Oh.  My.  God.  E3 was FANTASTIC.  I drove 720 miles there and back.  It took me over 13 hours, but it was a gamer's dream come true.

Let me begin my story by saying that I got up at 4:00 am on Thursday morning to drive to LA.  4:00 am!!!!  There is absolutely NO other motivator that can get me out of bed at that hour except something to do with video gaming.

[ [ Warning: Tangential riff on LA traffic incoming (Yeah I'm a complainer.  Wah wah wah.  Go away.) ] ]

I then drove for a very long time, and once I hit LA, I also hit LA traffic.  Two minutes on the LA freeways is enough to make me want to kill someone.  People were driving insanely fast through slow moving traffic and cutting other people off.  USE YOUR TURN SIGNALS PEOPLE!!!!  I don't care who you are.  Don't put the lives of others in danger because you are too LAZY or too COOL to take ONE SECOND to move your pinky finger and flip your GODDAMN TURN SIGNAL!!!!  GO TO HELL!  Ok, and if all THAT wasn't enough, I got stuck in 3 separate traffic jams.  Oh my god!!!!  Don't you DARE mess with a woman who has driven 6 hours to get to a goddamn electronic entertainment expo.  I have the reflexes of a 13-year-old boy.  Beware. 

All right, so then I finally got to the convention center, only to spend another 30 minutes looking for parking.  I saw one place charging $60 for parking.  I was almost to the point where I was willing to pay $40 at another lot, when they (thankfully) opened up the convention center garage and I FINALLY made it in.

Ok, so now I was inside!  Oh my god!  I was at E3.  E3.  The holiest of holy meccas for fanatical gamers.  The neon shrine inside which I could meet the gods of my worlds (developers), play hot new titles, see the cutting edge consoles, and experience the magic behind games that I love to play.  (Some of you will argue that E3 is over-commercialized, but I still had a great time!)

Random Inside
  

XBox 360
I had to get a look at the new 360.  I watched two games, the new Need for Speed game and a fantasy action adventure game called "Kameo: Elements of Power."  Both looked fantastic on the 360.  NFS, for those who've never seen it, uses great reflective surfaces and blurs movement at high speeds to create a "bleaching" effect.  Kameo, on the other hand, is a game where the player can morph into different creatures that have special abilities with which to navigate map levels.  In Kameo we saw a battle scene between hundreds and hundreds of creatures, which really showed off the 360's processing power.

I took crappy pictures so here are some screenshots:

A shot of the XBox 360 (the little white box in the slot):

And the 2 Apple G4s (the alpha kits) that were ACTUALLY running the games.

Blizzard
I love the stuff that comes out of Blizzard (who doesn't), and I was especially excited about new shots of their FPS game Ghost, which is scheduled to come out in the first half of 2006.

I watched people play in multiplayer mode on the big screens for a while, and the game looks and feels almost exactly like Halo with a Starcraft skin.  Not that I'm complaining at all.  I love Halo and I love Starcraft, so mixing elements of the two together gets a big thumbs up from me!

NCSoft
The NCSoft booth was huge and for good reason - they've done extremely well in the MMOG market.  I think that NCSoft has focused a lot on a specific sector of the gaming industry that is exploding rapidly (as evidenced by 20+ new MMO titles coming out), and they are the major powerhouse, especially when you take into consideration their success in Asia (4 million subscribers to Lineage).  NCSoft, please employ me!  Footnote: I have also have a theory why a lot of the 20+ MMO's are going to fail.  Article is forthcoming.

They had some very entertaining performances that included dancers and flamethrowers, but the absolute HIGHLIGHT of my day was watching the Guild Wars tournament that they put on.  They invited the #1 team from Korea, War Machine, to E3 and they played a live 20-minute guild battle against the #1 team in the world, Negative Zero. 

The match was intense but War Machine won, and if you know anything about Guild Wars, you know that these top teams run as a slickly oiled machine.  They can read each others minds.  They know every single ability in the game, have experience from hundreds of past tournaments, and have fast reflexes to react to crisis situations.  It's really fascinating to me how these guys are like celebrities.  Who says playing games can't get you anywhere?  And I got a picture!  See my face?  I was SO excited about meeting them.

Nintendo
The Nintendo team was showing some cool stuff.  Their booth had about eight huge vertical displays that shot flames up.  I thought that was one of the coolest visual displays at E3.  The other cool one was from EA, who had a circular video arena that played 3D surround sound so you felt like you were IN the stadium with the football players from Madden. 

