LIFESTYLE COLUMN: E3 - ELECTRONIC ENTERTAINMENT EXPO 2011

Running Amok Under an Assumed Name at the World's Biggest Gaming Event

By: Josh Moorhead

June 13, 2011

(June 7-9, 2011 at the Los Angeles Convention Center) Strange things happen in LA. That's nothing new. About a month ago, I was stopped on Sunset when a gutter spontaneously combusted next to my car, threatening to send it up in flames. Meh. What else is new? Last week, a friend of mine texted me late Wednesday with a question he phrased as simply as one might ask, "Hey, wanna go get a sandwich?" Except this time the question was "Hey, wanna go to E3 tomorrow?" Uh, chya. Super chya.

E3, for those who don't know (and better act like ya do, holmes!), is the yearly Electronic Entertainment Expo, second only to Comic-Con for its geek cred biz bonanza. If Comic-Con was once about comics and is now about movies and TV, E3 is and has always been about video games. It's where the big platforms, software, and products drop. It's where companies practically light money on fire for consumers and press attention. Case in point: to promote Lord of the Rings: War in the North WB Games and SnowBlind, studios fenced off a patch of convention center, decorated it to look like stories-tall ice cave, then filled it with a full orchestra to play LOTR tracks to game footage while serving all in the crowd middle earth mead. This is how they do it.

And how did I do it? Well, I simply had to pose as [name deleted], who had a pass to represent UK trade interests and then go about my merry way playing video games and looking for swag all the live long day. And it went generally well.

I'm not the world’s best gamer. I'll run you on Madden, I can't turn away from Donkey Kong Country, but when it comes to the games people are really playing…well, I've never met a Halo or a Modern Warfare, or even a more complex puzzle game than Tetris that liked me. I know, it's a hard road. But that doesn't mean I didn't geek out for my circumstances, which were good. My pass meant people wanted me to do and see stuff, even if they realized after anywhere between ten seconds and five minutes that I was neither British nor adept at the joystick. But it was fun.

After oogling the exterior for a bit, my friend came out from the South Hall and pulled me into the LA Convention Center. The banners, lights, video blasts, and costumed wanderers made it feel like Blade Runner if Ridley Scott had sold every corner of his frames to advertisers. It was all pretty nifty. Standing outside Sony's bright white construct, that might as well have been the deck of the USS Enterprise. It wasn't long before I had my Droid out, dropping photos on Facebook and exclaiming that I was pretty sure I was standing in the future. Much of the tech wouldn't have disagreed with me.

It wasn't that long ago that we were playing with black and white Game Boys, people, that ran for two hours on two double-As and were as thick as Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Now Sony was debuting the Vita, a hand-held console that made my Droid look clunky, my 720p TV look fuzzy, and my PS3 look old and tired. It might not be floating cars, pellet meals, or robot butlers, but we're getting a version of the future, people. It just seems to have come so naturally that we've barely noticed it. Every time you Skype, you're doing something everyone thought looked cool and impossible in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anyway. The Vita was cool. Like I said, it has amazing computing ability, matching if not excelling the PS3, and it looks just as perty, and handled light, sleek and comfortable. It'll be a worthy rival to Nintendo's 3DS, which ain't as pretty but does do the wonder of 3D without the hassle of glasses. Impressive.

On the non-portable front, I kept wandering around the Sony area and jumped on Street Fighter vs. Tekken. It was honestly my most triumphant moment, as a fellow stranger joined me for a best-of-three match after I informed them of how terrible my play would be, and then I whooped ‘em. They must have felt hustled, but it's really a testament to how playable the game is and how flexible Dhalsim still is. Wanting to keep the positive energy going, I made my way to the back wall, where Sony was showing off some 3D gaming. I picked up Sonic Generations, which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the iconic hedgehog, and assumed I'd be able to keep up. How many hours of my life have been spent playing Sonic 2 anyway? Well, ripping the dude in three dimensions is a whole different ordeal. It was fast. Way fast. And the 3D was exciting and immersive, but thankfully the control was still intuitive. After some lackluster recent Sonic titles, it looks like the blue fur in the red shoes is going to get a proper 20th birthday.

