Okay so this is a little later tonight because I had to fly home and all. Then wash a day’s worth of convention stink off and upload a bunch of pictures. As I mentioned last night, I am going to do the same summary tonight I’ve been doing and then tomorrow and Saturday I am going to put up a bunch of previews and E3 articles as well as videos of games I saw at the show. I thought the videos would be blurry and grainy but they look quite nice I think if you allow for me holding the camera like I am having some kind of fit and people occasionally walking by (or straight up standing right in front of me). I will be doing this while trying to remain as motionless as humanly possible and have nothing at all on my back in a backpack. Anyway, that is tomorrow. Tonight, the summary!

So I had a meeting with Steel Series this morning and it was off convention grounds in a decked out tour bus. I had a bit of trouble finding it but the PR person Tori was awesome and called me and I found them. They are putting out a gaming headset, called the Steel Series, that is specifically for the XBOX 360 and it is light, uber-durable and sounds awesome (I cycled through a variety of songs with different ranges on my iPod and it all sounded great). They are light, flexible and built to stand up to gamer rage of the highest order. Pretty much every concern I have had or issue I’ve had with headsets is addressed here and I am really looking forward to their release in August. I will have a much more detailed preview of these tomorrow with tons of info and pics. These, I think, are something to watch for and they felt better than the Turtle Beach cans. Just saying.

After the meeting I headed back to the West Hall where I had just eaten a breakfast of exorbitantly expensive pizza and dropped off my luggage at the luggage corral, and made my way back to the Nintendo booth. I had stopped by before the meeting to get the lay of the land and see how bad the line was. At that time, it wasn’t too bad at all so the 3DS was going to be my first order of business. When I got there this time the line was a lot longer and it took me about an hour to get my hands on a 3DS during which time I shot video of Metroid Other M, which kind of looks like they saw Shadow Conspiracy and remembered they used to do some games like that. It is weird when an homage to another game is then strip mined by the original game for new ideas but there it is.

Other M doesn’t look bad at all especially given I really dug Shadow Complex, it is just weird. I also shot video of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword until a Nintendo guy came and told me I wasn’t supposed to film unless I had someone playing. Kind of bones me since I was by myself and Zelda was my next stop but whatever. I had shot a bunch before he said anything anyway.

After an hour of wait time I got about 10 minutes or so with the 3DS. I think I could have had longer but the area was a mad house and I was already pretty impressed.

Yesterday, I saw the new 3D tech for PS3 and the 3D HD TVs with the glasses and thought it blew worse than Clash of the Titans. I wasn’t really expecting anything impressive here as it was a hand held and there were no glasses. I was kind of thinking I was in for Virtual Boy. I was wrong. Seeing the 3DS made me really mad at Nintendo. They can do shit like this on a hand held but they are dicking around with low res tech for the Wii? Seriously? They are just willfully staying behind the curve and I don’t get why.

Anyway, the 3DS is awesome. I played Professor Layton, which sort of looked like you were investigating through a View Master, but the Resident Evil trailer is what really got me. It was in 3D and the graphics looked amazing. The 3D effect was awesome too and I can’t believe that I was seeing it without glasses. I really don’t mind having waited. I was VERY skeptical of the system right up until I had my hands on one. Now I am sold and I want one BAD.

Next up was Zelda and for that it was an hour and a half wait. It ended up being an hour wait with 10 minutes to play the game so that wasn’t so bad. The game is boasting true 1 to 1 sword play and it offers that to a point. You can move the sword in your hand around and it does what your arm does but when it comes to slashing horizontally and vertically. The slashes still seem canned and the girl at the booth who was helping me started to think I was functionally retarded. Apparently my Scooby Doo shirt was pretty cute though. The graphics looked pretty much the same as Twilight Princess at first but they are really quite a lot smoother and sharper this time around and it has a very nice look to it. Still not HD and still a little fuzzy but it looked about as good as something can look on the Wii. I have video of that so I will post that and more detailed impressions tomorrow.

After Nintendo, I went over and checked out a demo of Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned which is a new action RPG set in the PoC world but taking place before the films. You control Captain Sterling and split your time between being on land and on your ship. The demo today showed only the land portion and it looked like a very solid action RPG. The graphics and art style looked a bit cartoony, which is not at all bad but they certainly aren’t going for gritty realism. All just as well I suppose, there is plenty of that out there already. The combat looked pretty decent and varied with range attacks, combos and finishing moves. There is a distinct element of choice as conversations and actions can have big consequences. Overall it looked pretty promising and even if the ship elements shit the bed completely they look to have a better game than any of the previous PoC attempts.

Next I spent about 20 minutes playing Crackdown 2 and it was pretty much what I thought it would be. There is apparently some better tech under the hood this time around and the game can handle a lot more onscreen at once but in the broadstrokes it felt very much like the original. This is not at all bad.

Next I bumbled into Red Faction Armageddon again thinking I was getting Homefront but Red Faction looked even better this time. The dude driving the demo did cooler things with the magnet gun and the combat looked better than it did Tuesday. It in another game that looks promising and that I hope delivers.

After that, it was time for me to gather my 35 lb duffle bag full of crap and get out of dodge. The show ended at 5 but I was on the shuttle bus by about 4:10 as I really wanted to avoid the rush and not miss my other shuttle to the airport. As it turns out, I misjudged the timing and got back way earlier than I needed to. That was okay though, I finally got to eat some nice Quiznos and a pigeon rolled in to check the place out. And that was Day Three of E3.

Thank you and goodnight.