E3

went to E3 up in LA today and it was KICK ASS. i carpooled with my PlanetSide homies. the expo started at 8am so we met up at work at 6. i woke up at the unholy hour of 5am, and i haven’t woken up that early in ages, so that was pretty hard to do. the drive up there wasn’t so bad, until we got up to LA, and the drive was ass from then on. we also had trouble finding the place due to some incomplete directions we got, but we eventually found it. one of the first exhibits we saw was for Bungie’s Halo2 and that just raised the bar for everything else that we were going to see. we all pretty much agreed that the Halo2 exhibit was the best of show. that and the other game demos for the Xbox has me thinking about buying one of these evil boxes. Square-Enix had a really cool setup for their upcoming games. before we got into the room, we were given these wireless headphone units. when we were waiting for the show to open, they piped in news and info about their upcoming games and how long it would be until the next show would be open. once it was open, we walked into this dark room with a big screen up front which was also synced with the headphones. the standout games that they showed were Final Fantasy X-2 and FF XI. Nintendo’s booth was damn cool as well. they had a circular layout on the floor and in the middle was a raised platform with 2 DJs and some girls tossing out swag. Mario Kart looked like the title they really wanted to show off. there was a huge line to play it but we didn’t want to wait for it. there was also another huge line for Half-Life 2 but it was getting close to closing time, so didn’t get to see it. the booth for PlayStation featured Gran Turismo 4 (i didn’t think things could look better than GT3 but i’m wrong), Socom II, and a number of other games. SOE had a “by invitation only” booth which featured a live demo of PlanetSide (yay!), Lords of Everquest, Everquest Online Adventures: Frontiers, and Everquest II. Namco’s booth was right next to ours, and they were showcasing Soul Calibur II, and had some yummy booth babes as well. speaking of booth babes, there were plenty around the convention and i did get snapshots of a some (hey gary — bibbodee-pow!) as well as pics of exhibits. i’m uploading them as i type this and should be up in the gallery soon. well, it’s been a long day… we actually had some work to do after the convention, so we stayed till 9 to wrap up, and i’ve got work these next 2 days so it’s bedtime for me. l8s…