Anyway, there were 3 especially cool things from Nintendo.  They have a new game for the DS called Nintendogs (check out the link for a demo).  It's a Tamagotchi like pet that you can "pet" by stroking it with your stylus, walking it around, feeding and playing with it, etc.  Super cute.  If I had a DS I'd play it.

Nintendo is also coming out with the Gameboy Micro this winter.  It's a super tiny, iPod sized gaming machine with a really pretty screen.

Finally, there's this AWESOME AWESOME game called Odama that is incredibly wacky and fun to play.  I thought this game was one of the most innovative I saw at E3.  It's Age of Empires and Pinball mashed together.  The objective is to take your troops (at the bottom of the screen) and storm the enemy gate at the top of the screen.  You control a cannonball that bounces around the field, knocking down soldiers and opening crates and floodgates and stuff, but the awesome part is that the soldiers respond to voice commands through the attached microphone.  So you can yell things like "Rush the gate!" "Forward!" "Push!" "More men more men!"  It was a crazy, chaotic, and absolutely fun game that I would definitely get for the Gamecube.

Random Games
Hmm, so the other games I saw (SO MANY) included an outcoming NCSoft MMOG called Tabula Rasa.  It's designed to be a MMOFPS, so that when you control your character on the battlefield, it looks and feels more like an FPS game.  I sat down and played with one of the team's game testers in Texas, and he walked me through a mission (which, btw, is an AWESOME way to demo at E3).  The game has built-in VOIP (Teamspeak/Ventrilo).

Ok, that was a really crappy photo.  Sorry!

All right, here's a pic of Soul Calibur 3.  Looks like the same basic game, nice new content and graphics.

An MMORPG called Pirates of the Burning Sea, where you control a ship and can group up with friends to form fleets, capture territory for different sides (the British, French, and Spanish), and learn skills like breaking an opponent's rudder.  Scheduled for release sometime in 2006.

Dungeons and Dragons Online.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (MMOG).  Beautiful art direction.  This game was getting more media buzz than a lot of the other MMOGs at E3, so I'm interested to see how the game turns out.

A dancing game!  This was one of the games from a Korean developer.  I think you control a dancer and try to waltz, tango, swing, etc. for the highest score.  It looks interesting.

At this point I want to mention a Korean game called 3Feel, made by creative media (?).  This is a online game where people can meet to have virtual sex.  I was walking past their booth when I see this half-naked woman dancing on the video screen.  Now, this is not unusual in the gaming world.  But then the next shot had a guy standing behind her, also half naked, and they were humping!!!!  I was like, WTF?  What is that?  I couldn't actually grasp the concept that someone had actually made a sex game until I saw sign that said "3Feel: the world's first cybersex game."  Anyway, in my shock I forgot to take pictures, but here are some screens I pulled from other websites:

Shadow of the Colossus, which is a game similar to God of War for PS2.  In this picture you can see the player on top of a giant stone golem creature.

Newest Onimusha.  Am I the only sob who likes the Onimusha games?  -_-

A game called Okami, which has a really really cool art style.  The entire game is painted in a beautiful flowing, watercolor style.  Apparently this game has also been in development for a long time.

An amusing game called "Kill All Humans."  I'm sure you can imagine what that means!

There was also a Sony PSP game called "Infected" that was particularly interesting.  It's a zombie/virus game where you run around shooting at infected humans, but it also has the wi-fi (wireless) multiplayer capability that the PSP comes with.  But the cool thing about the game is that if Person A defeats Person B in the game, Person A's character will "infect" Person B's game.  If Person B then plays and defeats Person C, B will infect C's game, but Person A also has a small chance of infecting person C's game as well.  Cool huh?  (Random side note - a group of programmers have gotten Linux to work on the PSP.  Check it out here.)

And finally, some shots of the guys at Gamespot, who were working from the showroom floor.

And that was the end of a thoroughly exciting day at the E3 expo.  But wait - the story doesn't end there!  Afterward, I went with some EA friends to the NCSoft party at the Figueroa Hotel, where they were celebrating the successful Guild Wars launch.  After some speeches and drinks and mingling, the Guild Wars team proceeded to throw ArenaNet founder Jeff Strain into the swimming pool, and then jump in after him!

Man, what a great night.

So, there ends my E3 journey, for alas I had to be back at work the next day at noon.  But still, although some parts were exhausting, I wouldn't have missed it for the world!  Now to start planning for next year's convention...