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It starts with a console unveiling and it ends with a console unveiling, and between all that is one of Microsoft's most interesting E3 conferences in years. This is a year for subtle messaging and huge thunderbolts - and pulling everything together is games, games, games. Fighting games, racing games, card games (of course) and even pirate games. Microsoft was punished, still fairly recently, for trying to turn the Xbox into a cross-media platform. Since then, it's retreated to the old favourites, risk-averse and seemingly vision-averse. Not this year. This year it's saying something new. And it's saying it, for the most part, with games.Not that absolutely all of it makes immediate sense. After an opening message that speaks of the Orlando shootings - "the gaming community mourns with you," said Xbox boss Phil Spencer - the first of those consoles is announced: The Xbox One S: a smaller, glossy white version of the Xbox One, with a slightly better controller. 4K, Blu-Ray, HDR gaming. Want one? Possibly. Sadly, an hour from its unveiling, Microsoft is going to leave punters confused and perhaps a little bit annoyed.
Not yet, though. Next up, Gears of War: a warm bubble bath of pretty storm effects and brisk splatter, rendered ever-so-slightly toothless by familiarity. Still: so pretty, and so weighty. Heavy doors, heavy winds, heavy armour clumping around. Here's a new physics weapon that sends razor-edged disks pinging around the environment. Here's four-player co-op across game modes and a shot of good ol' Marcus Fenix at the end. None of this is the real message, though. The real message is Xbox Play Anywhere: buy the game digitally and you get to own it and play it on both Xbox One and Windows 10 - with saves and Achievements transferring, and crossplay between platforms. This is Microsoft's main theme for the evening.
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