Day 2 of E3 I completely and totally lost my shit. But first, the keynotes!
I got up early to catch both the Nintendo and Sony keynotes. Standouts from the Nintendo keynote, as I twittered live, were things like Golden Sun DS, Mario RPG, and Dead Space Extraction. As a Wii owner and DSi owner I was really enthused by those titles. Four player Mario looked neat but I hated the stutter when a player died and the other three had to apparently wait for a half second. Mario Galaxy 2 won’t be out until next year. The only things left that excited me were the new Metroid game and the possibility that the Wii Vitality might give us the ultimate video game experience, a game powered by your heart rate, Wii Crank.
Sony started off a tad slow in my opinion, but when they recovered they really recovered. God of War 3, The Last Guardian, MAG, and PSP Go I think were really really really strong announces. Their overall briefing had a lot more energy than the Nintendo one and their exclusive line up really has me interested, even if I have to wait for 2010 for most of it.
CNET has a great wrap up of the three keynotes. Not surprisingly, I tend to agree with the wrap up. <g>
Keynotes watched, e and PMS Kitty and I went to have lunch to debate the presentations and talk about what has us excited as gamers.
As a side note, I got weird flak during my live twittering our competitors’ keynotes because I work at Xbox and people expected me to somehow be loyal solely to that. Look, I’m a gamer first. I own all three platforms and a DSi. Yes, I work at Xbox to make it the best possible platform, and I think it is clearly the best platform. But this isn’t a zero sum game. I love PAIN, Killzone 2, and Infamous on the PS3. I love World of Goo, Boomblox, Metroid on the Wii. And I’m on record that my DSi is by far my favorite hand held platform evar. Fanboyism isn’t really my thing, because it’s really really limiting.
Then Steven Spielberg walked right by me and I temporarily lost the power of speech.
Wait I’m getting ahead of myself.
So after lunch we hit the crown jewel of the event for my first E3, the thing I was looking forward to the most, that deep fried twinkie/snickers bar combo of dense awesome gaming event goodness, the E3 expo.
Right outside the hall was a full size Ecto 1!!!
Sony did a great job branding the West hall.
The expo is divided into two halls, the South Hall which was mostly our booth plus Harmonix, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Square Enix, etc etc, and the West hall which had Sony, Nintendo, Activision, Capcom, etc etc.
For our first day, we hit the South Hall. Energy there was way up, with tons of title announcers and demos and lines to see the new hotness. We started off checking out all the titles in the Microsoft booth. For a lot of them we’d of course seen them because, you know, we work there. But pausing slightly at a demonstration of the Sky integration LIVE feature, I looked up from the demo to see, passing less than a foot beside me, Steven Spielberg and a couple of his body guards. As my jaw hit the floor with an audible thud, e saw my reaction and took the opportunity to try and engage me in conversation, “Are you ok?”
“He—that—walked just now—things—movie I like—just now—right by us—he…” I stammered.
Did I diss on fanboyism just a minute ago? I lost, my shit. Steven *fucking* Spielberg walked mere inches from me on the way to our private briefing area to show off Natal. In retrospect, there was thankfully no opportunity for me to engage him in conversation because I would forever made him hate me by saying “THANK YOU FOR CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/JAWS/SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, btw what the hell were you thinking re: Jurassic Park: The Lost World?” Of course in my temporary stroke victim status losing my speech center it would have come out “THANK—CLOSE—JAWS—PRIVATE RYAN—HELL—LOST WORLD?”
My mind totally screwed, we proceeded to check titles out. Standouts are Assassin’s Creed 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Blur, and Shadow Complex for XBLA. AC2 looks incredible on any platform. Splinter Cell Conviction is one hell of an incredible exclusive for the 360. Blur looks to have the same type of longevity as Burnout Paradise. And Shadow Complex is the best looking, most fun XBLA title I have seen to date. It’s like playing a side scroller version of Gears of War 2, it looks that good.
The final night we rocked the Bethesda party in Hollywood. I’ll just say there was drinking and karaoke, and I dedicated Pearl Jam’s Alive to The Lone Wanderer. Our execs showed up too and to say a fun time was had by all is a bit of an understatement
E3 2009 was already probably the coolest thing ever. Day 3 report coming up! (and don’t worry contest folk, you day is coming with special new prizes. I added a first, second and third prize set!)