Alright so sorry that this wasn’t up last night but delays in flights got us home after midnight and sleepiness was having its way with me whether I liked it or not. Here we go.

We were running a little late (read: right on time) to the show due to hotel check out and baggage stowing so there was no waiting around in large crowds to get it. I know that sounds weird to lament but, for me, that fifteen or so minutes before the show helps to build up anticipation. I might be weird. We pretty much walked right in using a side entrance that Riyad found on Wednesday by accident and proceeded directly to the Mass Effect 3 press and retail only stand-by line. We got in that line IMMEDIATELY and an EA rep came by and reminded everyone it was press and retail only and that only five people from this line would be let in every half an hour. So that meant that from where we were, we were looking at a two and a half hour wait. Still, the demo was 30 minutes and we had at one time decided to wait at least that long for the Wii U so we decided to go ahead. That a half an hour’s worth of wait left the line right after hearing about the wait made the decision that much easier.

The wait in line wasn’t so bad. We chatted with a writer from Darth Hater, a website devoted to Star Wars, about the Knights of the Old Republic MMO which at this point 10 minutes after the show had opened had a line that would make the PSVita cry, and learned some pretty interesting things on a game we would not get to see. I also got to meet the Guild and Dr Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog’s Felicia Day. My short interaction with her was awesome and she was very nice and very gracious and it made me giddy to a ridiculous degree. I think most of that was being a fan and a small portion was the beginning rumblings of the Nos energy drink I got for free walking into the place.

After waiting only an hour, we lucked out and the demo had fewer people than we thought so they let 10 of us in from standby. Riyad and I had to sit on the floor in front of the screen as it was standing room only but I honestly would have sat on a pile of live king cobras if it meant I was going to get to see some Mass Effect 3. I will have a big article on this later but holy shit does Mass Effect 3 look amazing. It is releasing right around my birthday in March and I couldn’t think of a better present. Epic is kind of an understatement for what we saw.

Next up I tried to get some hands on time with Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and after waiting through two different people’s run throughs a guy in a wheelchair cut in front of me. I didn’t really want to make an issue of it so I just left but what I saw of RE:ORC looked really good. I noticed that all of Capcom’s demo units were running it off of PS3 hardware and I wonder if that is an indication of where developers are going as far as preferred systems now that the 360 is showing some age. I have some videos of this to put up a bit later on so if you are interested in the new Resident Evil look for that.

After that failure to get hands on we went over to Bethesda again to see if we could get on the list for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We could but they said only one of us could get into the 4pm demo. Given I was a huge Elder Scrolls fan and Riyad not as much my name went down and we decided that we wanted to go and get some lunch off site as we had gotten into most of what we wanted to already and the odds of us getting into other stuff wasn’t so good nor did we want to wait in lines all day. On the way out we noticed that there was an Uncharted 3 multiplayer demo going on so we hopped in that line which moved at a pretty good clip.

The gameplay was very smooth and intuitive. It was similar to the multiplayer for Uncharted 2 but felt really polished and looked pretty great. We were playing a three team, two man team death match and it was a lot of fun. I would have liked to have seen some of the single player stuff but that is harder to pull off in the sort of set up that they had going on. We have some video of that to come as well.

After our tasty lunch and a serendipitous run in with a friend of mine I haven’t seen in 8 years, we returned to the show and decided to get some hands on time with Rage. Riyad played the 360 version and I played the PS3 version. It looked pretty to a certain degree but the textures were really blurry and there was significant load times on both units. For my part, I got kind of motion sick and maybe I would need to turn the sensitivity down a bit. I am kind of surprised by how this looks on consoles and as Riyad tweeted yesterday, PC might be the way to go with this title.

The last thing we did was the half hour demo of Skyrim. It was the last demo of the show and they packed people in for a standing room only crowd. Riyad managed to get in after all and everything was right with the world. I am going to do a huge write up on this one but again, like Mass Effect 3, this is a big holy shit moment. Going in, all the media I had seen for it made it look like an Oblivion + with some better textures and graphical tweaks. Seeing it in action made me almost poop myself (goddamn energy drinks). Seriously, nothing I had seen from this title prepared me for how great it looks. They showcased a lot of tweaks to inventory and combat that look very nice and November 11th of this year cannot come fast enough.

After that the show was over and we headed back to the hotel to collect our things and start what would become a seven hour ordeal to get home. I say ordeal but it was mostly just sitting in the waiting area groaning when they announced another delay. It was a great trip and I can’t wait for next year.