E3 Day 1: Scratching the Surface

South Hall Entrance to E3

Bright lights. Loud music. Towering posters and flashing screens as far as the eye can see. This is E3. For six hours we walked around the show floor, trying, yet failing, to take in all there was to see. Giant multi-storied booths dominated the center of the of the showroom, while in the corner smaller one-man tables sat. Free merchandise everywhere. Oh man, the all the free stuff. There’s a lot to take in, and there’s a lot to describe, so I’ll do my best.

Our first day on the floor was mainly spent gaining our bearings. It’s the first year at E3 for most of us. We needed to spend our time wisely, and decide exactly what was important to see. Wisdom would dictate that we find out exactly what was important and interesting before jumping right into lines. We wanted to make sure we could at least see everything before diving in to hour long lines to play 15 minutes of a game.

So naturally the at the first glimpse of Batman: Arkham City we immediately jumped into an hour long line for 15 minutes of gameplay. I can tell you we walked away a little dazed from all the awesome, but we’ll have more on our opinions of individual games tomorrow and Thursday.

Batman: Arkham City

After coming to our senses we continued with our original plan. Touring the Warner Bros. Interactive booth we also discovered an underwhelming Green Lantern tie-in (can you say “like God of War but mediocre?”) and a multiplayer demo for Gotham City Impostors. The game looked interesting, but with other stylized, class based, multiplayer, first person shooters out there, it’s probably going to have a hard time making an impact. As long as it doesn’t make the mistake of going on sale for full price then it could be an enjoyable experience.

Some of the more awesome features included a full size Marcus Fenix statue, a two story multi-booth showroom from Sony, and a massive jumbotron dominating the Capcom booth. Nintendo’s section of the showroom was a completely enclosed room filled with glowing lights, screens displaying their 3DS, Wii, and the new Wii U consoles, and a huge representation of Link riding an eagle across the ceiling. The next to each screen was a friendly (usually female) associate, who were always happy to assist and answer any questions. And hand out free stuff. Don’t forget the free stuff. I played around with a few of the DS games, but didn’t get enough time to get a full impression just yet. By this point we were on a mission to see everything.

A packed showroom and a 2 story Playstation Booth

A mission we technically ended up failing. One of the only booths with missed out on was Microsoft’s. It wasn’t a deliberate snub, but none of us really felt like we had missed much at the end of the day. Based on the first day and opening press conferences, I hadn’t formed any negative opinion on Microsoft, but I didn’t see anything to draw me in either. Possibly it has something to do with our subconscious not wanting to dance around in front of a Kinect, which is what Microsoft is pushing heavily this year. Nevertheless, we will visit and gain an opinion on some of the new games, and I’ll make sure those opinions make it to the web for both of our readers. Thanks, Mom.

Tomorrow we’ll be bringing you more stories on individual games, vendors, and booths. Hopefully we’ll be getting up some smaller individual stories throughout the day, but either way you can expect another post like this tomorrow night.

About the Author

Matt started Pixel Legends originally to cover E3 2011. Aside from video games Matt also enjoys books, wasting time on the internet, and being from England. He doesn’t have a British accent.