GOONL!NE

Instead of numerous news posts of what happened today at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, we’ve taken all todays happenings and stuck them all into one handy place for you to read about them.

Find out what went down with Microsoft today after the jump.

Xbox 360 Redesign

The big hardware news up first, and the news is good. Microsoft are introducing a brand new Xbox 360 SKU. As we speculated in our E3 predictions, Microsoft have indeed slimmed down the 360 and upped the spec of the current models.

The 250GB HDD remains unchanged but along side it is built-in wireless N, a redesigned internal structure with quieter fans and a combined 45nm CPU and GPU. Moreover the new Xbox has a smaller power supply, more USB ports, touch sensitive buttons and a host of other features that you can see here. The new consoles will be stores this week in the United States, with shipping beginning today. European customers will see the new Xbox hit shores on with Play.com pricing the new Xbox at £200.

Enjoy these two videos, one an unboxing and the other a hardware hands-on courtesy of Engadget. One last thing, you can harbour a slight hatred to all the journalists at the Microsoft event as each one of them left with a brand new 360 slim, the lucky beggers!!!

Call of Duty: Black Ops DLC Exclusivity Deal

Don Mattrick’s was on stage to announce that Activision and Microsoft have entered into a deal that will see all the DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops come to Xbox Live before any other platform over the next 3 years, also indicating that Black Ops should be a well supported game too. 

So essentially if DLC is a big deal and you want to get your hands on it first, 360 is the place to play Black Ops over PS3 and 360. We expect those formats to receive the DLC around a month after the 360 just like what is and has happened with Modern Warfare 2. 

So, this means, that like the Modern Warfare 2 DLC Xbox 360 users will get it first. Check out the video below for the exclusive Call of Duty: Black Ops footage that was premiered at E3 today.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising Footage

Just like he did last year, Hideo Kojima popped up again to promote Metal Gear Solid: Rising, of which nothing more has been known since the tease last year at E3.

No date was given for the game, and little was told of the story but this trailer they unleashed on us more than makes up for that. It. Looks. Epic.

Fable 3 Dated

Peter Molyneux was on stage to tell us more about his upcoming title Fable 3. The game will be released exclusively to Xbox 360 on October 26th, with no word on a date for the PC version of the game.

A trailer was also released which you can catch below.

Crytek to bring exclusive title to 360

Not too much was revealed by Crytek about their upcoming 360-only title bar the a codename, Kingdoms, and a short teaser trailer which as you can already guess, can be seen below.

Halo: Reach Footage

This arguably was one of the hottest things Microsoft showcased at E3, Halo: Reach looks like it will be the best Halo title in the series so far.

Bungie’s announced that the multiplayer mode Firefight from Halo 3: ODST last year will be included in Halo: Reach.

Additionally, Microsoft showed off some sexy space combat as well as more gameplay footage from the game which can be seen below.

ESPN for Xbox Live Gold Members

Microsoft set about getting people to bump up their Silver packages to Gold with the announcement that they’ve teamed up with ESPN to offer sports on demand.

The service will initially see around 3500 on-demand sports events being streamable to the 360 including college football and basketball, NBA, MLA and soccer (or football for those of us outside the USA), and most of the sports will also be in glorious HD too, although whether it was to be a 720 or a 1080 stream was never mentioned, we’d bet on 720p.

ESPN features integration with Kinect and allows for voice commands, so you can simply tell your console to pause, stop or rewind without the need for a remote control, they’re so 20th century.

Microsoft Kinect

Project Natal was today officially unveiled as Kinect, and will go on sale on November 4th in North America with 15 (some of which are pretty lame) launch titles for the motion camera.

GameStop in the US currently have Kinect priced at $150 and has a Kinect-Arcade bundle at $300.

Kinect was also demoed to make video calls ala Skype, and full integration throughout the 360 was demoed by Marc Whitten as he controlled the Zune Marketplace on Xbox Live with full voice control, pausing, rewinding and moving though films without a remote.

Facebook, Twitter Last.FM and basically everything else on the 360 will work with Kinect. It was also confirmed there is a new Forza title on the way for Kinect.

You can see gameplay from Kinect below from some of the forthcoming launch titles. Just to warn you now, it’s not fun and came damn near close to making this a bad conference.

Gears of War 3 co-op footage

Last but not least, gameplay footage of the cooperative mode from Gears of War 3. Not too much to say here bar you can see it in action below.

Keep an eye out for more articles over the coming days rounding up events from conferences like Sony’s, EA’s and Nintendo’s.