After spending Sunday night before cutting some embarrassing Yoostar videos with Joe Haygood, not to mention a stab at Kinect Joyride (and yeah, let's not ever mention Kinect Joyride), the old E3 pro Mr. Haygood started Monday by taking fellow writer Roberto Olano and myself downtown for the first official activity of E3: the media check-in. These two are both LA locals, so I got to be the tourist and gawp at the extreme changes in scenery you get out that way. Where I'm from, you have two types of terrain: trees and shopping malls. In LA, there will be this huge desert mountain, then some urban sprawl, then a residential zone with those crazy tall cliche trees. Then another unused mountain that you can't believe hasn't been bulldozed and turned into Disneyland North.
At the LA Convention Center, the check-in area was just shy of abandoned on Monday morning. Then we parked in the media hospitality room and watched the Microsoft press conference stream, since none of us managed to get an invite to the 360 Kinect show.
I was glad to see some actual creative-looking kid Kinect titles arrive that aren't just bullshit Wii Sports ripoffs. I would totally buy Disneyland Adventures, Sesame Street Once Upon A Monster, and maybe Star Wars Kinect and Fable: The Journey. We tried out the new Kinect Fun Labs stuff that night. There's one lab toy that turns your picture into an Xbox avatar, including whatever shirt you happen to wearing... but the facial transformation stuff is about as good as the 3DS Mii Maker (which is to say, not very), and there's no way you'll be allowed to use this photo-tar as your official friends list avatar since it would be too easy to make an obscene shirt.
Another one of the free Fun Lab apps is Googly Eyes, which lets you scan in an item (front and back), then watch as the program attaches googly eyes to it and makes it dance. If Nintendo added something like this, the internet would call for the immediate dissolution of the company. But because 360 used to primarily have nothing but shooters, the peanut gallery gives them a pass on this crap.
The "hardcore" uses for Kinect were best exemplified by Mass Effect 3 and worst exemplified by Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. ME3 lets you use voice commands to order around AI partners (which is nothing new) but more importantly turns the player into an actor of sorts when choosing dialogue responses. That's some slick stuff. Ghost Recon, however, has you using hand gestures to assemble custom guns and then test them out with even more hand gestures. You use one hand to point where the gun should be pointing, and then pop a jazz hand to fire. Terrible. There's no way anybody wants to play the actual Ghost Recon game by pulling a million jazz hands a minute; seems pretty obvious this Kinect interface is for the gun assembly minigame only.
Just before the Halo 4 announcement, we bailed out of the convention center to start walking to the site of the EA press conference, the Orpheum Theatre. The theater first opened in 1926 and has played host to Judy Garland, Jack Benny, Will Rogers and the Marx Brothers. I was there to see EA talk about the new Madden.
And other stuff. I think the new SSX looks pretty good, and the new Need for Speed intrigues me since it is not entirely about driving (although I gather driving fans already hate it.)
In the EA show was when I started actively checking in with my 3DS to collect StreetPass data. This would prove to be a major distraction through the expo... but this was my only chance to actually experience the tech in action, so I had to take advantage of it. I've had a 3DS since before launch, and in my hometown I have had exactly one StreetPass.
After EA came Ubisoft. This was at the Los Angeles Theater, a venue constructed partially by Charlie Chaplin in 1931. Ubisoft has a cute looking Kinect Rabbids game (another one I'd probably get, if I had a 360), and of course their one big franchise, Assassin's Creed. It's good that worked out for them, because I don't what Ubi would have to talk about without it. They have a new Rayman side-scroller coming that looks fantastic... a lot like Donkey Kong Country Returns, but with an Earthworm Jim kind of look.
Then we boarded buses for the short drive to Sony's press conference, held at Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena... opened in '59, this location was the site of Wrestlemania 2 in 1986, the 1960 Democratic National Convention that gave Kennedy the gig, and Michael Jackson's last full performances in the US (during the "Bad" era in 1989.)
Although it was cool to see EA and Ubi give their game forecast - although almost nothing mentioned for Nintendo products, I noted - this Sony show was a big deal for me. I was very interested to see how they'd handle the outage talk (Tretton apologized), and I've been watching their E3 show from home for the last two years. This would not be the last time that I would silently and excitedly remind myself that I was at E3.
Lots of stuff we knew about and have seen a ton already, like Uncharted 3. Lots of stuff we knew about but had not seen much on, like Sly 4. Some welcome it's-about-time announcements like Move tools for LittleBigPlanet 2 and a arrival date for the ICO/Shadow collection.
The Vita price announcement was a clear cannon shot right at Reggie Fils-Aime's forehead: $250 for the non-WiFi model. If the Vita does indeed arrive this year (Tretton said "this holiday" in the presentation, but I have heard rumors that it could get pushed... but that could be referring to rollout in other territories), that puts two new handhelds on the racks at the same price. Then it totally becomes a features/games comparison, which is just as it should be. I'd give the edge to Nintendo for the holiday season since they'll have months of quality 3DS titles out by then and the Vita will likely have the usual anemic kickoff, but into 2012 both companies will have to fight for market share. And it will be dirty. We'll see if Nintendo cuts the 3DS price anytime soon to get a leg up; I'm sure they were confident in their $250 because they figured that's no possible way Sony could enter a new portable at anything under $300. Now they may have to rethink that.
After the conference, Sony raised the curtain and held a massive party. Almost a mini-E3 all by itself. Vita was there, most of the big games were there... they even had performance art dancers and a DJ. My iPhone battery was dying by this point, so I was unable to do any live tweeting during the conference, plus when Haygood and I were separated during the party it became a very real problem to locate each other with my phone dead. I found an outlet in the mostly-abandoned press box area and was able to charge up enough to tell Haygood where I was. We left during the Jane's Addiction concert.
Day 0 stats: the 3DS pedometer says 6,403 steps, and most of my 3DS time was spent in the Notifications app (15 minutes checking to see if I was receiving StreetPasses.)
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