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Senses Working Overtime: News, Photos & Video from E3 2006**
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3-hour wait for Nintendo's Wii booth
ENLARGE |
NEW PHOTOS and VIDEOS ADDED BELOW See Day Two coverage
Nothing you read or hear or remember ever really prepares you for the brawling, assaultive swamp of humanity that is E3. More on the next-gen gear and games below, but first some atmosphere:
Your every sense comes under attack the second you step inside. After waiting until 11 a.m. for the doors to open to the public, your herd of sweating, impatient geeks, journos and businessmen stampede inside to let the world's biggest game companies focus millions of dollars, watts, decibels and candlepower on your quivering nerves.
You stagger-shuffle from one place to the next, body throbbing with the multi-channel dub mix of PA and game sound. Your eyes flit from pixellated battleground to racetrack to gridiron, soaking in the stench and bump of your fellow man ...
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Truly, there's nothing like the reeking breath of a geek who's been walking around for four hours with his mouth hanging open because he's too dazzled to bother getting a drink of water. It could peel paint, I tell you.
And yeah, it's fun.
But on to the show:
Like the two 9,000-ton juggernauts they are, Sony's Playstation 3 booth and Nintendo's Wii booth hulk beneath the Convention Center's West Hall roof at E3 this morning, duking it out for market share.
The huge booths this year have shoved other gamecos to the hall's perimeter, and the Nintendo and Sony games themselves seem almost unimportant compared with the booth architecture and philosophy:
Sony's $499-a-unit (!!!) PS3 is shown off in an open-air arena of glass and brushed aluminum, like a cageful of diamond-vision light, screaming surround sound, HD and sweating gamers hunched over controllers in front of sex-bomb high-def screens.
Nintendo opted for a sort of stretched-nylon nautilus shell - packed with game stations and intimate living room set ups showing off its wireless-controlled platform - from the mouth of which streams a line more than two hours long.
To keep you from getting bored, Nintendo set up human-sized "interaction" screens, from which company spokesfolks chat via camera-link with the line-standers.
Cool stuff here in both booths (I'll post more details from the South Hall exhibits shortly):
Sony's GranTurismo HD is a staggeringly pretty load of digital eyewash. The polygon count is so high it's not even worth mentioning - the look is super-realistic.
I kept blasting my Bentley leMans racer into the chicane barriers because I got distracted by crispness of every leaf on every tree around the racetrack, the grain in the asphalt speeding pasts, the reflections in the other cars' paint, the road-rattle of the in-car "camera."
I also had fun with Nintendo's "Elebits, which lets you use the wireless controller as a sort of voltage-beam projector to ransack a kitchen in search of weird, pixie-like pests to exterminate. Extra fun is found outside the kitchen, where you can use the beam to fling cars around, tear up shrubbery or juggle neighboring houses as if they were silk scarves.
Who's gonna win the platform war? I'm no judge, but $500 is a pretty deep bite, and I'm not the only pundit predicting it'll push people away from market king Sony to start springing for the cheaper XBox360 - or the Wii, whenever it's released - instead.
UPDATE:
There's some intriguing hardware on the floor this year in addition to the new platforms - Phillips is introducing a line of atmosphere-enhancement gadgets for the PC called amBX.
A rig including two speakers with color-tunable LEDs and a back-light for the space behind your monitor puts ambient light synched with the game into and around your desk, while air-blasting fans give the illusion of speed, wind or weapons swings. A rumbling wrist pad adds vibration to the mix. The whole thing's supposed to go on the market for $100 to $200 at the end of the year.
Some OG game titles get the 21st-century treatment: Nintendo rolled out a new Legend of Zelda for Wii that has our heroine fishing, sprinting, picking off goblins with bow and arrrow, and battling a lava demon's chains of fire. Sonic Wildfire has Sonic the Hedgehog decked out in high-res 3-D, with new monsters, bosses and challenges.
WebZen has a gorgeous new MMPOFPS first-person-shooter in Huxley - the trailers look stunning, especially when played on the booth's immense pixel-vision display screen.
I'm a huge sci-fi geek, though, so while Lost Planet may be just my cup of robot oil, you might prefer the trailers for Scarface or Eragon or ... my god, are they still making Madden football?
I'm headed back on Thursday for more fun. If I get more pix or video, I'll post them here, so mail this post around and drop by again.
