The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else on staff, nor are anyone's opinions meant to be taken as statements of fact.

For one week every year, a city I don't like becomes a place I have to be. The city is Los Angeles; the event that draws me is, of course, E3. The following recounts the things that stuck in my mind, the things which for me defined E3 2K3, and why I regard it as the second worst E3 ever.

Don't get me wrong, E3 even at its worst is bigger and better than the Tokyo Game Show and ECTS combined. The sheer size of it all, the personalities present and the overwhelming quantity of available content ensures that E3 is and remains the single most important event in the world of interactive entertainment.

That being said, this year's E3 left me wanting. The industry, it seems, is heading in a direction which makes me feel uneasy.

The press conferences remembered

It all started with the Microsoft press event. Microsoft came out swinging, The company was dynamic, showed great games, and made a strong case for Xbox Live and the new music mixer attachment. The Halo 2 demonstration was the icing on the cake and the crowd (myself included - and I didn't even like the first Halo that much to begin with) was ecstatic. After the great show MS delivered, I was pumped for the Sony and Nintendo conferences the next day - particularly Nintendo's, since it had by far the best presentation of each of the three last years.

Boy, were my hopes shot down.

Before Nintendo, however, came the Sony conference, and by all accounts it felt like a rehash of last year's effort. All we got were polished but spiritless sequels and Kaz Hirai again making bad jokes about the market performance of MS and Nintendo. Difference was, this year no one was laughing.

EA's presentation at Sony's event (featuring Tiger Woods and Cedric the Entertainer) was funny, but couldn't match up to a similar skit done last year with John Madden and two professional NFL players. The Sony conference felt like a spiritless rework of last year's edition. Sony, as the clear-cut market leader, didn't need to come out swinging like MS did . . . so it didn't.

Then came Nintendo, which last year came out strong with crowd-pleasing games like Metroid, Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine etcetera. Nintendo this year had a surprisingly humble showing in several ways. There were very few games of note, and an apologetic Satoru Iwata (the new president of Nintendo) was admitting mistakes made with the GC. It made for an altogether un-Nintendo-like showing.

The crowd cheered most loudly when Super Mario Advance 4 (a remake of Super Mario Bros. 3) flashed on the screens. When the crowd is most excited by a remake of a game that is a decade-and-a-half old, you're in trouble, and as much as it hurts me to say this, Nintendo at the moment does seem to be in trouble.

After the Nintendo briefing, we dashed to the Nokia one. The less said about that one, the better. One thing, though: Nintendo doesn't have much to fear from the Ngage. Looking at Nokia fumble, one must respect what Sony and MS have achieved as industry outsiders that actually provided a compelling product and marketed it accordingly.

The show remembered

The disappointments continued on the show floor. There were few surprises, and despite featuring more exhibitors than in the previous two years, there was very little groundbreaking content.

Instead, more licensed drivel and uninspired sequels made for a show that, despite being packed with booths and games, felt empty. There were few games I felt I absolutely had to check out. What surprised me the most, however, was that even the Korean companies this year were disappointing, despite some of them having lavish booths in one of the main halls. This had not been the case in previous years.

What made this year's edition second-worst instead of worst (that dishonor still lies with E3 2K1) was the sheer size of the event.

E3 is growing again. It still isn't as big as it was in 2000, but it's getting there. For sheer size, E3 2K was the biggest - riding on the final days of the tech bubble, it was an enormous orgy of sights and sounds with companies left-and-right trying to outdo each other in an obscene show of capitalistic excess. Having experienced that, I found E3 2K1 a major disappointment.

Gone were the lavish booths, half the exhibitors, and most of the excitement. Since then, Sega went third-party and three companies released new console hardware; the games industry has been growing again, and likewise, so has E3. The growth, sadly, didn't translate into genuine excitement for new groundbreaking software.

Meetings remembered

For a slacker like me, E3 is hard work. Between playing games, there are meetings to attend, interviews to take, and EGM editors to abuse. After doing all that, the following things remained glued in my mind:

- Industry legend Dave Perry is 6 foot 8 inches tall and used underhanded tactics to convince the Wachowski brothers to give Shiny the Matrix license.

As we wrapped up the interview, he said the following: "So how's the show? You guys have it good checking out all the games out there while I'm stuck here giving interviews and showing my great game all day." (Let it be noted that I disagree with his feelings about the Enter the Matrix game.)

My reply: "You're the one worth millions of dollars, wanna switch?"

- Nintendo, while claiming to have learned from its mistakes, is still doing a lot of things wrong.

During the Nintendo press conference and several chats I had with Nintendo employees, one point was hammered home: we will never give Sony another eighteen-month lead (a sentiment shared wholeheartedly by MS I might add). Though this might be true for the release of the next batch of consoles, the company seems unwilling to provide online content, thus giving the competition another chance at expanding at Nintendo's expense.

