E3 - Day 1 Recap
The industry sure has gotten bigger in the nine years since my last E3 conference, or at least the show floor has gotten bigger - now in three halls, with many thousands of attendees.
While this is supposed to be a show for the “trade”, a whole lot of pure fans with no obvious trade affiliation managed to get in. And some looked a lot younger than the required 18 year minimum age posted at the entrance.
In any event, after getting through the ESA presentation in the morning, and discovering the power outage, I hit the West Hall exhibits area. The lighting was subdued due to the power outage, which did not affect power to the booths, but did affect ceiling lights. The power finally returned at 1:21pm PDT, and there was much rejoicing, as the power outage had prevented the concessions from opening, many of the upstairs meeting rooms from being usable, and impacted the press room and press registration pretty badly.
The West Hall’s star attractions were Nintendo and Sony, each featuring huge tracts of booth space, many dozens (if not hundreds) of game demo stations showing the latest titles in development. Folks got to hold the new Nintendo Gameboy Micro, as well as scope out a variety of single and multi-player game titles.
I will skip over the various Nth generation franchise game titles, the “new” war gaming titles, and all the other standard genres, as you’ll undoubtedly be able to read about them elsewhere.
The most interesting non-standard things I found were a VoIP program on the Nintendo DS, the Video Chat on the Sony PS2 using EyeToy, and a preview of EyeToy Kinetics. The latter was something I think I could finally get my wife to use as an entry to possibly finding game consoles useful for more than playing DVDs or distracting her three children (my two kids and myself). EyeToy Kinetics let’s one use the PS2 with an attached EyeToy camera as an interactive exercise device, with exercises ranging from a sedate but rewarding Tai-Chi-like session, to a heart pounding aerobic kick boxing work out. Can’t wait until it ships.
There was no sign of the PS3 or the Revolution in action anywhere, however.
In the South Hall were Microsoft, Ubisoft, THQ, EA, and another half dozen major game publishers, also with huge booth space. Microsoft even had a bridge/walkway one could use to by pass the crowds checking out upcoming Xbox titles. And, tucked away in the back of the booth were a handful of Xbox 360 demos, running on development systems. Shown were Activision’s Call of Duty 2, 2K Sport’s Top Spin 2, and Full Auto and Condemned from Sega of America. The visual quality was definitely closer to that of a higher end PC, and better than that of a current model Xbox, but it was tough to tell more than that.
I had my own chance at using the Xbox 360 development platform at the Electronic Arts booth, where I played a short segment of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (and inadvertently hung the system when I press the Xbox 360 button on the controller (if you’ve seen pictures, it’s the silver button in the middle). This button will be used for pulling up the Xbox Live! and related menus, but apparently that wasn’t implemented on the demo system I played with.
I know I saw many more interesting and cool things, but my brain and body are a bit toasty from walking around all day with far too little food and water for sustenance. Once I revisit my notes I will post more.
Until Day 2....