I also played some 3D Captain America. Usually these licensed titles are all bad, ironically, just as the video game-to-movie conversion doesn't usually take, but I had fun with Cap, even if the 3D wasn't as thrilling or the game itself terribly inventive. It still got points for being entertaining -- one of E3's big Es. One of the more amusing highlights was taking on the PS Move engine -- Sony's answer to Wii's motion controls. I played Medieval Moves: Deadmund's Quest with some helpful but frustrated Sony game tutors at my side. This is an instance where I have to assume that it wasn't the game but me that sucked. It wasn't long before they asked, "Wait, where are you from again?" after they realized I wasn't very good at this stuff and that I didn't understand half of the things they were trying to sell me on. But they still helped and explained that because the move engine is a 1-for-1 motion control, my wacked-out and exaggerated movements -- sometimes required by the Wii -- were overkill for this. Once I started getting the hang of that traipsing around a castle tossing ninja stars, shooting arrows, and swinging swords into ne'er-do-well skeletons was becoming a more thoroughly baked piece of cake. The Move has a lot of promise, if you're into standing and moving.

And that's not to crap on the Wii. Nintendo's system, now getting up there in console years, is the most inventive system ever produced. And at a price that didn't ask you to take out another mortgage or student loan to cover it, it brought all kinds of gamers into the fold that weren't there before…like many Dads and Aunts of the world. But that also lead to a dumbification of games leaving hardcore gamers to feel as if their real gaming fixes were going to come from the X-Box or PS3. Nintendo aimed to combat that and the development of rival motion technology with the biggest announcement of E3, the Wii U, which I believe is fancy for "it's the next Wii, guys."

There was a four-hour line to get to actually play the thing, but I got to watch those playing and hold one of the crazy controllers myself. Think playing Mario with an iPad in your hands. To be honest, I cannot say if I believe in this thing yet or think Nintendo has another Virtua-Boy on their hands. The console does promise one thing, though, that no other ever has, that might just make it worth it -- you can keep playing a game, even if someone changes the TV channel. Badda-bing! No more Zelda vs. Extreme Makeover Home Edition arguments! This is allowed thanks to that iPad controller with a fully interactive touch screen on its surface. But it did feel funny holding it and remembering the original Nintendo’s light, fit rectangle with four buttons. I don't know if this will all be too complicated, both for users to use and for developers to develop. It's a bold leap into a direction. What direction, who knows? But one thing Nintendo is promising, even as their stock price did drop a bit the day after the unveiling, is that the Wii U will have more computing power than both the PS3 and the XBox 360 by a mile. They're welcoming back developers to Nintendo as a serious place to make games, and they already have licensing agreements to make sure their new system isn't flooded with cheap carnival games or virtual pet sims. Nintendo did have one innovation that was vastly appreciated though in their giant Wii-looking cube that housed all their products: carpet! It was good on the feet.

But it turns out that plush spoilage wouldn't end there. After walking by the Sony booth one more time, only to see a man in a cow costume dancing to the PS Move, we made our way to Sony's European lounge on the VIP second floor of our Euro-passes. Thanks, Brits! There we found Uncharted 3, which I actually didn't get my hands on but looked much like its brethren -- a mess of fun, now with multiplayer. And I discovered my own multiplayer experience hopping onboard with Ratchet & Clank All 4 One -- the latest in the fun platforming series filled with cuddly cartoon characters and tricked-out weaponry. This is why video games exist -- so you can shoot an enemy with a gun that turns them into a Velociraptor that then devours the other enemies. Adding the co-op layer of play was a natural and fun evolution in the series.

Of course, I still struggled, though. Someone sat down and started helping me. I accidentally killed them probably 37 times. So goes co-op games. They were patient but curious, I guess would be the word. They asked me about my gaming experience. I lamented my PS3's meltdown and my insufficient finances to fix it. I got a funny look. "Where was I from again?" they inquired. Oh yeah, sorry, I'm not who this pass says I am. But we bonded anyway. And as I made an arse of myself occasionally in game-play, I eventually discovered that this dude was the creative director on the game.

There was a lot of that marching around E3. You never knew who you were rubbing shoulders with, and lacking the recognition of movie stars or athletes, these designers just merged into the crowd and watched with bated breath as joe schmoes like myself got their paws on their life's work for the first time. In that respect, it was super cool, and I hope I was fair to their efforts.

There was some other gameplay intermixed -- the Lord of the Rings title was a fun hack-and-slash, grittier and bloodier but also more exciting than I expected; Madden looked and played just as good as always; Final Fantasy XIII-2 looked great, if I could have only remembered the complicated control scheme; Square-Enix's take on Tomb Raider looked like it could give Uncharted a run for its money; and other distractions abounded, from Yoda to Batman's Harley Quinn. (Arkham City looked pretty cool, by the way, with a playable Catwoman!)

But eventually, and after some free swag, an afternoon was done, which largely, like most LA experiences, remains a blur. A 3D technological marvel of a blur, but a blur. But hey, that's the future.

E3: The Electronic Entertainment Expo takes place each June at the Los Angeles Convention Center.