Got to go to e3 for the 2nd time and thought i might start writing about the experience.

first off this year didn't seem like it was going to happen till the last second. Our hook up from last year didn't come through this year after our names were turned down. i'm thinking it's because he got lazy and didnt file our industry id but who knows?

anyways e3 started may 8th with meetings and the expo started the 10th. At 3am the first day of the show joel found a guy on ebay and made the deal. 1 ticket but hey it was better then nothing. only one thing though... he was a sheriff. you start to wonder considering this is industry only and he's a cop. we got our hotel, car, and everything set that morning then jumped on a plane to la. Then the sheriff called at the airport to see if we wanted him to look for another ticket. sounded good. after landing in la talked to him again and found out he got it! got our PT crusier rental car.

we missed the first day of e3 but we were set for the next 2 days :) I also got to go to dave and busters for the first time. great place. it's like a bar and arcade with some games i havent seen anywhere like this horse racing game where you make your horse, name it, race, also this trivia game thats pretty fun and you get tickets from it for stuff. awesome place drinking and video games :) got the hook up with a pretty sweet hotel too in the OC across from disneyland The Portofino.

Thursday we set out to the staples center and e3. sheriff was running a little late but it was cool since we had time to check out everything out front. when the sheriff showed up he was really cool. had our badges and came to see even he had a diffrent name on his pass. joel got to be antony mazzotta and i got to be samuel han! lol

We entered the show's south hall first. i was hoping to see some of the new metal gear titles such as ps3's metal gear 4 guns of the patriots, but all they had were the videos of the titles playing on the big screen they had.

The nvidia booth asked us to take a survey in where we learned that joel as mazzotta was from new york and myself as han was from tokyo!

They had some nice statues at the square booth and playable demos of FINAL FANTASY 12, FINAL FANTASY 7 dirge of cerebus.

The microsoft booth had one of the more impressive games of the show. Ping pong by rockstar. It doesn't sound like it would be much but it had very good graphics and played very well. madden 07 was on display as well looking good.

The EA booth was in the same style as last year but still just as impressive. with a huge circle video screen that played the videos upcoming titles. Spore the new game from the creator of the sims was at ea but had a pretty big line the whole time of the show.

The west hall was mostly taken by sony and nintendo with both showing off the new systems due this year.

The nintendo booth had a impressive decoration this year but besides a few ds titles everything else was closed off since it was running on wii. the line for wii ran all the way around the west hall.

The playstation 3 booth was alot more open to move around. We got about 25 playstation 3 lanyards from and guy handing them out. "when there gone, there gone" and after that seen tons of them on about every table in the sony booth. NCAA football for psp is looking very nice. it looks and plays as well as ps2. the metal gear digital comic was on display as well. A download station of a mix of video and pics of upcoming games was available to download to the psp.

We were able to get some pretty good magazines for free from the ziff davis booth like playstation magazine and pc gamer. magazines are one of the biggest things to pick up at the show. we end up with about 15 diffrent ones by the end of the show.

Last year the tecmo booth had a long line to take a pic with the girls dressed up like doa characters and you also got a nice gift bag full of tecmo stuff. So this year when the line wasn't that bad we lined up. when they started the little presentation they tossed out some shirts and i got one of those. it was a pretty cool. a NES ninja gaiden shirt. they took like 5 of us into a hut they had set up and had us watch 5 not very impressive game trailers then up to the stage to get a pic with the tecmo girls. they weren't dressed up as characters and we didnt get a gift bag. :/

Had a panini sandwich for lunch at one of the new food places in the convention center. they opened alot more this year which was good. the lines didnt get as long as the year before.

Paris Hilton was at e3 to promote her new game. it looks like tetris but i guess she doesn't even know the right name of it. joel set out just to get a pic but ended up right with all the media and what so behind where bodyguards had closed off. the bodyguards were pretty rude, even to people who were working at e3. anyways joel ended up closer and closer and ended up getting some pretty good pics. I just checked out the sony booth while waiting.

Walked by checking out the rest of the booths and stoped by soe's booth again to see if the one set up of starwars galaxies maybe had someone involved with the game. To my suprise it was kurt stangl, know as thunderheart on the swg forums. got to tell him all about the post i had been trying to see so i could get a quest i was bugged on fixed. the blood hunter quest. he said it was going to be fixed, hard to belive but what could you say lol. when he asked how i liked the game i was like "eh....not much left to do" he said no new expansions this year but i would be impressed with publish 29. it's like a expansion itself. hmmmmm....... got a pic with him before leaving the booth.

The kentia hall was much inproved this year. last year it was very quiet down there. Kentia is kind of like the small time game companys trying to get noticed.

