It's interesting, because there was so much potential going in... But most companies blew their surprises early (so we didn't get many reveals at E3, just updates on things we already knew about)... And most of the next-gen consoles didn't have much substance ready.
Xbox 360 is the least excuseable, I think... by all accounts, they're something like five months away from launch, yet a lot of the games aren't even close to "there" yet, and were shown off on dev kits that were supposedly weaker and weaker as the show went on until they settled on the pathetic "30%" number... So some of the private showing stuff (presumably on full-power 360s) looked good, but the on-floor stuff was often underwhelming, and had developers repeatedly asking for large leaps of faith. Microsoft needed more working Xbox 360 units out on the show floor.
PS3 was nice and pretty and had some good-looking stuff... and of course, it was then made clear that if a lot of devs don't have their 360 stuff together, there's no way in hell that most of what we saw was actually designed and run on a PS3. No, a lot of it existed as tech estimates, done to optimal spec and polished in minute ways most console games would never be. True, most consoles present such estimates early on, but in the end, we were left with a lot of pretty videos and some ideals, but little substance and a lot of arguments.
And Nintendo... let's see, we had a slip out of Perrin (if she hadn't actually chose NOW of all times to kick her Jedi habit, we wouldn't have as strong preconceptions about the power of the Rev; even if they end up being wrong, that's still some damage done), heavy-duty backwards compatibility and a few game name drops, and another... "Wait until later." Which is... what we got last time. People were upset at this, and then cited it as a brilliant move, because... Nintendo makes brilliant moves. Always. To make up for this, they have expanded GCN support with... games we've already known about for months. And Super Mario Strikers. And another Mario Party with the completely daft idea of two people sharing a controller. (Got to say, though, their DS gamble has paid off a bit, the PSP is getting a lot of port-downs, while the DS is getting original games and GBA port-ups.) And they refuse to reveal their unique control interface for fear of it being knicked, so all we pretty much got out of it was "Tiny retro box with FF:CC and a blue-lined slot loading disc drive."
So the next-gen aspect was disappointing (not to mention the lack of reveals, although MGS3: Substinance looks promising), but at least we got confirmation that some of the titles in dev are doing well.
No excuses for Namco not announcing a US release of Namco X Capcom, though.
