Wednesday, May 14th

Today was the big day: My first day at E3. All I can say is "Wow!" E3 is huge, and it rocks! We woke up at 06h30, but everyone was so anxious to get to the show that we hardly noticed the early hour. We took the shuttle to the airport and headed straight for the registration area. I had pre-registered, so it was over pretty quickly for me. While I was waiting in line, I bumped into Tycho from Penny Arcade. I wouldn't have recognized him if it wasn't for an interview with him and Gabe that I had seen a couple months ago on Planet GameCube. I heard later from Andrew that they were surrounded by eager, autograph-hunting fans in Kentia Hall.

After registration, I headed down to West Hall to wait for the doors to open. Media was supposed to gain entry an hour before everyone else, so I was expecting to be able to play a couple games without battling the crowds. Unfortunately, it seems that management didn't feel the same way, as we ended up waiting in front of the doors, booths in cruel view, for nearly an hour. When the doors did eventually open, I rushed in to get to the first game that caught my eye: Castlevania: Lament on Innocence. I was very surprised by it, simply for the fact that it was a 3D Castlevania and it didn't suck.

I spent a bit of time in the morning trying to orient myself and find most of the games that I wanted to play. There were already lines forming for some games, a staple of the show that would continue until the very last minute on Friday. Mikel and I hit Natsume's booth at 3pm for a meeting with their Directory of Operations, Graham Markay. The company's CEO, Yasuhiro Maekawa, was in the meeting too, but I suspect that the language barrier is what stopped him from taking part too much. Either that or he just thought I was an idiot. Hopefully the former.

Lunch at E3 is a rather frustrating experience. With 60,000+ people roaming the halls, it's not surprising that it's hard to get something to eat. When I could handle it no more, I headed for the closest restaurant and joined the shortest line. Frankly, at that point, I really didn't care what was being served. It turned out to be relatively edible turkey sandwiches. The cost is something else that flabbergasted me. I paid $11 for a sandwich, a snall bag of chips, and a soda. It's like some sort of perverse fast food fantasy world in there, a world where vendors can overcharge and everyone compies with a smile.

The first thing that struck me once I started roaming the halls was that it was damn loud. E3 basically consists of three large halls: West Hall, where Nintendo, Sony, Sega and Bandai are; South Hall, home to Square Enix, Natsume, Konami, Capcom, Microsoft, UbiSoft and NCsoft. The last big hall is Kentia, which is populated by most of the smaller companies. It's not quite as glitzy as the other halls, and not nearly as crowded. Of course, there are also way less games to play there. It's still pretty interesting to look at some of the obscure Asian games, most of which are MMORPGs. I got a flier from one of the companies that has an ad for what has to be the cutest game of all time: Hello Kitty World Online, an MMORPG.

I spent a lot of the day running in and out of the media room as well, trying to upload the stuff we were getting from the floor. For some reason, we were booked into a hotel that didn't have broadband internet access. We set up AOL on someone's computer, but it was a far cry from a workable setup. Next year, this is the number one priority.

We went back to the hotel at around 7pm, after being physically forced to leave the media room. Only four of us were allowed to use the shuttle bus back to the hotel, since they have some idiotic limit on how many people can get passes, so the rest of the staff went by car and cab while we waited for the bus. We got a bit of a tongue lashing from a company representative about being so late. it seems that the four of us were the only people that had not taken the previous bus, and the driver was forced to come back to drive us through rush-hour downtown L.A. traffic. I suppose I would have been pissed, too.

Most of the evening was spent working on impressions of games. We ordered pizza, spoke about the first day, played some Super Smash Brothers Melee and wrote. Getting everything up using the dialup was a pain, and since only one person could be online at any one time, it was infuriatingly slow. The rest of the staff helped us get everything up, which did serve to make things run a little smoother.