Today was the first day of the exhibits at E3. A lot more happened today than I could have really anticipated.

I thought that it was impossible for E3 to suck at all, except for one thing that could happen, that could make it suck. A power outage. And that’s what happened this morning in the LA Convention Center. It wasn’t the LACC’s problem, it was the city’s problem, so there was no telling when they’d be able to get the power back up. Fortunately, they had generators running to keep the emergency lights on around the building and the parking lot. That didn’t keep the parking lot from looking like a dungeon though.

After AJ and I got to the parking lot, we drove around looking for a parking space. We drove around for a half an hour at least, constantly behind a long line of cars, wondering if I had wasted money on the parking ticket I bought. After a while, we were finally directed to an area, by staff. In a dark abyss of a corner, there were finally some parking spaces. When we finally got in the door, people had to deal with the power outage, quite simply because there wasn’t really anything to do because of it.

We met up with Dan and Marcus, who were in line waiting for the media briefing that was held before the exhibits opened. Everyone in line would get a bagel and listen to the media briefing. Dan and Marcus lost interest in attending the media briefing, and both decided to go to McDonalds and eat something there. Since AJ and I already ate, we just stayed in line because there was nothing to do. However, because of the power outage, some dude that worked there (I’m assuming) said some stuff about “since the power outage is blah blah blah, so the media briefing won’t blah blah blah.” I couldn’t really hear him because it was really loud and he was kind of far away. So, AJ just said we should just leave because they probably weren’t going to even hold the briefing. But I contested wholeheartedly because we’d get a bagel. AJ said it would be a shitty bagel, but I said “how do you know?” Other people in line made some comments about what we were talking about, but we didn’t pay attention to them, because they were stupid.

We walked around for about fifteen minutes in the lobby. We were handed some publications to read by some random people. One was an issue of GameInformer, and the other was an E3 Newspaper thing made by the ESA (the group that makes E3 possible). We sat around outside (because it was hot inside) and read what we were given, wondering if there’s going to be an E3 still because of the power outage. We waited until about 9:55 a.m. before we went back inside. Then the doors opened to E3, and the huge herd of people flooded into the E3 with cheers. Took a little while to actually get in, but we did.

The whole day we walked around pretty much, looking at all the different games around. I saw a lot of games being premiered for the first time like Shadow of the Colossus, Jak X Combat Racing, SOCOM 3, and like a thousand other games. There were big screen TVs everywhere and it was freaking loud.

Random information I gathered:

Square Enix is releasing a slew of RPGs in the coming months, such as Kingdom Hearts II, Radiata Stories, Romancing SAGA, Fullmetal Alchemist, etc.

Namco is trying to make all new franchises for their expansion into the PC realm of gaming instead of porting their games from the consoles, so the games have a feeling that is more than “Oh its on PS2, but now they’re putting it on the PC,” however it wouldn’t be stupid to think that some could transfer to console systems. When I poised the questions to different members of the Namco staff on-site at E3, they declined to comment on any possible porting of the PC games to the consoles, which could be a good sign in certain cases, depending on the type of game.

Of the games I saw, I only played/learned about a few enough to actually know something about the game. The following games qualify for the list of “what I know.”

Phantasy Universe – I hadn’t played a Phantasy game by SEGA since Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast. I instantly noticed the control scheme was amazingly better than PSO. I didn’t know if it was online, but whatever mode I was playing, I was accompanied by three NPCs in my team. I thought that it could be a really good game from what I had played.

Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII – This is the mobile game we’ve been hearing about which is a prequel of sorts to FFVII. It was all in Japanese, so I couldn’t tell you how the story was or anything, but by the way it looked, it had the best graphics for a mobile phone game I’d ever seen. But the controls don’t make the same impression. While it was still only in development, I’ve seen games that come out and have horrible controls regardless, so I had told someone about the way I felt the game should be improved a little bit. It was definitely hard to control your character in an action-battle setting, where you had to dodge around and hit your enemies, while they were firing at you and moving around as well. Needless to say, you need something better than a mobile phone to control that well. Also, if you were hit by the enemy who had a gun (you only had a sword, since you were that red-headed Turk), their rate of fire was that that you couldn’t hit them with your sword before they hit you, making it hard to get any hits in at all. Another minus was that the enemies had a lot of HP for being such low level ones. I can only wonder how hard boss battles (or the final boss battle, for that matter) would be. I’d gander a “near impossible.”

Kingdom Hearts 2 – looks like it plays just like what made the first Kingdom Hearts so great. They probably improved certain aspects of the gameplay and stuff, but I didn’t have a chance to actually play it. Perhaps in the coming days I will be able to.

Warhammer – One of Namco’s PC-only games. Its going to be an RTS game, but all they had of the game was a trailer with no in-game footage. Warhammer is a cool concept, so its possible the game could be very good.

Hellgate: London – I can’t say anything bad about it. I really think it’ll be one of the best games to come out on the PC. It mends together aspects of First Person Shooters and RPGs in a really cool way. You can read my preview for it here: http://www.gamersmark.com/previews/view/235/

Mage Knight Apocalypse – Another game from Namco’s wave of PC titles. Based on a table top game, Mage Knight Apocalypse prides itself on the fact that even though its an MMORPG-type game, there is no leveling up at all, which they feel takes away from the experience of playing the game, because it pulls you away from it while you level up. They explained that the stats increased as you used certain skills during the game, such as swinging your weapon or using spells. The skills that are increased would only be increased based on what you actually used during the game, so that means that if you use melee weaponry, you won’t get a magic skill for doing so.

It was a long day, and there’s two more coming up. We’re going to be concentrating more on playing the actual games than looking around and getting a feel for what’s around so we can prioritize our time the next day or two. And on a side note, the displays and booths look really cool. Each company has its own style. All the non-creative/low budget companies took up cubicles in the back of the halls though, so they weren’t as interesting.

We also saw some dude from Australia who had a virtual reality hardware thing called the a_rage. The technology and concept was really cool, since virtual reality was actually feasibly possible with it. They are an independent company, so I hope their product succeeds to some extent.

(Thanks to Marcus for subtitle name for the article.)