On second thought: no. No E3 awards, because not very much about E3 deserves an award. Killing off the bloated trade show is one thing, but it's quite another having us run around Santa Monica in cabs to go from appointment to appointment where, upon arrival, we had no idea if we were even going to find any games that we didn't already see two months ago.
Nobody knew what to do. Nintendo only had six games playable, because they had no idea if people would even have time to play them. Sony showed a whole truckload of games, then booked hour-long appointments that were supposed to encompass several hours of demo gameplay, then had a giant E3-like demo kiosk room that nobody could find. Microsoft chose to nearly entirely forgo gameplay for hands-off demo breakout sessions.
And the poor guys in Barker Hangar. Susan went, but by Friday it had fallen to me to decide whether I was going to make the lengthy trek out to the Hangar without really knowing what was over there or just go to EIEIO, which was located right next to the Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft Triangle of hotels. Guess which one I picked. So I missed Atlus entirely, which is sad because I wanted to check out Touch Detective 2 1/2 and Ontamarama, that Ouendanish music game they announced the day before the show.
Missing stuff at E3 is nothing new. But having to specifically book time for every single thing you're going to see is. There's no casual browsing anymore, no walking past a booth on the way to an appointment and making a mental note to yourself to come back. And if you make a lame appointment that's a waste of a half hour, you're stuck in a hotel meeting room. And be sure to add the travel time there and back to get a sense of how much time you've just blown.
Making things all the more frustrating was the fact that whenever I arrived at my appointments, I was usually greeted by air-conditioned public relations types who were chatting amicably about how "relaxed" and "chill" this year's show was. Yeah: if you're staying in one hotel suite the whole time. Not if you're out on the street desperately trying to find a cab and wondering where the heck is the next hotel you need to be at. The biggest danger in navigating last year's E3 was getting hit with a swag bag swung by a fanboy running for the Wii line. This year, you could get hit by a car.
Perrin Kaplan brought new ESA head Mike Gallagher over to me at Nintendo's press conference and introduced us. He seems like a wonderful person, and so I would like to ask him to please take this thing out back and shoot it. I love the idea of having a yearly infosplosion, but why couldn't this have all taken place in... I shudder to even say it... Kentia Hall?
Anyway, that's plenty about that. As I've said before, the news at this year's E3 could best be described as "status quo." Everybody seems to be happy exactly where they are, if the gaping black hole of interesting announcements from the three hardware makers is any indication. Nintendo had the single biggest with Wii Fit, but chose to fill its conference up with stultifyingly long clips of all the good press it's gotten instead of showing some videos of the games they have coming for this holiday.
Typical Nintendo: they make quiet little blink-and-you-miss-it announcements of games about which any other publisher would rightly shout to the rooftops. I'd put Professor Layton and the Curious Village up against any of the PSP titles that Sony showed at its conference: if only Nintendo bothered to make a big deal, or even a little deal, out of it.
All the same, as I said above, from a practical standpoint they were actually right about having to shave their lineup down to the bare minimum. I booked an hourlong appointment with Nintendo, the maximum available, and that wasn't even enough time to play the games they did show.
As I said before, my Sony appointment was a confusing non-event that, spectacular demo of LittleBigPlanet aside, consisted mostly of me standing around looking at the backs of people's heads. It's generally agreed that Sony had a much better press conference than last year, perhaps even the best of the three as far as pacing and amount of unique, new content. But all the "surprise wow" games -- Killzone, Echochrome, Infamous, etc. -- were trailers. Killzone was indeed from a playable build, but they didn't let anyone play it.
Not to say that Sony didn't have a lot of good-to-excellent playable games. They did, from all appearances. And that's great -- as Baker says, it shows they're not out of the race. And contrary to what some people are saying in the giant 100-plus flame comment threads, I didn't think Sony had a bad conference. I even said as much in, uh, my post about their conference. I just don't think that putting on a nice show really means that much in the long run.
Consider it this way: Nintendo had an amazing slam-dunk E3 in 2002, when the GameCube was spiraling towards failure. Mario! Eternal Darkness! Metroid! Zelda! It was the perfect storm. Their booth was packed. Everyone said afterwards that they'd "won E3." And they proceeded to get their asses kicked brutally in sales. Lesson learned: having a bunch of great games at E3 doesn't mean you're "turning things around." This time it's Sony that has built an impressive stable of first-party awesomeness, but that alone doesn't do anything -- especially when your opponents can both easily say the same thing.
What they'd have needed was some kind of giant news that sent Microsoft and Nintendo scrambling, and they didn't come close. What should have been at least a small boost to their fortunes, the price cut, was quickly revealed (possibly accidentally) to be only temporary. What's really going on is a feature cut. Now, as a business move, this isn't bad for Sony. They need to get back to profitability if they're going to weather this storm, and selling a cheaper unit at a higher price is a great way to do that.
Sony has also cemented the PSP's second-place finish with a hardware redesign that likely won't make a lick of difference to the average consumer. All the speculation of a sleek redesigned shell, built-in storage, a downloadable content store, and other upgrades designed to turn the machine into a desirable, viable portable entertainment device turned out to amount to absolutely nothing.
God of War, though. That was great.
We'll see if Microsoft is really able to reach casual gamers with their Scene It? and its new, simplified controller. In the meantime, I think a price cut closer to the holidays and their own perfect storm of huge releases is going to mean they're going to have a very good Christmas even if Super Mario Galaxy makes it out. Again: status quo. Although Wii will likely surpass Xbox 360 in installed units worldwide, I'm not sure it's a given in the US yet. And they are hitting such different consumers that they can effectively share the top slot here -- even though Wii's success is surely having some non-zero, deleterious effect on Xbox 360's.
Oh well. I don't know, anymore. E3 did get across one very clear message: there are an astonishing number of amazing video games, across every platform, that are going to descend en masse in the next six months. There's just got to be a better way to show them off.
