Microsoft's E3 presentation this evening (European time) has provided at least one minor shock. That is that Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360 "should" release on the same day and date as the PS3 version. This is according to Square Enix's president, Yoichi Wada.

This finally resolves the mystery of why Square was not going to ship the game in fiscal year 2007/2008 which we reported in May 2007.

The announcement that one of Sony's longest-held and most popular (in its homeland and abroad) third-party relationships was going to become more 'open' came at the end of a lacklustre presentation - the analysis of which we will bring you in due course.

In short you can expect no new hardware - bar motion-sensing microphones for the LIPS karaoke game. You can expect a tarted-up, 3D GUI with Miis... sorry, avatars, for Xbox Live.

Release dates were also announced for:

Gears of War 2: worldwide on November 7.
Fable 2: to be released in October.
Resident Evil 5: Friday the 13th March 2009 in Europe and North America.

Fallout 3 was given an impressive run-out; and will feature "substantial downloadable content". Talking of which, the DLC for GTA IV was also mentioned by Shane Kim. As we already knew that it would be coming later in the year, the announcement that it would be coming, "later this year" was really no surprise - remember that Take-Two told us all this back in June.

The bulk of the presentation, however, featured a raft of 'casual' gaming plus several Microsoft executives embarrassing themselves with the You're In The Movies application.

One thing we did notice by its omission, however, was mention of Too Human.