In order:
1) Nintendo
2) Sony
3) MS (Distant 3rd)
Nintendo's was engaging the whole time, there wasn't an un-necessary amount of time spent on new "casual" IP's and they didn't spend a huge amount of time talking about sales figures.
I loved the fact that they just hammering in more and more new games (Kirby, DK, KID ICARUS, Zelda etc), which was definitely a big step up from last year and the year before. I loved the stuff they showed about the 3DS (including, of course the new KH game). It was just fun the whole time.
Sony's was good, not better than last year, because they spent a little bit too much time on un-necessary stuff, like the Kevin Butler bit (seriously, it was okay, but it would have been funny as an Ad on TV and not at a conference where they're meant to show their plans for the next year and about 3 minutes shorter). GT5 getting a solid release date was good, I thought the showing for Move completely killed MS Kinect in the games department and Twisted Metal was an amazing finish. But for all the exclusive games Sony has been touting and how big their E3 was meant to be because of it, they basically showed as many exclusive games worth noting as Nintendo (probably less actually) and many of them we knew about officially before e3. And the lack of PSP talk, other than those ads with the kid from role models and the ghost of sparta, didn't help. PSN plus was okay, but the lack of details as to what you get with it hurt it (exclusive look at games is the only thing i remember). It was a good conference, but it wasn't as good as last years and certainly not as good Nintendos. Honestly, for a lot of the time, I was thinking to myself "stop with the taking pot shots at the competitors and actually show me something that says I should play my ps3". That's what I was thankfully about Nintendo, it seemed like they appreciated the competition, where they could have been like "we did it first".
MS lost in a big way this year, biggest concern with MS is that they basically piled on their core games in the first 30 minutes and then spent the rest of the time on Kinect. Big Mistake. I would have been less critical if they broke it up between core games and kinect. Like I said above, from e3, Move kills kinect in games, but I was really impressed with the general functionality of kinect (browsing etc). It seemed MS was less concerned with pushing games and more about pushing tech and whilst I appreciate it was there and how good the tech is looking for intergrating everything, they spent way too much time on it (Sony had the edge because it didn't feel like they spent forever on it).
Essay over.
