Vin Diesel’s gaming company, Tigon Studios, is trying to make good with Wheelman, a Driver-esque, open world action/driving experience due out from Midway. There were a few… interesting innovations in the game (instead of stopping your car to steal other vehicles, you can now hijack any car on the road while in motion), but this was mostly a case of “we saw it being played so you don’t have to.” (more)

Microsoft struck first at the world’s most prestigious video game trade show with a press conference held Monday in Los Angeles. The gaming giant used the event to announce that the dashboard for its Xbox 360 console was going to receive a major overhaul. A system update is coming this fall that will completely retool the system’s graphical user interface and give gamers the power to create customizable avatars that will act as digital representations of themselves in the Xbox Live community. (more)

It renamed itself the “E3 Media and Business Summit,” slashed the guest list, ditched the booth babes, expensive parties, D-list celebs and glitzy demonstrations. Attendance dwindled from the more than 80,000 people packing the convention center to a fraction of that — about 5,000 people this year.

With so few attendees, no big announcements and not much buzz, it begs the question: Is E3 going the way of the dinosaur? Or perhaps, going the way of the more recently extinct Comdex?