samred.com | ©2012 Sam Machkovech

At E3 2011, Ice-T performs "Cop Killer" in front of a Gears of War 3 logo.

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After seeing Microsoft’s gaming lineup at this year’s E3, you’d be forgiven for calling its Xbox efforts family-friendly. In particular, its most recently announced Kinect-enabled games that week included incredibly kiddie fare like Sesame Street and Disneyland.

On Tuesday night, that sure seemed to piss rapper/actor Ice-T off.

Taking the stage at an LA nightclub, the Law & Order: SVU star reunited his notorious punk band Body Count at a party celebrating the upcoming Xbox shooter Gears of War 3, even unveiling a song with the game’s name in the chorus. Minutes later, clad in an orange jumpsuit and spraying f-bombs like machine-gun fire, T demanded that a crowd of game designers and businessmen in suits shout along to the song “Cop Killer,” going so far as to ask fans to “sing it from your nuts.”

That’s one way to get your game rated M for mature.

Xbox’s E3 presence repeatedly bounded between the polar extremes of Gears of War’s skull-crushing combat and Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster’s adorable critters. Consider that stance a necessity for the company. Unlike its rivals, Microsoft had no new hardware to show off, so its PR message instead revolved about being the game system for “everyone,” from the hardcore to the family.

Certainly, Microsoft tried to proclaim that Kinect, the system’s motion-sensing add-on, could satisfy both extremes. Emphasis on “tried.”

“I can make a hardcore game with Kinect, and I don’t want to go back to a controller,” declared game designer Peter Molyneux as he presented the Kinect quest game Fable: The Journey at a private press demo. But his game’s footage didn’t match his words; while promising that the game wouldn’t unfold “on rails,” the 10-minute demo followed a fixed path. Players waved their hands to ride a horse in a straight line, then pointed at the screen to blast fireballs at goblins, light-gun style. If Peter wanted to convince us of his mission, he picked the wrong segment to show off.

There’s a reason so many Kinect games are on rails, as Sega’s new horror game Rise of Nightmares proved. Its demo had players walk through an abandoned prison and deal with wretched zombies, mining the campiness of the House of the Dead series. That meant Kinect tracked your every move. Use your hands to wield chainsaws at campy zombies? Cool! Use your shoulders and feet to steer and walk yourself? Awkward!

Kinect Star Wars didn’t fare much better in that department; its on-rails demo allowed two players to team up against the Empire and flail together, as Kinect intermittently responded to lightsaber swipes and “force” pushes. Wait for encounter, wave arms wildy, automatically walk to next encounter, repeat.

In better news, last year’s biggest hits have gotten better with an extra year in the kitchen. Dance Central 2 showed off two-player support and competitive modes, meaning the game might finally rival the massive Just Dance franchise; also worth noting, dance routines now come with preview videos. Fitness title Your Shape will add much-needed floor routines and regimen refinements to its fall 2011 outing, as designer Nicola Godin admitted that in last year’s, “workouts could be like a black hole.”

The Kinect-crazy folks at Ubisoft are also putting the polish on a Raving Rabbids mini-game collection, the first in Kinect’s lineup to push augmented reality. The game’s cute Rabbids walk around your living room, and you can pick them up, fling them, bop them on the head, or pose with them for photos. Behind closed doors, I snuck a glance at a very rough demo in which I had a booger hanging out of my nose on the screen, then attached a Rabbid to it, swung my head around to build momentum, and flung the critter hundreds of feet.

On the normal-controller side, Microsoft was surprisingly quiet about some of its best fare. Indie games Bastion and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, set for release this summer, will surely rank on critics’ best-of lists with their remarkable takes on things like spoken narration and art design, but they were overshadowed at Microsoft’s booths by run-and-gun squad game Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and supercar sim Forza Motorsport 4 (which, admittedly, are both pretty slick for their respective genres).

Strangely, the company also played it cool about its potentially biggest game of the year, the 10-year anniversary reboot of Halo: Combat Evolved. As a way to placate fans, the game’s original engine has been left intact–”we didn’t want to ruin a classic,” said producer Dennis Ries–with a modern graphic engine loaded on top. If players want proof, they can tap a “time warp” button at any time to make the game look just like it did 10 years ago.

Indeed, the original, 10-year-old version looks terribly dated, but the “updated” graphics aren’t much to shout about, hovering just short of Halo 3′s looks (which isn’t saying much). The game will come with a weird mulitplayer mode, as CE’s seven original combat maps are on the disc… but run separately in the 2010 Halo Reach engine. CE Anniversary buyers will get a code if they want to attach those maps to their copy of Reach, instead. As of now, that makes this $40 package a barely touched version of CE and a map pack. If I’m gonna replay a tried-and-true franchise, I’d rather put my holiday games money towards Gears of War 3–at least if its updated Horde mode, complete with slick tower defense elements, is any indication of the final product.

The best news at Microsoft’s E3 presence was just how much there was. Microsoft’s press conference, parties and showcases gave fare like Gears of War and Kinect Star Wars the biggest booths and loudest f-bombs, obviously meant to entice and titillate the mainstream. But Microsoft was better than any other company at E3 at dotting its floorspace with compelling and varied content. Kinect had its fair share of sleepers, like this week’s Children of Eden and the forthcoming Fruit Ninja, a smooth spinoff of the iPhone hit.

And there was enough Xbox Live fare to make some of MS’s booth look damn near like indie-friendly GDC, from the Populous-esque world-building weirdness of From Dust to the two-player “tower offense” combat title Rock of Ages. That quantity and quality approach, more than anything, did the best to fulfill Microsoft’s “games for everyone” mission.