yeah, press access is where it is at. my buddy works for a major media site/company, so he has alot of juice. I will get to that.
OK, so I am back from E3 now. my general take on things: Wii isnt all that great, PS3 doesnt look like much as of yet, and the 360 had the best stuff at the show.
Nintendo:
there was some cool stuff for the DS, but nothing stand out. I really didnt want to wait in line for the Wii, so we hit my buddy up for his dark powers. he strolls up to the PR people, who know who he is, says "hey, can I get these guys to go on a tour?" sure, no prob, one minute. the PR woman then has us follow her, she takes us to the entrance area, says "I have four" to the people regulating the influx of people, and waves us in. my wait was about 5 minutes. inside, saw and played a bunch of stuff. everything looked ok, but not great, maybe xbox 1 or so. madden was there, and it sucked, control just sucked ass. Wii sports basebal wasnt too bad, your swing was a little slow/delayed, but after like 2 times you were used to it. same thing with tennis. the tennis could be fun with a couple of people. there was a music game, where you were the conductor. it was ok, but I really didnt get the point of it. the tony hawk downhill was pretty fun. the control will take some getting used to, but should work well after that. zelda, control again sucked. the doppler effect using the speaker in the controller was cool though. red steel sucked big time. looked awesome, but if you cant control it, its worthless.
plus, there will be no HD on the Wii.
oh, but some good news for you, Jonah. I didnt see it, but my buddy had some scoop on Animal Crossing, and there should be some really cool features on that title.
PS3:
I will say that the "new" PS3 controller is hardly new. getting rid of the vibration, and adding the motion sensors seems pointless right now. I didnt see anything playable that took advantage of the motion sensing. nothing on the PS3 looked too stand out, with the exception of Grand Turismo 4 HD. the visuals on that were about 99.9% photorealistic perfect. of course, this was just a demo, not playable, so we will see how the final product is. also, the "HD" on the signage for it was specific, not sure why on that in particular and not others. so really, not much exciting there.
360:
this seems like the best of show. almost everything that I really liked ended up being on the 360. gears of war, forza motorsport, viva pinata, spore, and others. hard to get into it all, but I really was most impressed with upcoming 360 titles out of everything.
viva pinata, I think that will attract alot of animal crossing fans.
spore, very, very cool. I think that will make the Sims pale in popularity. it really played well, very easy. it looks awesome. and, it has hundreds of hours of gameplay.
we got to go inside the ultra super megaforce secret Lucasarts room. only a few titles on display, some SW legos and RPGs. but the biggest thing was the new Indian Jones game. they just had a tech demo, but OMG, it is certainly going to bring alot to the table when it comes out. they said that now all things Lucas are on the same campus, they are working together on things. the games are now using particle and lighting effects taken from ILM. combine this with the AI work and physics capability, and it is something to behold. quite a while until this comes out. they said they have a team of 85 people working on it for at least another 14 months, and that this was just the first E3 we will see this game at.
again, enough geek talk for now.
-Kinkyman