From the beginning, Microsoft promised a return to its roots — "games, games, and more games," as Xbox Live’s Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb put it. Last year, the company was pushing the idea of a connected machine that touched every piece of media in your living room; one of its exclusive games even included a semi-interactive TV show. Since release, though, the Xbox One’s sales haven’t matched those of the PlayStation 4. This time around, there was no mention of the One’s streaming and TV capabilities. The formerly central Kinect got a single nod with Dance Central Spotlight, a digital-only title apparently designed to scratch devoted players’ itch for new hit songs. Hryb spent the half-hour before the show interviewing stars on a "green carpet," and the whole show was cut with interstitials from high-profile developers and the cast of Silicon Valley reminiscing about their favorite games. Xbox head Phil Spencer praised gaming as the "fastest growing new medium."

Sony's conference was exhaustingly dense by contrast

Sony’s press conference, held in the evening, was exhaustingly dense by contrast. Speakers jumped from games to hardware to television and back again, bringing entire teams of developers on stage. After two hours, we’d seen glimpses of dozens of games, in-depth demos of a smaller number, a $99 gaming set-top box, a new edition of the PlayStation 4, and a new movie and TV show. Microsoft’s slower-paced conference wasn’t short on showmanship, including a frenetic demo for skate-punk shooter Sunset Overdrive, but it seemed more dedicated to the abstract idea of games than the titles themselves.

Sony also got to kick off its event with one of the most anticipated games of E3: Destiny, Bungie’s massively multiplayer shooter. It aired the first real footage of Batman: Arkham Knight and announced the next-gen debut of Grand Theft Auto V. Compared to last year, when Sony gave the impression that it had neatly wrapped up indie games, Microsoft made a decent showing of its ID@Xbox program; Limbo developer Playdead came out with a stylish Inside trailer unlike anything else at the show. But Sony blew it away with games like the astonishingly beautiful No Man’s Sky, a completely procedurally-generated space-exploration game.

In its most successful moments, Microsoft tapped into a potent nostalgia for the Xbox 360 and even the original Xbox. The biggest announcement of the morning was probably the Master Chief Collection, a remastered compilation of four Halo games that includes every single multiplayer map and updated graphics for Halo 2. With Halo 5: Guardians set to come out in 2015, the collection created a nodal point for the series, including access to both a Guardians beta and a Ridley Scott-produced digital series — not to be confused with Steven Spielberg’s Halo TV series. Its other offerings were less direct remakes, but the greatest applause went to two revived Xbox exclusive titles: open-world shooter Crackdown and action-strategy game Phantom Dust. Microsoft has given us some of the most iconic titles of the last two decades, and it’s not letting anyone forget it, even if those titles have taken a long time to make it to the Xbox One.