Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was quite a bit different this year. The annual video game trade show had become, since its inception in 1995, a circus of video game excess, with 60,000 fanatics taking over the convention centre in downtown L.A. (“This is the only event that makes the attendees of (San Diego’s) Comicon look like Ocean’s 13,” quipped comedian Jamie Kennedy while hosting this year’s Activision press briefing.)
After last year’s event, the Electronic Software Association, the industry group that produces the show, decided to scale things back. It was an attempt, they said, to return E3 to what it was initially designed to do: give business partners a place to meet, and media a one-stop shop to collect information in advance of the critical holiday shopping season.
The show was renamed the E3 Media and Business Summit. The roster of 60,000 attendees was cut to about 3,000, who were personally invited to attend the show, and the number of exhibitors was restricted to the bigger, established video game publishers. The event was moved from May to July, and from downtown Los Angeles to oceanside in Santa Monica
One thing is for sure: the environs of Santa Monica are far more pleasant than the cement of the L.A. convention site. However, if there was anything significant about this year’s edition of E3, it was that nothing significant happened.
In 2005, the “big three” console manufacturers — Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony — were all releasing details about their next-generation hardware platforms. Last year, all the excitement was about how the Wii and PlayStation 3 would fare against the Xbox 360, which had been released six months earlier. However, now all the hardware is out there, either in the homes of gamers or — the industry shudders at the thought – sitting on the shelves of electronics retailers.
Even without any glitzy hardware to flash, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony still took the opportunity to hold lavish press conferences. Microsoft cleverly got its bad news out of the way a week before E3 when it announced an extension of the Xbox 360 warranty to three years (the company last year extended the initial three-month warranty to one year). This accompanied a begrudging admission that the failure rate of Xbox 360 machines was about a third. Analysts expect this to cost Microsoft in excess of $1 billion US.
Microsoft held its annual briefing the night before E3 officially started, in the outdoor amphitheatre at Santa Monica High School. The lone hardware announcement at E3 was of a Halo-branded Xbox 360, which will be available when the game Halo 3 is released on September 25.
Sony also broke some big news just before E3. It dropped the price of its PlayStation 3 console to $549 and announced that an 80GB hard-drive model will become available in August. It will ship with the racing game MotorStorm, and will retail for $659 Cdn.
At its press conference at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, Sony revealed a new, skinnier and lighter version of its PlayStation Portable game unit. The updated handheld will be able to display video on televisions using a new video-out port and will be available in the standard Sony “piano black.” Two other colours will be part of special retail packages: “ice silver” with the game Daxter and a “ceramic white” version stencilled with Darth Vader, which will include the game Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron.
Of the console developers, Nintendo had the most interesting hardware to show off this year. At its E3 briefing, held at the Santa Monica Civic Center, the innovative company revealed three new video game interfaces that you’ll be using in the future to play games on the Wii. The first, called the Wii Zapper, is little more than a plastic housing for the Wii remote and nunchuk, but it turns the controllers into a two-handed gun, ideal for first-person shooter games.
The second interface is the Wii Wheel, which will be packaged with Nintendo’s upcoming Mario Kart Wii multiplayer racing game.
The third and most intriguing peripheral from Nintendo has been labelled the Wii Balance Board. Resembling a low step-aerobics platform, the wireless Balance Board senses weight distribution. As such, it can assess your balance when you’re standing on it, which means it can be used for any number of fitness and conditioning “games.”
For all that the Big Three tried to get us excited about, this year’s event was a return to the days when the software — not the hardware — took centre stage. In the next Joystuck, I’ll run down some of the titles I saw in Santa Monica that gave me more than enough reason to get excited.