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!