Tuesday, May 13th

Mission accomplished! Back from Nintendo (and more, read on), and it was a total blast. I got to see one of the people that shaped my life: Shigeru Miyamoto. You can read about the individual games announced on the main E3 page. Getting into the conference was a relative breeze. We weren't pre-registered, but a quick flash of a business card and we were in. I got the chance to talk to some other game journalists, which was very fun. Nintendo kept us waiting until the last minute, and then it was a mad rush to get decent seats. And then it began:

Nintendo E3 Briefing 2003, Kodak Theater

While most conferences are all about companies indulging themselves, Nintendo's was very down to earth. George Harrison and Satoru Iwata took the stage and layed their cards on the table as to Nintendo's current position in the worldwide video game market. While Nintendo is still in second place on a global basis, they are making inroads, especially now that they have released a lot of top-tier product. Both men were very up front about inadequacies on Nintendo's part over the last year, but its clear that they company is focused on bringing more top quality games to market. Nintendo's line-up of games is looking good. Maybe not from an RPG standpoint, though there are a number in development, but as a whole, the company is working on some really innovative and interesting games. One item of note is that Iwata stated that Nintendo would be the first of the three hardware manufacturers to debut their new consoles in the next generation.

There were a few games announced that particularly piqued my interest. The new GameCube/Game Boy Advance Pac-Man game looks very interesting. Players can either take the role of Pac-Man, who is played on the GameBoy Advance, or they can be one of the three ghosts, who are controlled on the GameCube and have to try to catch Pac-Man. The game looks like a lot of fun to play. Together with the Zelda: Four Swords for GameCube and Puzzle Collection, Nintendo is going to dominate party games for the next while.

The show wasn't all about Nintendo's first party stuff, however, as the company brought along a couple important guests. First up was WIll Wright, who spoke about the upcoming Sims titles for both the GBA and the GC. The games will support connectivity for added gameplay functionality as well. The other major presence at the conference was Konami's Hideo Kojima, who showed up to present some footage of the recently annouced Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. The game is a basically a remake of the original Metal Gear Solid that appeared on the PlayStation a few years ago. While the game did look decent, the video shown was way too dark, making it harder to tell whether the graphics are of the Resident Evil or Resident Evil 2 variety.

It was pretty interesting to see the big prompter that the speakers used. What was more entertaining was seeing the prompter die on George Harrison. He was more than a little flustered, and that just made me like him more. I appreciate seeing humanity in people that seem that far removed from the rest of us.

As far as hardware connectivity is concerned, Nintendo is all about the GBA/GC link. Nintendo has not had much support for Internet connectivity, and it seems that this is going to continue. Mario Dash is going to support LAN play, but, other than that, your GameCube is not going to be connecting to anything other than you GBA. There are, however, a lot of games that are going to support the GBA/GC link, like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, which was briefly shown.

All in all, it was an impressive showing by Nintendo. While there were no huge game announcements, they demonstrated that they are serious about doing better in the upcoming year. The company has its work cut out for it, but the software is there for this to be a good period for the company.

Following Nintendo's gig, Doug, Andrew and I went over to the Hyatt Regency, a very swanky hotel, for a meeting with Peter Molyneux. There were two other sites that were supposed to sit in on the meeting with us, and since they were late, we got to chat with Molyneux and a couple of developers from Big Blue Box. It was excellent to be able to have a simple conversation with game creators of this calibur about, for instance, what their favorite games are. For a full report of the meeting, you can check out this news story. I wasn't all that excited about Fable before the meeting, but the demo got me really excited. He gave us a look at BC as well, which is a basically a caveman simulator, just with a more action/platformer bent.

The whole RPGamer E3 crew had a meeting Tuesday evening to finalize our plans for covering the show. We also got around to starting our actual coverage of the show, which you've probably already had a look at. Excited doesn't even begin to describe the mood.