(These photos are also viewable as a slideshow on Flickr)
CLICK THUMBS TO ENLARGE
| Working the buttons on the latest Nintendo DS titles. |  | | Seek and destroy - preparing to shoot energy beams at the Elebits. |  | | The boothbabes are cheerful this year, but a bit chaster, thanks to the threat of $5,000 fines for exposing too much flesh. |  | | Sony's immense Playstation 3 booth - back-to-back trailers on the big screen, non-stop next-gen action on the small ones. |  | | Gran Turismo HD: Screaming gorgeous graphics put you on the track atop a Honda 1100 CBR or inside a Shelby Cobra GT. Slick, slick, slick. |  | | QMotions showed off several sports-minded game controllers including a stationary bike, golf tee and baseball bat for fighting couch-potato spread. |  | | The brilliant artist Kurt Wenner has spent more than three days chalking this elaborate illustration for Gears of War on the floor of the atrium outside South Hall. |  | | Wenner's chalks. |  | | The booth for XBox360's Lost Planet. It's a handome-looking game, just from the trailers and illustrations I saw. |  | | Lucasarts shows off some concept art. |  | | A mounted knight from Sega's Medieval 2 installation of the Total War series. |  | | The Mutaytor's fire dancers, drummers and snarling guitars heat up the room for NCSoft's Tabula Rasa - another handsome game. |  | | Fire dancers work the stage. |  | | More of The Mutaytor. |  | | NAMCO erected a brick-lined, OG booth and packed it with vintage PacMan and DigDug machines to tout their line of cellphone games. |  | | Nyko models pose for snapshots. They gave pretty good schwag, too - little battery powered fans that help cut the heat inside the hall. |  | | PacMan shills for his World Rally game on XBox. |  | | Crave had someone dealing hands for World Championship Poker: All-In. |  | | VU Games erected this massive set to tout Scarface. "Coming Soon," or so the site says. I'll hop on line for the trailer Thursday. |  | | Phillips' new AmbX system ($100 to $200 later this year) pumps ambient atmosphere out of your gaming PC in synch with game action. LEDs glow with game action, fans blast air when you run or duck a blow, and a rumbling wristpad adds mood to the scene. Phillips reps say the rumbling thing might one day be hooked up to your sofa. |  | | Special ops soldier gets jungly to push America's Army |  | | QMotions' bike controller - gamin' and excercisin'. |  | | Call of Duty 2 ran a head-to-head tournament. |  | | Pixar's Cars game shows off some full-sized models. |  | | A little cosplay in the name of game promotion. |  | | Drool, gamers. The Dell XPS looks evil, but what's under the hood? |  | | Anime dragon from Spectrobes for Nintendo DS. |  | | EA's massive booth dominates the entrance to South Hall. |  | | Final Fantasy warrior, ready for action. |  | | Heroes: It's Katamari Damacy's world, and we just live in it. |  | | Network fragging on Webzen's Huxley is fast and ruthless. |  | | A Huxley model strikes a pose. |  | | XX and XY, from Huxley |  | | E3 rule 1: Gamers will do anything for a t-shirt. A voguing competition. |  | | Korea's gaming industry fields some domestic booth babes. |  | | Korea's booth takes up more than 1,000 square feet in South Hall. |  | | Happy workmen wield giant wrenches for "SEED." |  | | Lights, sound, color, noise. The show floor in the South Hall. |  | | Square Enix's screenings for Final Fantasy XII and other projects were all booked by mid-afternoon. |  | | Sonic the Hedgehog, ever more heroic. The new Sonic Wildfire on Nintendo Wii looked miles beyond the side-scrolling, ring-grabbing joy of late-80s Sega Genesis. |  | | Square Enix's knight. |  | | A dragon threatens a soldier. |  | | Tony Hawk signs autographs and chats on-air to support his massively successful line of games. |  | | World of Warcraft fielded two dozen live gaming stations and this fine bastard to push its new expansion, the Burning Crusade. |  |
More local E3 coverage:
- Sean Bonner's Flickr set
- LATimes scopes out the booth babes and charts the push by Christian games to thwart the totally sick joystick fun wicked evil of GTA: San Andreas.
- Daily News says, "OOooo, graphics, pretty."
See LAVoice's Day Two coverage here.
(Technorati tags: e3 2006, los angeles E3 videovideo videogames, gaming, electronic entertainment expo )
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 - 02:32 PM
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