It’s biggest event of the video game calender and consistently produces days of earth-shattering announcements and game reveals. Best of all, E3 is just days away.
By Leo Stiles
The Electronic Entertainment Expo is a truly massive event and there is almost no convention to match it in terms of sheer size and scope. Last year the event played host to over 45,000 visitors over five days, where over 200 companies did their best to dazzle the attending world press.
The statistics for last year’s expo are truly staggering. The event took up as much space as nine football fields and housed over 35,000 monitors, 21 miles of fibre optic cabling and 1,000 staff members all sucking up more power in five days than Dublin City will use in a year.
No expense is spared as success here can mean the difference between record sales figures and company-destroying losses – just ask SEGA who in 1995, saw their new Saturn console undercut by Sony’s Playstation upstart by $100 just 30 minutes after their big reveal.
Clash of the consoles
Typically, the event comes down to a three-way fight between the industry’s ‘Big Three.” Each year Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft shout, boast and sometimes attempt some excruciating bad comedy stunts, all in order to come away with the title of the E3 winner.
Last year the outright winner was Nintendo, with a spectacular reveal of their no-glasses handheld 3DS console which was paraded in front of journalists by an army of comely maidens. This, along with a stellar line-up of games for the new system was the highlight of the show and took the spotlight off an aging Wii console that was rapidly running out of steam.
Consumers were disappointed to find that their own 3DS consoles didn’t actualy come with portable ladies
While the Wii (and some say motion control gaming) was plummeting from the record sales highs of previous years, this didn’t appear to have deterred Sony or Microsoft, who once again had taken their eye off Nintendo to fight it out with their own motion control offerings; Microsoft’s hands-free Kinect and Sony’s more traditional Playstation Move.
To say that these products were unwanted by the machine’s fanboys is an understatement, with pages worth of comments for hardcore gamers cursing their console makers for abandoning them for the casual crowd.
Despite this, both Move and Kinect have done what they set out to do with Kinect still maintaining some impressive sales figures despite the dearth of new games for the system. Sony’s Move by contrast doesn’t appear to have done as well but let’s face it, Sony has far more important things to be worried about in the last few weeks.
While the focus was indeed on expanding their audiences, both Sony and Microsoft still had a formidable line-up of software both from their own internal studios and a third-party slate that included such massive titles such as Need for Speed Shift and Hot Pursuit, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Dead Space 2, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Little Big Planet 2, Halo Reach, Fable3, FIFA 12 and Crysis 2, most of whom were shown to audiences for the very first time.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for any company, with many presentations being undermined with technical issues (Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto failing to execute Zelda controls), overly scripted demonstrations (see Microsoft’s beyond lame Kinect Video presentation) to endlessly monotone speeches (pretty much all of Sony boss Jack Tretton’s bits).
However even in an event that revealed a console add-on through a performance by Cirque du Soleil (Kinect), one press conference went above and beyond to deliver what has to be the most inept collection of presentations we have ever seen.
Konami’s presentation looked cheap from the start but nothing could have prepared us for a bizarre and hilarious collection of Japlish, wrestling and unrequited love between one man and his colleague. Take a look below:
This year should be bigger than 2010, if that’s possible, with at least two new consoles on offer (Nintendo Wii follow-up and Sony’s PSP successor), a giant apology by a certain Japanese company and what is likely to be a tsunami of new motion control games for Kinect.
Speculation is rampant and with just under a week to go it’s still anyone’s guess as to what will be revealed when E3 kicks off in Los Angeles on Monday, June 7 but JOE will be covering every minute of the event as it happens with previews, analysis and the best and the worst of gaming’s premier showcase.
In addition to news reports and game reveals next week, be sure to keep an eye out for our E3 previews and predictions for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo in the next few days.
Then next week join us on Monday at 5pm for our LIVE Microsoft E3 press conference tracker and Tuesday at 5pm for our LIVE Nintendo E3 press conference tracker.
Sadly we can’t go live for Sony as 1am Tuesday morning is a little past our bedtimes. We’ll then follow up the above coverage with our verdicts on each press conference and our top picks for this year’s games of the show.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ podcast – listen to the latest episode now!
