E3: Day 1

Yeah, I know I never did a post on the Nintendo conference. Hopefully I'll get to it. The hotel's internet is some garbage, and I have no way of..actually watching it. I saw the WiiU bit on my phone this morning though, so that'll work.

E3. I don't know where to begin. It is beyond words. Seeing what you see, talking to the people you talk to, taking everything in.. It's really something you have to experience to understand. My eyes watered up a bit when I first saw the convention center with those massive posters outside of it. It's that same picture you see every year, except I was looking at it with my own eyes.

We got to the convention center at 9 in case there was a line to pick up our badge holders (there wasn't), so we were able to do a bit of exploring before the expo opened at 12. Unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot to see since they kept the two main exhibit halls closed off. After an hour of looking around and 2 hours of anxiously sitting near the bottom of the escalator into the south hall, we entered. I can't really recall how long my jaw was dropped for. It might be a new record. What followed was a series of incredible experiences until we eventually decided to head over to the West hall for a second set of incredible experiences. The south hall contained most of the big game development companies like Ubisoft, EA, Square Enix, etc. Each of the main booths had a ton of games to play, as well as some amazing light and sound systems to give it an awesome feel all around. Lots of free stuff, a couple beta keys, and the overall excellence of being near so many game developers and famous people. I had a bagel for breakfast and ate nothing more until dinner at 7. The games sustained me.

I'm not even sure where to begin as far as describing the booths. EA had a big central area with a ton of small, 15ish people viewing rooms circling it. We sat in on a Sims 3 pets demonstration and got ourselves some lovely dog collars. Square Enix had a nice little light wall thing set up, along with a huuuuge viewing screen for trailers and several FFXIII-2 stations, along with other games (Dead Island looks fun). Activision had some sort of drop down 360 degree theater for showing off MW3. Nexon let us try out the new Vindictus character and some Dragons Nest gameplay, giving us tshirts for both and a beta invite for Dragons Nest. I could continue for hours.

The west hall had a few other major game companies (Konami, Capcom) and the maaaaaasive Sony and Nintendo booths. Nintendos was less of a booth, more of a gym-sized tent with WiiU demos, 3DS game demos, and easily the best booth babes to be found. Sony had an amazing amount of games to try out. Resistance 3 multiplayer is pretty freaking fun.

I'm pretty exhausted so I'll leave it at that for now. The pictures tell it better than I can. Hopefully I'll get a chance to try out the WiiU and the Vita tomorrow, so I'll post my thoughts.