E3 2010 For a First Timer
By:
Micah Seff
|
June 29, 2010, 8:54 pm

It was pretty weird going into E3 for the first time, with most of my colleagues having gone through the hoopla several times in the past. In truth, I had never actually made my way to the game industry’s yearly Mecca. I’ve gone to most every other major trade show in the biz, but for some reason, an E3 trip had always eluded me.

After cutting a swathe through my very first E3, I came away pretty impressed with the event. For the most part, it was a more well-oiled machine than any other show I’ve been to, and offered an incredible spectacle of unreleased games. I didn’t get to play one third of the games I wanted to, and I spent way more time than I expected walking between the West and South Halls of the gigantic LA Convention Center, but overall, my first E3 was just as fantastic a display of gaming over-indulgence as I had always expected it to be.


Filming Skyward Sword footage after the conference
I suppose the coolest thing about E3 this year would have to have been getting to watch Nintendo’s Press Conference live and from the third row. For the past decade, I’ve been rousing myself early, and squatting on live streams for hours, hoping to get a clear view of the show. I’ve seen these streams get better and better each year, even as Nintendo’s show got worse and worse. I think I might have actually been pretty happy to see anything after so many years of elated highs and disappointed lows, but the fact that this year’s conference held so many great games was enough to push the whole thing over the edge.

Naturally, after walking away from Nintendo’s show (and having been one of the first twenty or so people anywhere to get to play through the Skyward Sword demo), I was jazzed to head to the show floor and just jam through as many games as I could. Ha! The joke was on me, as this was a dream that is hardly feasible at an event of this scale. Instead, I had an appointment with Realtime Worlds and their GTA-inspired MMO, APB, and I had no idea how to get to their private meeting room.


Standing in line is the easy part
I hoofed my way through the cavernous halls of the Convention Center being mislead by dozens of staffers before finding the booth and being greeted by an amiable member of the Suicide Girls. I’m not one to buy in wholeheartedly to the usage of hot, nubile girls as a method of making games more appealing, but I’m also not one to ignore the nude models trying to get temporary tattoos to stick to me, even if they’re being paid to be nice.

After over an hour at Realtime World’s booth getting charmed mercilessly by one of the developers, I made my way back onto the mean streets of LA’s Convention Center. I spent the rest of the first day scrambling around from one meeting of this sort to another checking out a whole smattering of anticipated games, unfortunately none of them particularly anticipated by me. Well, that’s not entirely true, Civilization V will own me completely when it comes out, and the more robust demo (when compared to the GDC build) was pretty impressive.


Spectacle is of utmost importance
The second and third days of E3 were much the same as the first, except I didn’t spend as much time getting lost trying to make my appointments. High Voltage Software pulled off a neat disappearing trick (like the Grinder on Wii! Zing!) by surreptitiously being left off the floor map entirely, but other than that, it seemed like I was getting the hang of at least navigating this utterly daunting experience. I was finally also getting to play some games that were more up my alley.

I got to rock some Donkey Kong Country and 3DS behind closed doors at Nintendo’s booth, suck it up at drums in Rock Band 3 with most of the GameXplain staff, get inside scoops from The Grinder devs, play an advance copy of a WiiWare title (Frobot) on a Wii development unit while sitting on the floor of our hotel room, and take our team out to some delicious Japanese curry in Little Tokyo. It was all going pretty smoothly.


Random Itagaki sighting are rare yet wonderful treat
I even got to meet some people that I hugely respect, which was a delight. Foremost among those was my chance run-in with Suda 51 while making my way back to the show floor after lunch. He’s one of my favorite game designers in the past decade, so the chance to get to speak with him -- albeit in my terribly broken Japanese -- was simply awesome, to say the least. He seemed pretty busy, and my mind was full of Japanese phrases involving food, so I didn’t get to pump him for much information, but it was a joy nonetheless. Getting to film a GameXplain bump with Charles Martinet was rad as well. He really has an incredible voice, as silly as that may seem. I also met two of the guys from Mega Man tribute band, The Megas, whom I got to sell on the awesomeness of Skyward Sword.

All in all, I’d say that I viewed E3 this year as a success, pretty much on all levels. All three major console manufacturers put on great shows in their own ways. There was an abundance of co-op-focused 2D platformers, even in spite of the preponderance of shooters shown off, which made me happy. Plus, our video editing computer hadn’t gotten damaged on the ride down, after all. My first E3 was a success, now came the hard part: drive us all back to San Francisco on ten total hours of sleep in the past three days without killing the entire GameXplain team in a fiery inferno. Luckily, I hate sleep like most gamers hate fetch quests, and we all lived to tell the tale.
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