My Review of E3 2006

I was going to comment on the Nintendo and Microsoft press conferences like I did with the Sony conference, but I decided that it'd be more interesting for myself if I actually wrote about my first hand experience at E3.


This E3 was all about Nintendo. Seriously. Just the line to get into the Nintendo Wii booth was at least a 4 hour wait average. Don't believe me? Check out the lines. Of course, once you get inside, there are more lines for the Wii games themselves. Was the wait worth it? Hell yes. Every demo inside the Wii booth displayed the depth of thought that the developers are putting into the Wii.

Wii Sports looks like a fun party game. Metroid Prime 3 and Red Steel look like promising FPS style games. Although, Metroid looks far better than Red Steel does. (I do have a small reservation about the wiimote and FPS games: turning. Turning is done very slowly, as you have to aim the wiimote off screen in order to turn.) Tony Hawk and Excite Truck showed a promising future for racing games and maybe finally we'll have actual realistic analog input for racing. Finally, even EA's Madden managed to use the wiimote effectively.


The game I waited in line for was Zelda: Twilight Princess. I waited 45 minutes just to play the game for 5. That 5 minutes of game time with Zelda on the Wii was worth my 2 hour wait to get in (I'll talk about that later) and the 45 minute wait in line in the unairconditioned Nintendo booth. For being on GameCube hardware, Zelda looked beautiful. But the important thing is how the wiimote is used in the Zelda universe. The demo mainly centered around Link's bow and arrows. I loved the experience, but had some trouble aiming due to the controller being too sensitive. I'm more than positive Nintendo will polish this as time goes by but the demo served its purpose showing how games will be played in the future.


I really wanted to play Super Mario Galaxy as well (only got to play Zelda and Madden), but after spending about 3.5 hours in the Nintendo booth on Friday morning/afternoon I felt that I should give myself a chance to see the other booths before the show closed for the year.


Next to the insanely packed Nintendo booth was the relatively empty Sony booth. All of the PS3 games sucked ass. In fact, the only memorable thing from Sony was during their press conference. Sure they looked nice... but not $600 nice. The only PS3 game I tried was Warhawk and I only tried that game for one reason - to check out the new PS3 controller. First off, yes, the controller is extremely light and feels cheap. I guess that's to be expected when the controller was hacked together in less than two weeks before the start of E3. The Warhawk demo was the only game that made use of the PS3 controllers tilt functionality and it was implemented very poorly. Unlike the seemless motion based controls on the Wii games, I found myself repeatedly trying to control the ship with the left analog stick rather than tilting the controller. It also didn't help that there was a couple millisecond delay between my tilting and the movement on screen. Sony's fault was keeping the familiar dual shock style controller. It's just not meant for spacial movement. The only other game I wanted to try out at the Sony booth was God of War 2, but I forgot about that game until after the show closed.

I didn't spend all that much time at the Microsoft booth. There wasn't really anything on Xbox 360 to see. I would have checked out Gears of War had it been on the show floor. Doesn't make sense to not have the currently overhyped Xbox 360 game on the show floor. When something like this is done, it either means there's something wrong with the game or the game is still in the pre-alpha phase of development. Not good for Microsoft.

Spore was another game I wanted to see in person, but it was only available via another wait in line for a private screening. Lame.


I wanted to go to this year's E3 for one reason: Wii. I saw it, I touched the wiimote, and I got to play Zelda. Considering what else was on the show floor, I could have stayed in the Nintendo booth all day and still go home happy.

The second most memorable moment of E3 2006 was my wait in line for the Wii. Two hours into the queue, I decided to get on Pictochat to search for other DS owners in line to start up a game of Tetris DS. Soon after we started, a Nintendo rep came by and asked for the people who just started a Tetris DS game via Pictochat. We were asked to leave the line and immediately enter the Nintendo Wii booth as invited guests. Sweet.