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Well I'm back in the US. I'm currently in LA and will be going to E3 again for the next three days! Yay!
I guess that's why I haven't been around much lately, because I have been trying to get things sorted out for my trip. And well I'm kind of down on Oddworld's new direction [don't worry, I aren't leaving or giving up the site or anything, I just lost motivatoin for a bit].
I'll post some E3 reports on Oddworld-Web if anyone is interested. And if you have any games you want me to try and check out, let me know ... I'll try my best. Providing I can drag myself away from all the FF7 goodness at the SE booth. ;)
Abe Babe...
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You've never been to E3 before have you?
I managed to skip E3 this year, and boy am I glad. I get asked by people if I'll take them with me and they're all the same... they all think it's like a startrek convention. They all think it'll just be like a day in the park and they don't realise that it's
business not
pleasure.
You want to know what E3 is like? Loud, lots of flashing lights and music, no space to move around in the booths, unwashed sweaty people bumping into you or so close that you could hear them breathing (if the music wasn't so loud), and long queues for everything. Yay! Alright, say for instance you want to play the latest version of a game you like; you go find the booth (which is a task in itself) and once you get there, you've got to queue up for ages, then when you finally get to the console (which is identical to the kind you find in game stores with the controllers attatched to the thingy) so that you can play maybe half a level of a half finished game, with lights reflecting off your screen, and music too loud for you to hear anything that's going on - do you think you would be satisfied with that? Before you know it, your time is up and you've got to let someone else take over.
And that's only if wondering around looking in booths is
what you're supposed to be doing. Even then you're expected to write a short report on each thing you check out, which is nearly impossible to do without just writing "couldn't tell much from demo". You'll often be given a list of things to see too, so it's not like you can really make a beeline for anything in particular. If you have to manage your company's booth, then you ain't going anywhere bud - you're unlikely to meet anyone important either. If you're lucky enough to be one of the floor guys who runs around checking out all the booths, then the only hope of getting anything useful out of your time, is attending talks. I take a dictaphone to these since scribing it all out on a notepad means you don't get to listen to what the speaker is actually saying, you're just hearing words and writing them down.
Of course, there's always the people who have gotten tickets by "being in the business" but not "being at E3 on business". They can just browse around at their own leasurely pace, garnering whatever info satisfies their desires. Not that there is any damn point of course, they just do it because they can, and because it makes them feel special. I bet they don't feel too "special" at the end of the day after being bashed about in crowds of people and being on their feet all day. Considering that most the game news websites come to E3 and have their own reporters going round the entire show so that they can update their readers with a live feed, there really isn't much point in going to E3 if all you want is info for personal use. You can get all the info you want on these websites, as it happens. All major games will be covered, as well as some other, minor or low key games. The demos are really crap and don't tell you anything important, nor do they give you any kind of feel for what the game will be like. Anything important about the demos is usually covered in the news reports.
So you see, it's really not all that it's crept up to be.
Good luck Abe Babe, and remember to take a mobile phone, water/liquids, and for gods sake always keep a map of the event on you.