This was the first of what I am sure will be many E3′s for me. My initial desire was to run in, check stuff out, run to the press room and post about it, then run back to the show floor, but the actual experience was much different than that. The first thing I learned about the E3 show is that it’s huge. Frickin’ Huge, I might
even say. I started wit’ mah possee at the West Hall, where Sony and Nintendo’s enormous booths were located and slowly worked my way through the hell that is the show floor, or rather, one of the show floors.
As it turns out there are at least 3 show floors, 2 of which could be considered “main floors” I would say, because they contain all the major vendors, demos, booths full of games (and of course, booth babes) and so on. All the major players (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony) had impressive booths with lots of games on display. From my angle it appeared that the DS areas were by far the most popular portable area (No, I don’t own a DS or a PSP for that matter) but the major console areas appeared to be pretty evenly divided.
Obviously enough the best looking games were the alpha’s showing on XBox 360 (yeah, they needed some work, but they all seemed quite pretty) and those on PC. The PS2 games, for the most part, looked like
crap on the LCD monitors they were displayed on (not all of them: Jak X Racing was nice, as were Dragon Quest VIII and Akami), underscoring the importance of not putting that system onto a nice, high-resolution display. GameCube and XBox had some nice games showing (including the new Zelda and the awesome Battlefield 2).
The first day began in a very cool way: We arrived early because one of our staff had to register on site, and we were first-or close to first-in line to get a free Mountain Dew, which also happened to have winning tickets for 2 out of 3 of us (not bad!). So we started our day out with a new game for me (Forza Motorsports, yeah! Can’t wait to try it this weekend on my new HDTV!) and a free year of XBox Live and a game for Ed (who know has to actually *get* an XBox). In addition to those big bonuses there were of course the “Free! Take me!” publications (big name gaming and animation/entertainment mags mostly), and we ended up making a trip to the car to drop off our schwag about 2 hours before the show floor actually opened. WOW.
Next up, I’ll tell you all about what the physical E3 experience is like, and if you’re as out of shape as I am, your legs will hurt just reading about it!
