the new trailer certainly put smiles on plenty of faces.

WATCH NEW CALL OF DUTY 4 TRAILER

Moore followed the Mass Effect trailer with a run-down of the games we can expect on Xbox Live Arcade over the next few months. Most of the titles he announced were already expected, but there was one surprise: the original Sonic and Golden Axe games went up on Xbox Live Marketplace tonight and are already available for download. More sure-fire hits will follow over the months to come, with classic Hudson multiplayer action game Bomberman and old-school Bungie FPS Marathon (which shares roots with Halo) chief among them.

No doubt eyeing the smash success Nintendo has had playing to a casual crowd unfamiliar with videogame conventions, Microsoft's Jeff Bell - in one of the evening's only truly unexpected announcements - unveiled a new Xbox Live version of the successful "Scene It" board game. Scene It games, if you're not familiar with the series, are trivia games with accompanying DVDs - and the Xbox 360 version will ship with four friendly-looking controllers bearing big red buttons and little else, all for the regular price of a 360 game.

• Call of Duty 4
• Halo 3
• Halo Wars

On the PC front, a decent portion of the evening was given over to discussing the future of Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative. Surprising no-one, Gears of War is coming to the PC this year, complete with content that looks suspiciously like it's made up of all the stuff Epic wanted to ship in the original 360 version but couldn't. Lead designer Cliff Bleszinsky demonstrated one of the new fights, against the colossus-like "Brumak" creature that made a brief appearance in the 360 game. Viva Pinata, Rare's half-gardening, half-management game, is also on its way to PC.