We've just got back from the final day of e3 and are now just chilling back at our hotel room. It's been a crazy couple of days and part of me is relieved (my legs), while the other part is somewhat remorseful.

That remorse mostly comes down to the fact that I've had my first taste of... wait, let me rephrase that. That mostly comes down to me having spent some quality time with the Wii. Yeah, that's slightly better...

They said at their conference that 'playing = believing'. You have no idea how true that is. It may have taken me some getting used to but once I got into the groove of things, the hype level was through the roof. The anticipation and excitement I felt when lining up for another Wii game pretty much sums it up. Even right now as I write this, I'm thinking about how much I want another round of Excite Truck, or face a couple more fast balls in Wii Sports Baseball. AAAARGH! I'm going to go insane.

There where 27 games in total, and I got to play 11 of them during my 5 hours in heaven.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - Got to love VIP access! I got bumped to the front of the 60+ minute wait queue. Thank you NOA!
Tony Hawk Downhill Jam - I didn't get much time with this, but from what I did play, it was pretty promising (and just downright pretty).
Excite Truck - I am SO buying this. It's burnout with the Wii controller. Fucking awesome. This was the one game I wanted to keep coming back to, but I needed to try as many games as possible.
Necro Nesia - Um, yeah... It was kinda... not good.
Elebits - I'm buying this too! Great twist on the FPS formula. Actually, it's not so much a first person shooter as it is a first person crazy Japanese game (FPCJG) that involves flinging stuff around the room and zapping up little pikmin looking things. Very addictive (think katamari) and incredibly clever (think katamari). I see this game doing very well.
Wario Ware: Smooth Moves - you all might be a bit wary of the series by now, but this is seriously great fun. The Wii-mote was made for this game! The actions you saw in the trailer is basically how you have to play this game. Awesome fun.
Wii Sports:
-Golf - sinking a putt from 23 feet has never been so satisfying!
-Baseball - i wasn't holding a controller in my hand, it was a baseball bat. Getting the 'Out of the park!' rating is oh so sweet.
-Airplane - bodes well for a pilotwings game.
-Tennis - I only had one game of this and had my ass handed to me. It was still quite realistic (hence the ass-handing), but I needed more time with it to get the swings right. Once this tech demo turns into a fully fleshed out game, it will become a system seller.
Red Steel - I liked it. The sword control was a tiny bit underwhelming, mainly due to the fact it wasn't freefrom and was a little delayed, but the gun play was fantastic. Don't worry though, the sword fighting is still good fun and there's still more time before this game ship out. The game looks awesome too.

I really regret not being able to play Mario Galaxy, but it was either spend my entire time in the Nintendo booth waiting to play that, or try out tonnes of other games and buy Galaxy when it's released. What would you have done?

One noticeable omission from Nintendo's lineup was 'Rayman: Raging Rabbids'. I personally think the game uses some form of augmented reality (check the trailer, Rayman shows up inside the living room, plus they were showing short 10 second trailers on the show floor showing the 'rabbids' in the real world, like in a bath and on a frying pan) so they might have held it back because they didn't want that to steal the show or something. I don't know if I'm just being a raving loon (again), but I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't show it in at least some form on the show floor. Cryptic trailers don't count.

I took a few videos of some of the games in action, but the damn things won't be live till tomorrow. Upload speeds are a bitch. I'll be writing up an article with my proper impression of every game I tried at Nintendo's booth, so keep an eye out for that soon.

Right now though, I'm pretty damn hungry. I think I'll head downstairs and get me a bowl of good old American style chille.

Stay tuned for those videos. They are a must see.

Mario Galaxy.... (drool)

EDIT: Hmm, I noticed this post is completely devoid of any pictures and looks a bit barren...

Ahhh, that's better.

EDIT (again):
Here come the vidoes;
Downhill Jam - MPEG4 (1:04 min - 8.90 MB)
Elebits - MPEG4 (0:46 min - 6.46 MB)
Excite Trucks - MPEG4 (1:05 min - 8.86 MB)
Iwata and Kaplin - MPEG4 (0:16 min - 2.50 MB)
Project Hammer - MPEG4 (4:26 min - 35.2 MB)
Super Mario Galaxy - MPEG4 (3:25 min - 27.2 MB)

Given that we seemed to be in the stratosphere of the Kodak Theater, these pics didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. I'll still put them up for your viewing pleasure. I should also take this opportunity to say that being at that conference and seeing the legend that is Shigeru Miyamoto in the flesh was one experience I'll never forget. It was a total adrenaline rush! Anyway, check these pics out.

And now for the afformentioned 'other crap'. What you'll find is here is a collection of weird and wonderful things we saw on our way to and from the Kodak Theater. There's also a couple of pics from our after conference lunch at the Johnny Rocket diner. Bon Appetite!

Here's some vids I took at the conference hasty converted & uploaded for your enjoyment

Zelda demo - DivX (6:16 min - 41.2MB)
Red Steel demo - DivX (6:09 min - 40.4MB)

NB: you may need to download the latest DivX codec to get the video to run. Go to http://www.divx.com/divx/play/download/ and click on the "Download" button (you don't need to fill in anything).

We were stuck up on the third level, but were on the third row in so had a pretty good view of the stage & theater. It was pretty cool watching Miyamoto, Reggie and Iwata in real life. Unfortunately our free swag was limited to a DS Lite case. After watching the MS & Sony conferences I'd say that Nintendo easily wins this round.

Here's some pics I took (a bit blury). Lahiru has some too which will be up soon.

We're getting ready to leaving the hotel now. Despite the Kodak theater (where the Nintendo conference is held) being only a few blocks away we're going to get there early to a) sus out the joint and b) try to get good seats. The doors open at 8:30, and we'll probably be there about 8:15 (45 mins from now).

We'll try to get a net connection once we're there, if we can't get it working we'll send a few live updates via sms to Luke who will post them on PALGN.

More soon.

We were taking a walk around downtown LA yesterday and decided to head over to the Convention Center so we could scope out the route there. As a result PALGN’s E3 Live Blog is proud to bring you the exclusive first pics from E3!

In particular check out these pics of something being setup in the West Hall. Could it be Nintendo's booth?

No, I can't find anything better to do with my time. Watch out for my excessively long diatribe on why LA sucks coming soon