The direct bottom line for Nintendo still seems to be more important than giving a dwindling customer base the content it craves. This allows the competition to create another gap that Nintendo will find hard to close in the future. The official Nintendo line remains that there is no money to be made with online content - a idea not shared by Yuji Naka, whose PSO1+2 to this day provides the only online experience on the GameCube.

Please, Nintendo, Mario Kart DD already has a LAN mode. It won't cost Nintendo a single dime to allow people to direct-connect games, so please tell me why you go out of your way to cripple the LAN mode in such a way that online LAN gaming becomes impossible? After Sega, Nintendo is my favorite video game company - why must those we love hurt us so much?

- Peter Moore left Sega for MS a little while ago. It's nice, though, to see that the move didn't make him lose any of his passion, wit, and sense of humor.

At one point during a roundtable interview, he showed us his MS employee chip card and quipped, "Yeah, I know that some of you think MS implants these in our brains when we start working for them. As you can see we are not there yet."

Sadly most of the time at the interview was wasted by a German journalist from some financial site who kept insisting that MS was to blame for EA refusing to go with Xbox Live. He insisted on finding out what Moore was planning to do about that situation. He obviously knew people inside EA, and those people had told him that EA, under the restrictions MS puts on them, could under no circumstance sign on for Live.

Moore remained calm and spoke conciliatory words. He had to; he is not allowed to reveal what's going on. The reality of which the German journalist was unaware is that EA wants to limit online support for its games to a maximum of one year, so that people who are using one of its sports games, for instance, will be forced to buy the latest version in order to be able to continue playing online. That was one of the major stumbling blocks (amongst a few minor pricing ones) between MS and EA. Moore, of course, is not at liberty to talk about such things in a public interview, and sadly the German journalist wasted twenty minutes of our time asking the same inane question ("What are you going to do about it?") over and over again.

- I am amazed at the stupidity and ignorance of the collective Belgian gaming press.

Calling these people press is a disservice to hard-working and knowledgeable people at fan sites and fanzines all over the world. The worst excess is a guy called Frank Hofnar (it's Molnar actually, I threw the Hofnar in for our Belgian readers, they will get it), who used to work for game distributor Contact Data before he became famous for showing his bare ass on the first Belgian edition of Big Brother years ago. He now hosts a game show on local Belgian cable channel JimTV in addition to a poor Jackass rip-off for the same network.

Sadly, no matter how much I try to avoid the guy, I seem to bump into him on lots of occasions. This year's E3 was no different. I was chilling outside the MS press event waiting for the presentation to begin, when he (together with a few other guys - equally uninformed people from games.tele.be and gamespot.be) showed up. A few yards away from us stood Team Ninja boss Tomonobu Itagaki.

I overheard the gamespot.be guy (remember this is the Belgian Gamespot, not the slightly better U.S. one) asking Frank if that was that guy from that fighting and beach volleyball game. Frank replied, "How should I know?" At that point, I said, "Yeah, that's Itagaki." The Gamespot guy looked puzzled, so I repeated that the person standing next to us was indeed Itagaki. The puzzled look stayed on their faces and as I turned away I overheard 'em still discussing whether it was that beach volleyball guy or not.

- Chris Kohler from Wired magazine is a professional fanboy.

I love guys like Chris Kohler - professional journalists who are extreme fanboys for a company. Kohler is a Nintendo fanboy, and as such tried to excuse Nintendo's bad showing this year by claiming it was due to the fact that Nintendo never shows anything until it's almost ready to hit retail (of course forgetting that games like Wario on GC were playable last year as well). It was fun seeing him squirm under the onslaught of titles I started listing that Nintendo has shown at several E3s in a row that have yet to materialize.

I had a ball mentioning to him that the best levels in Mario Sunshine are the ones that were left out of Mario 64 (little known fact: the platforming levels of Mario without his water pack are reworked leftovers from Mario 64), etcetera, etcetera. Kohler is a nice guy and I like Nintendo and its games myself, but I do get a perverse pleasure from playing with the minds of professional fanboys . . . it's fun, it's harmless, and it brings some joy to my otherwise miserable life.

There is lots more I could say about meetings I had, but considering I'm not getting paid by the word, I'll refrain from mentioning those for now. Oh wait, am I getting paid for this at all?

So for those wondering about the taking of EGM freelancer Patrick Klepek: go ask him yourselves at Gaming Age or check the crappy pic at the end of the link. Those of you wondering about the parties: tough luck. I gave all my invitations away and chose to spend some quality time in the evenings with a friend who lives in L.A. and who I only get to see once a year.

Those of you wondering what games I liked: read the effing TNL show awards. For everything else, feel free to send feedback, flames, or questions to ali@the-nextlevel.com.

Empire State pigeon

· · · Ali