E3 2005: Matt's E3 Blog

Written by Matt Swider  on May 18, 2005

Blogs: The Bossman blogs at E3.

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005 @ 2:40 AM
This is my first entry into my Gaming Target blog, but because it's the eve of the E3 show floor opening, I'm going to keep things rather short. Actually, midnight has already passed and I have to wake up at 6:25 AM to ensure I'm at the E3 breakfast by 8 and to my first appointment at 10, right off the bat with a Sony booth tour. But such is the life of some one covering E3 live and having to update the site in real-time. I'll keep everyone informed on how the hands-on experience goes, and be one of the first to report the experience. Until then, I can dwell on the past two days, full of travel and conferencesЕ

Coming from the east coast to L.A. is no easy task. I purposely avoided a casual 8:30 AM ET flight leaving Philadelphia and arriving at LAX at around 11:00 AM PT, and instead took an inconvenient flight 5:20 AM ET that included a transfer all the way out in Charlotte, North Carolina. This is because the latter flight would arrive at 9:48 AM PT and allow me to make Square-Enix's 11:30 press conference. Of course, like all movies where a number of unfortunate events occur to an innocent character, I suffered a dual delay on the connecting flight and lost my favorite sweater while moving from the one broken airplane to another. So a big thanks to U.S. Air not only delaying me two hours so that I miss covering Square-Enix (and can't receive any revenue money for it), but for also making me shell out money for a new sweater (so I'm forced to spend that non-existent revenue on a new one).

Despite the daunting delays, I arrived in L.A. safely and was impressed with The New Otani Hotel. Previous years, we've stayed in the Holiday Inn LA Downtown (not the good one, but a decent one not too far away), but apparently that closed. It's more expensive here, but at least this hotel includes an in-room Internet connection. After checking in, meeting Glenn Wigmore in the lobby and Kyle Williams at the Sony Press Conference (Chris Reiter would join us later in the night), I got into the conference (unfortunately, without Kyle & Glenn). I ate some hotdog wienies, had a couple of complimentary Cokes and avoided the raunchy wraps that few people seemed to touch, yet they've had on the table at every Sony conference since 2003.

Inside the actual conference, I counted not one PS2 or PSP game shown. It was all PS3. However, this is not to say I was disappointed. I went in there thinking it'd be a tough battle against Microsoft, but Sony, despite the typical boring nature of their conferences, impressed with quite a bit. PS3 is definitely a match for the Xbox 360 in terms of power and the fact that it utilizes 50GB Blu-ray and 7 wireless controllers on a single console is really an advantage over the competition.

The Nintendo conference the next day did impress me as well, but I'm still frustrated with many of the company's decisions. The advantages of Revolution are the Virtual Console, which allows it to play NES, SNES, and my all-time favorite system, N64, games via download as well as GameCube through backwards compatibility. The Game Boy mini, although sleek and somewhat cool, is just a third GBA to confuse average consumer and one that I don't really need. I felt like the DS not being the next-gen Game Boy was a mistake considering Sony's high-tech entry, and one year later, the industry doesn't receive the successor, just something else that swallows gamer's money. We'll see if Nintendo can keep its large share of the portable market. It'll definitely keep my faded interest in GameCube until Zelda, now called The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Sadly, Zelda doesn't look like it'll be on the showfloor. Still, there's something like 600 other news and unreleased titles that'll be playable and I have to hurry up and cover them all over the next three days. So I better take a quick snooze so I don't pass out from all the excitement in the morning. Until next time, keep it tuned to Gaming Target.