Often times on the third day of E3 things start to wind down a bit and things are marginally easier to get into as people start to shuffle off to their respective places of origins to settle into long hours of writing coverage or waiting around airplane terminals or whatever they have to do. This years day three was sort of like Ragnarok. I am not sure what happened to people when the doors opened this year but it was goddamn chaos. People were sprinting to lines and knocking things over with little or no regard to the safety of others and general rules of decorum and self respect. I have dipped a bit heavily into hyperbole here but people were really off sides. Especially at the Capcom booth trying to get Resident Evil 6 tickets but I will get to that later.

It was immediately apparent that my secret entrance was really just an entrance now as there were  a lot of people mulling about with little concern or understanding of things like lines but I still made it in very quickly and found that Capcom’s line was already so long that there was no way that I would get RE6 tickets at that point. As it turns out, those were out by 10:05. Because that was a bust I went to the Assassin’s Creed 3 line as I had not seen anything even approaching ‘short’ or ‘reasonable’ related to it for the whole show. I was pretty close to the front but the first show of the day was 100% media with appointments. The second show was full of people in front of me and I was third in line for the third show of the third day. Then the seventh seal broke and the Earth split open and began the grim work of devouring everyone in torment and hellfire. That didn’t happen and I may be a bit punchy.

Assassin’s Creed 3 looks incredible. They showed us a frontier level and Boston. The movement in the forest environments looked smooth and fluid with much less awkwardness of the city climbing in past games. There are also terrain specific elements that effect locomotion that look both realistic and badass. Combat looks pretty similar to past games with the familiar countering system intact but the ability to use any tool in battle turned the awesomeness way up. More on this later, it is nifty.

After Assassin’s Creed 3 I went to sort out a Resident Evil 6 ticket. I am not sure what Capcom was thinking when they designed their booth this way but in order to get hands on with Devil May Cry, Lost Planet 3 or RE6 you had to go to their booth at 10am or 12noon and get a ticket to come back at a later time and play. In theory this makes it more orderly and less line intensive. In practice you had a huge crowd of people showing up who seemed to be pretty indifferent regarding the safety of others  I showed up at 11:15 and was told that the line could not form until 11:30am. So what this resulted in was a mob that was roughly crescent moon shaped clogging the area around Capcom as people waiting to get in line to wait. I was fairly close to the table with the tickets itself so I was planning on an elaborate pivot maneuver that would put me right next to the table. This sort of worked. When they said we could line up a crush of people all attempted similar things and we ended up with a line about as thick as a Graboid from Tremors. One of the Capcom employees tried to get the line to move over in some sort of misguided effort to remind people that they weren’t goddamn animals and to resolve into some kind of single file situation. That didn’t work so he tried again in the other direction. That didn’t work either. Then they said fuck it and started handing the tickets out early. I got one. It was worth it, even if my soul died a little in the process.

After that I left E3 altogether to hit up the nearby Yard House for a lunch meeting with Fabling game studios about some things I can’t talk a lot about at the moment but is very impressive and you will get a ton of coverage from me about when I can. I can tell you that the Yard House has some amazing Mac and Cheese and an incredible beer list.

After that I had a quick meeting with Razer as they showed me some of their products that are coming out soon including a Battlefield 3 headset based after helicopter headsets, a Mechwarrior cockpit style flight controller and a pretty awesome mouse. I’ll have more details on this later as well but they were pretty and cool. The shortness of the meeting freed me up to go check out Dead Space 3 so I did that.

Dead Space 3 again follows Isacc Clarke but this time allows for drop in/ drop out co-op game play for another character John Carver, who has his own goals and storyline. If he is with you, you will get story moments and cut scenes you won’t otherwise so it gives you incentive for the co-op above and beyond it being fun. There are also human enemies for the first time in the series and as such a new dynamic cover system has been introduced to allow for 360 degrees worth of attacks. It looks cool but also kind of weird to see Dead Space devolve into every third person shooter ever.

Next up was my hands on time with RE6. It was glorious. I want it to be October right night. I will have a lot more detail later. But this might be my game of the show. For reals.

Next up after that, and finally, was Star Wars 1313. It also looks incredible. This is a joint effort between Lucasarts and Lucasfilm  including ILM. The performance capture looks stunning and the graphic fidelity was amazing. It is also the first mature rated Star Wars property so that is pretty badass too. Also you are a bounty hunter. More to come.

And that was Day 3. It seems like not as much went down on this shortened day but it was still pretty epic. Afterward I retreated to Wokcano for happy hour with a friend and then, because my girlfriend and her friend were at Disneyland, I saw Snow White and the Huntsman at the Regal theater at LA Live and then hung out at Denny’s reading and eating a Superbird until 12:30am. You’ve gotta love the downtown LA nightlife when you are a geek decked out in geekery. Fun E3. I was happy to be a part of it. Lots more articles to come!