So, two weeks ago there was this little event called the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. You might have heard of it. Well, this article should have went up when I got back but wouldn't you know it, I got called to do this top secret CIA thing. All very hush hush.

Along with me on this trip are four friends from my college, two of which make up the rest of Brick Flick.

Day 1
Wednesday morning we awoke ready to head out to the L.A. Convention Center, and what a lovely morning it is. You might be asking yourself: "Why the sky is so blue in L.A.?" Well, there's actually a pretty simple answer. We stayed in Long Beach.

Good Morning Long Beach!

After a quick drive down the 405 we arrive - woo hoo! The expo! Just like last year, Atari had a huge sign on the outside of the building, although this year "vandals" somehow "graffitied" it.

How did they do that?

My friends and I used the Expo's new way of registering: the online application. I guess that method was extremely popular because we had to wait in a huge "online reg" line to get our badge. We were harassed by reps from "25 to Life" three times during our wait (a game described to us as SOCOM in the 'hood). Oh, and we saw a grey ho.

At about 11:30am we got our badges and are allowed to enter the sacred land of E3.

This is the last sunlight we saw for the next seven and a half hours.

This sign, while attempting to be helpful by posting hours, is quite baffling. In order to not miss any action, I should visit the E3 Insider web page? Hmmm, instead I think I'll actually go inside of E3 myself.

Todays agenda isn't really set yet, and as it turns out Day One will end up being a day where we wander around the West Hall. Konami is one of our first stops. At least I can scratch the fanboy duties of playing Metal Gear Solid 3 off my list early on.

Look out, fan boy coming through!

Konami has an interesting setup, imagine a kindergarten class where the all the students sit on the ground for storytime. But, instead of getting a story Konami loops a 30 minute video of their games on a huge screen. MGS3 is a full 10 minutes and is easily the crowd favorite (and mine).

Konami has some great booths (and one terrible one). The Metal Gear area is covered in rocks and greenery, to match the demo's swampy feel. An even more elaborate design was the small area for Silent Hill 4: The Room. The whole mini-booth was decked out like a little kitchen.

OOOOoooOO Scary!

I guess it was supposed to be scary, but the scariest room at the Konami booth was the also looked the most innocent, a little section named 'Club Revolution': a small room where people went in and sang Karaoke to Konami's Karake Revolution 2. *shudder*

If you haven't noticed, poker is the world coolest sport now. Now that it's taken over late night cable, it has its sights set on video games. It better be one damn good poker game for it to cost $50 when a deck of cards costs $3.

Someone needs to tell Gary Coleman that his game came out last year and that it sucked. Although, he probably doesn't care either, he gets to walk around with a couple beautiful women and smile for the camera all day.

The Advent Rising booth had a nice big screen to show off its trailer and to accommodate viewers they built chairs into the booth design. Unfortunately, they built the seats so they angle away from the screen. Wonderful!

Yes spider, I'm disgusted by her too.

Holy crap, it's the Punisher and he's totally going get that guy. Obviously you don't want to cross the Punisher!

Man, that dude is soooo punished!

One of the first private shows we waited in line for was the trailer for Darkwatch. Well, that's a bit of a lie - there was no line. The place was decked out like an old, beat up church, complete with steeple.

Back at the GDC I got to take my picture with a celebrity and my luck continued at E3:

Look, I'm starstruck!

What's the deal with making giant versions of portable machines?

Next up, Microsoft. Last year they had a terrific setup, lots of room to walk around and play games. We walk down the long entryway with grand expectations.

Step into the green...

And find that the booth sucks! Whose idea was it to wall in the booth?! The place was so cramped that we all got separated in less than thirty seconds. Additionally, because of the fact that Psyconauts was nowhere to be found, I left the booth rather upset.

The rest of the day, save a break to spend $42 on expo food, was spent in game playing bliss. Near the end of the day we saw this giant Yeti eating people so the three members of Brick Flick (Billy, Deon, and myself) decided that it was picture time:

I'm the one with red sleeves and red eyes.

And so ends Day 1, one hall down and one to go. Okay, two if you count Kentia Hall, but no one does, so one to go.

When we got back to the hotel we were tired from a full day of walking and gaming so we just sat and gamed for the rest of the evening.

Our E3 report concludes later this week!

Day 2 After running around the West Hall for a day we decide that on Day 2 we are going to have a little bit more of a schedule. We heard rumors of a Square Enix show that not only requires tickets but also has a sneak peak of Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children. So our first stop is to wait in the line so we can get tickets. One hour later we score tickets (buttons actually) to see the 10:30 show.

We only have about an hour to kill, so we just hang around Square Enix and its neighboring booths.

Sora, from Kingdom Hearts, apparently hides melons in his pants.

Gets customs ever time!

10:30 rolls around and we "Enter the Red" and prepare for the wonders of Square Enix and Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children...

Enter the Purple

... and see neither. Basically, we they just showed extended movies of what was out on the expo floor. And the Advent Children stuff?? Less footage than what we've seen on the internet. Bah Humbug. No more stepping into any more colors!

Next up on the day 2 'sched' is the South Hall, home of booths like Sony and Nintendo. On the way out of West Hall I see that the Punisher is still giving that criminal trouble. Man, that Punisher, he's crazy!

Crime doesn't pay folks.

As a bonus, on the way to the South Hall there are a few rooms on the Concourse that we hit up. Concourse is a fancy way to say "hallway". One of the rooms is Sega.