This year one of biggest (and funniest) booths from last year TQ with everyones favorite Conquer online moved down to kentia with not too much to show. no dancing show this year.

They had the history of videogames display again. some cool stuff like atari and coleco vision. They also added a vintage arade area. didn't get to play very many. gonna have to spend more time next year.

There was a action figure dealer also with some really nice final fantasy figures. gonna have to pick some up next year if they come back.

Another suprise of the kentai hall we ran into a booth that had snoops hiphip gaming league going on. 50 cent was there giving interviews to the e3 media. B-real from cypress hill and crazy bone from bone thugs were at the booth playing nba 2k. crazy bone had a heavy weed cloud around him and his eyes were barely open. no wonder he lost by like 20 points.

So our day 1 was a complete tour of everything. best to kind of take in everything the first day and take your time the other days and see what you want. went to dave and busters again. played more trivia and more horse racing.

The start of day 2 we tryed to get to the wii booth as soon we got in a little after 9am. after seeing the line to the wall i thought nope not gonna happen. joel wanted to see how long the line went so wii followed it all the way around the west hall. i made about 20 wii jokes along the way. wii didn't know when it was going to end. had wii waited in line wii would of been there all day doing nothing else. although im pretty hyped for wii there was no way wii were going to spend all day in a line.

Got to spend more quality time with games and talking to the games dev's. talked to the dev's from ea's head coach. The virtua tennis 3 dev thought playstation 3 version was going to end up better then the xbox 360. We got to map our faces into a poker game with pretty good results. at least joels turned out alright lol.

Tryed out a new singing game called singstar. it was pretty fun although we weren't very good singers. first we tryed black eye peas "shut up" Joel didn't know it at all and i didn't know the rap well enough. got d's for that one. also tryed killers and didn't know that i was screaching bad! lol! the cool part was it gages how well you stay in tune with the song and the video is on screen. should be pretty fun when it comes out, although they didn't have a release date for us.

Went to the G4 videogame tv booth and got to meet the attack of the show hosts. kevin pereira and olivia munn. They were both cool and signed pics of themselves for us with some funny coments. "Wii can wait" :)

Got to visit the Lucasarts booth for the first time this year. It's a vip room until 1pm the last day of the show. They had some really nice art from the upcoming starwars 2007 game (it's most likely darth vader). they had a cool statue of lego chewie for the new lego starwars game. the new indiana jones game for next gen looked real good too. it won a award for best of e3. the characters in it had good ai, they would try to hang on this cable car if they got knocked off.  

The rest of the show was very good. got alot of stuff, shirts, demos, magazines, etc. One of my favorite items was kojimas handout at the konami booth. they styled it just like the show daily calling it M4 show maybe? had all kinds of cool stuff on metal gear 4, metal gear portable ops, the digital comic, and the breaking news on the metal gear movie!

Didn't end up getting to try everything i would of liked to but still got a good idea of what cool games will be out soon. Here's my list of what i'm looking forward to picking up.

- The Wii : winner of the show in many people's book. even though i didnt get to play it. from what i've seen and heard it sounds really fun. The contoller looks very fun and inovative the way you move with it. The old games that will be available for download from nes, snes, turbographix 64, and genesis make it a nice bonus too. looking forward to earthbound, mariopaint, exitebike, and bonk! remember that game? if you haven't seen it yet check it out http://wii.nintendo.com/home.html

- Playstation 3: looking forward to ps3 since it can play just about any disc including the next format after dvd the blu ray discs. of course madden and the ea sports games will be great for it. final fantasy 13 and final fantasy versus 13, and nothing looks better than metal gear 4. The $600 price tag is crazy, but this is going to be the highest power of the next gen systems and should have some impressive games such as the ones above.

- Metal gear sold 4 guns of the patriots : I really love the storyline and the action of the metal gear games and i've never seen a better looking game. if your even a little into games you have to check out this trailer. it's amazing http://www.konami.jp/kojima_pro/e3_2006/

- Singstar : lol as imbarising as it was it was still very fun and i could see having alot of fun with my daughter on the 2 player mode.

- Virtua tennis 3 : for playstation 3. looked and played very good.

- Table tennis by rockstar : too bad it's only for xbox 360 at the moment. we had a great time with this one. can't be getting a 3rd new system just for 1 or 2 games.

- EA sports head coach : going to great to have a nfl sports sim like this.

- Metal gear portable ops : looks as good as snake eater for the ps2. also going to be cool to fill in the story between snake eater and the first ever metal gear on NES.

Well that's it for my report on E3 2006. another great year at e3 that almost didn't happen. Thanks again joel! never gave up! even at 3am day of show. lol! 

can't wait for next year. maybe next year i will do this sooner after the show. this thing took days to finish and is like a novel to read lol.