Miss iRiE

Ana

E306 - Day 1

After driving for almost two hours to LA with my fiancee (Jason, aka. Vision), we finally made it to the first day at E3. After not being in California for a year, I can tell that nothing has changed in regards to traffic and gas prices are very high. I feel for the Californian residents, that have to deal with this.

We still managed to arrive at the Convention Center an hour early. The first thing I noticed was the community bloggers bus. The guys did a great job with the bus, they made it as much possible for us to provide the community enough information about the event. It's a shame that I don't own a laptop and I don't feel comfortable using other people's computers. Otherwise, I would've shared all this from the bus.

Then the doors finally opened at 10 am, there was a lot of people just lining up to go in. The first booth that I noticed was the Ubisoft booth, they where playing some music that at first sounded half decent but then when I heard the same song over and over it went from decent to blah. I was quite surprise to see some booth babes there. But I guess that's marketing and they where actually dressed pretty decent, compared to others...But I still don't have nothing against those girls. Hey, they have to deal with a lot of mess.

Then we decided to go inside to check out as much as possible that way we could have a better idea. I checked out the EA they where demonstrating trailers of various games that we will be expecting to see soon. The one that caught my attention was Sims 2, Pets. I am a huge Sims fan so anytime EA comes up with an expansion no doubt that it will be on my list. Other games that they where demonstrating was Godfather 2, Madden 07 (of course) and more.

We then decided to go checkout the Xbox 360 booth that was located in the rear of the South Hall, close by third party companies like Ubisoft and Blizzard. I don't know from last year, but the booth looked great. It was nicely decorated with the 360's hardware on the side, limited edition faceplates, skinned with Microsoft's Zero Hour launch event, and others had house duo Daft Punk's logo.

Some of the games that I checked out where Los Planet: Extreme Condition, Prey, F.E.A.R., Chromehounds, Ninety-Nights, Madden NFL 07, Too Human, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Crackdown and MotoGP 06. They also demonstrated the games for Windows too bad I didn't see a new Age of Empires available; at least an expansion would've been nice. They also had the Halo 3 trailer playing, so I guess they wanted to get some hype going for H3. Other than Gears of Wars, the game that caught my attention was MotoGP 06, too bad I will have to wait till June. But no doubt that will be one of the games that I will be adding to our collection.

In addition to the games they offered gamers a glance at some of the new Xbox 360 peripherals, the external HD-DVD player, which was previously unveiled on Tuesday at the Microsoft Press Briefing that some of us got to attend. Also, the wireless, force-feedback steering wheel was held aloft by wires, and next to that were an Xbox 360 controller, the wireless Ethernet adapter, the Bluetooth headset, and a wireless receiver, which makes Xbox 360 gear compatible with PCs.

We then passed by Nintendo's Wii and I was expecting more. I guess we shall see the outcome of that new controller. I hate to put them together but then we decided to checkout the infamous PS3, I got the impression that they didn't really have much to offer to their fans. I guess we will see in the holidays. Either way, I will most likely end up purchasing both consoles. I might hold off on the PS3 till it drops in price, because that $500-$600 price range it's really pushing it too high.

Other booths that where around we mainly took pictures of them. Scarface - The World is Yours had a pretty stylish booth, too bad Al Pacino wasn't there. The game looked half decent; I don't know about games that are based on movies. Perhaps if Radical decides to use a certain percentage of profits they make from the game to a Cuban foundation, I might consider it. Moving on, we then decided to checkout what Nvidia had available for us, what techy is not interested in this? They had over 45 games running the GeForce 6800 GPUs. Besides that they had available for gamers to visit the "Unreal Engine 3 Theater" for viewing the Unreal Engine 3 demo, powered by the GeForce 6800. They also had the latest Nvidia GeForce 6800 demos: Nalu, Timbury and Clear Sailing.

We then decided to head back to the bus, to meet up with Godfree for C3 Community party. The community party was pretty cool, they offered an open bar and I got to meet some of the MVPs, John Porcaro, some of the staff from Xbox.com in Japan ( that where really sweet ) and others. They combined a get together with games, drinks, snacks and some of the gamers that are part of the Xbox community. I got my hands on shadowrun and I tried to play the MotoGP 06 demo, but unfortunately there was always too many people playing it. After the party ended, we where exhausted we had to drive back home to rest for the next day. I will be posting later tomorrow day two and the last day of E3...

Photography credits to Godfree, Vision, John Porcaro and Eric!

Posted: Wed, May 17 2006 20:13 by Ana
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