Holy crap! It's Sega's big news! It's Matrix Online!! What?! I don't believe it. You're lying, it's not really Matrix Online. Wait, you're not kidding? Stop pulling my leg. Really, what's the big news? You can tell me, I'm cool.

I'm still in disbelief

I somehow missed Outrun 2 when I went through here, so for me (sadly) the coolest thing I saw in Sega's room was a display of Sonic toys and shirts.

Okay - I just told a lie. The coolest thing I saw at the Sega booth was the mob of G4 people interviewing a ESPN Sports Rep. Q: How many people does it take to interview this guy?

A: 2 More. Really - they came in after I took this picture.

This being the tenth E3 they had a lot of displays showcasing classic gaming. Activision sure has a colorful past. Just look at that shirt!

South Hall here we are! I spent a lot of time in the Sony area. God of War and Monster Hunter are two of the games that came out of nowhere that I will be watching in the months to come. I also tried out a variety of new Eye Toy games include Sega Superstars.

Painkiller had a some interesting (read: damn ugly) statues at their booth. One wonders why they didn't have someone dressed up like these guys. They couldn't look any worse.

Lovely...

Okay, so maybe having a guy in a bad costume can get worse. Much, much worse. I have no idea what this guy represents, well, besides a reminder to stay in school.

Lucasarts was also setup in the South Hall. And even though this years line up didn't impress me at all, you still gotta love the Stormtroppers!

These aren't the games you want.

The rest of day 2 passed like day 1... by playing a lot of games. By the end of the day we decided that we would get food on the way home. We began by looking for a place I saw last year: Mo Better Meaty Meat Burgers on Pico Blvd!

Sadly, we got lost instead.

But, because of our detour, we came across a different meat place, not as "meaty" as Mo Better, but still unique. Finally, we can eat!

McSpeedy saves the day!

You can see us wearing some of our free nVidia shirts. I use the word some because we each ended up with 3-4 nVidia shirts each.

The prices seem to be quite old, to match the style of the place, let's hope that the burgers are new.

While we waited, some sort of Beetle Lover's Club started to gather. I've never seen so many tough attitutes come out of such tiny vehicles.

Well, we can have attitude as well. Well, kinda.

Day 3 Well, having an agenda for day 2 did nothing, so day 3 we decided that we'd just run around E3 again. The only planned event for the day was getting into line to see the Nintendo DS. We got there pretty early on Friday so we only had an hour wait. I got to try DK Jungle Beat and some "Pokemon Girls" annoyed the crowd at one section so the time flew by.

15 minutes later we were inside! And guess what - it was a sham! It was just another line. While we stood and waited the guy that is the voice of Mario & Co. explain how great the DS was. After some video that told me that the DS was the best thing EVER, we were let loose into a room to actually play it!

Oooo shiny!

Turns out that the wait was totally worth it. The DS was not only innovative and intuitve, it was a lot of fun. The design was a little clunky, but everyone told us 3 or 4 times that it wasn't actually the final design.

Well, with the only responsiblity of Day 3 marked off, the day fell to chaos. First up, the America's Army booth.

That us in more nVidia t-shirts

Okay, what the hell. Punisher, dude, kill the guy or don't kill the guy, just make a decision!

He just doesn't have it in him

At the Buena Vista booth we saw what the cool new Sora looks like in the GBA Kingdom Hearts game. Sadly, the melons have made the transition.

At this point, Billy, Deon and I realize that we have forgotten one of the best aspects of E3: Kentia Hall, and we split from the group. Kentia Hall happens to be the E3 version of the bargain rack. It's full of terrible booths, but there is the occasion gaming gem. Or so I hear.

A few companies decided to build controllers into excercise devices. I'm pretty sure I saw these last year too, but they were so terrible that I somehow forgot them. Let this be a permament mark that these things exist, and yes, they really, really suck.

The Classic Gaming Expo has a museum of systems set up in Kentia Hall, it was easily one of the highlights of the show. Not only did they have some systems I've only read about until now, they also have a copy of each system out to play! Like this guy from Sony Online Entertainment playing... the Atari 2600. Oh my, he's playing E.T.! I hope he's not doing research for SOE's next game.

Why ET!?

Fatal1ty, the "world's most successful professional gamer", has teamed up with ABIT Technologies to release a line of PC hardware. Ugh. ABIT ran an E3-long event where players could challenge Fatal1ty to a game; winner recieved prices upwards of $1000.

I read that you could challenge him to "any" game in the E3 newspaper they distributed at the show. But when I attempted to challenge him to a riveting game of 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' they denied me. Man, I bet I could have won the "grand" prize.

Once we had finished with Kentia Hall, we headed back up to the West Hall for some last gaming. You should recall that all weekend we have been wearing nVidia shirts, and this isn't because we like getting free shirts. We also like getting free video cards, which is what can happen if you are wearing one of the nVidia shirts. While hanging out in the West Hall, nVidia noticed Billy.

But there's a catch! In order for Billy to win the card, they ask him to take an nVidia bag, hold it above his head, and run down the West Hall aisle screaming as loud as he could "I LOVE NVIDIA". Well, without hestitation, he ran off like he was on fire.

During his trip about ten people yelled back, calling him a "dumbass", and one fellow screamed "What?! Where?!?". Upon his return he was not only awarded a new 5900 FX but a copy of the DVD edtion of Unreal Tournament 2004.

And so ends my second trip to the Electronic Entertainment Expo. They have some fast working sign gnomes because when we left they had changed the welcome message:

See you next year? You bet your ass you will!