Other E3 Notes
Well E3 has come and gone for another year, and while it was my first time in attendance there really wasn’t a heckuva lot to surprise me. The booths, if you can call them that, were massive; the game were at times difficult to get to and try out; some people were very very stinky; and at the end of the day, all you wanted to do was have a nice cold beer and try to digest all that your senses had been assaulted with.
Some thoughts:
- Booth babes - Still in existence, and I have the photos to prove it. Keep in mind that I couldn’t run down some of the other ‘babes’, but I did get a representative sample of them, roughly trisected into: dancing babes, distribution babes, and posing babes.
- Hideo Kojima - Loki in a Japanese body. He’s a cheeky guy, not afraid to toy with his audience, and single-handedly has more personality that most of the western developers combined.
- Okami - I don’t know if I’ve mention it before, but Clover Studio’s “action painting game” is one that’s been on my radar for a while. To quote IGN “Playing as Ama Terasu, a sun god who takes on the form of a wolf, your goal is to bring life back to the world. Bringing life back to the world involves defeating lots of beasts. With each beast you defeat, the world’s life force is restored just a bit, with colors and eventually people appearing.” The art is just beautiful and after having a try at it myself…gorgeous.
- Gears of War - Exciting in a very different way. In a boom-bang-crash sort of way. Combining photorealistic images with interesting new advances in realistic movement. After seeing CliffyB’s sneak peek, where the crowd literally ooo-ed and ahh-ed and squealed with delight as the bad guys were dispatched in a gory goopy mess with a close range shotgun blast, it’s hard not to like this one.
- Sega - Horrendously short on Sonic t-shirts, which I was trying to snag for my buddy Jonic over at Re:Retro. He’ll have to settle for pictures unfortunately but I want him to know I stalked the Sega employees like a maniac for two days. They’re tricksy they are.
- To Atari - I absolutely applaud your attempt to set up your display room like an old school urban arcade, with chain link fence and button mashing machines. In the future though, I would suggest perhaps foregoing a couple of machines for walking space, as I found myself mashed up against Neverwinter Nights 2 for several minutes.
- Booth of the Year: Has to go to Nintendo. It was just visually beautiful. Unclutter by a lot of ads and banners, clean, easily accessible with a lot of demo units to try. A nice calming (and very noticeable) white amongst the rampage of bright flashy colours. Thank you for saving my sanity and staving off epileptic fits.
- Most Practical Swag of the Year: Three huge cheers for The American Game Factory for their extremely useful swag. It’s hard to describe how disgusting one can get walking around and pressing bodies with thousands of gamers. I nearly cried tears of joys when I walked up to the booth to talk to the PR folks and discovered that they were handing out AGF packets containing moist toillettes. I felt like taking over the PA system and telling that guy I had stood beside two booths ago (yeah, you, the one that hadn’t showered in several months by the smell of things) to head over this way and sop up the sweat.
- Oddest Swag of the Year: A tiny, tiny little harmonica from the Atlus Inc booth emblazoned with the game title “Bumpy Trot“. Fully functional, if a little difficult to play due to the size.
- Fatal1ty: Could kick anyone’s ass. The guy is a machine. I watched him dismantled several challengers by embarrassing scores like 24-2.
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