So I woke up at 3am Australian Eastern Standard Time to watch the Xbox 360 event – it was not my wisest moment but I still enjoyed it none the less. Whether I do that for Sony tonight is another story because I’m feeling pretty tired as I write this.

So Microsoft kicked things off with Call of Duty Black Ops – it didn’t look too bad. Better then I expected. I have played all of the Call of Duty fans but haven’t played Modern Warfare 2 for a while – I got over it once they started charging for maps from the previous Modern Warfare. But Black Ops has got my interest for now.

I believe the next game shown was Gears 3 – which looked like, er, a Gears game. I’m excited for this no matter what so they could have shown Gears 2 and I will still buy it. The same could be said for Halo Reach which I think was next up. They only showed a campaign playthrough and it looked good. September can’t come soon enough.

Fable III was shown at some point with a release date of October…

Next up was something that I will predict will never see the light of day in Australia – Metal Gear Solid Rising. The fanboys cried foul that this is not a true Metal Gear game. The same can be said for the Acid on the PSP and to some extent the other PSP games. It’s the mythology we love this about game – not necessarily the gameplay – plus it’s multiformate anyway so hush up. I’m really looking forward to this.

From here it turned to Kinect – the new Project Natal controller free invention. I didn’t believe a lot of what was shown there and I really hated the dialogue from the “players”. Kinect has a lot of potential but at this stage I’m not convinced it’s for me. I’m not convinced this will kill the Wii either. But it might prove me wrong.

The games they showed were very party orientated and probably only appealed to younger families with younger kids. They did show I believe Forza 3 with the option to use it as well as a Star Wars game but again it just didn’t look right. Maybe in a year or two when developers have perfected the hardware we might see something that will appeal to all the 360 gamers but at this stage I’d be putting money elsewhere.

The final “announcement” was a new 360 model with built-in wi-fi and a 250gb HD. It’s coming July 1st in Australia but it doesn’t look like we have a price yet. At least I know when my next 360 breaks down I can pick this up and not worry about any more wires.

Other highlights today included the announcement of a new Need for Speed game from Criterion – which all kind of knew but we just weren’t clear on specifics. It’s made my list of must-buys this year.

There was also Dead Space 2, a new Michael Jackson game announced, Driver unveiled and more. We will dissect this and more on this week’s Game On! But now I should really take a nap if I’m going to even think about getting up to see Sony.