kasia in a nutshell

I'm not much of a game geek (sorry) so I won't be talking much about the games themselves (frankly before this conference I didn't know about the existence of 90% of these games) for that you're best of visiting another blog.. Matt has an entry about E3 that includes game-type-stuff. We hung out together for part of the conference and had lunch (pizza) in the horribly crowded cafeteria at the expo.. The lines to get anything other than wilty salads that have seen better days 10 years ago and semi-edible pizza were longer than I had time scheduled for the entire LA visit.

Most fun (for me) game turned out to be Gran Turismo 4. Playstation had a contest setup where four players competed against each other.. Everyone received tshirts (huge t-shirts) and winner a baseball cap. It was fun to play and surprisingly enough I was 3rd, not last! Line wasn't too bad.. maybe 15-20 minutes waiting.. Considering how crowded the conference was that's not bad at all. I enjoyed the game so much I played it some more at the consoles not mobbed with cameras.

Cameras were everywhere. Literally.. journalists, geeks, professional cameramen, webcams.. One couldn't sneeze without someone else snapping a picture of it. I spent some time playing with PS2 Eye Toy and had at least three cameras recording the spectacle. I think they were mostly excited to see a girl try it..

Females were very much in minority.. Although booth babes were plentiful. There was at least one booth surrounded by a mob of picture-snapping geeks.. we attempted to see what they were selling/producing/offering but all we could spot were two babes in underwear. Go figure.. don't need a product to be popular at E3!

It's hard to believe, but the US government actually paid some army soldiers to come to the expo and present their "America's Army" game.. Don't we have better things to spend money on? They even had a black hawk demonstration outside.. how much did that cost, I wonder?

Internet access was a little hard to get since the lines to the machines provided by Yahoo! Games were long (and painful, everyone seemed to have been writing novels).. then I realized I had a media pass (good to have friends!) and utilized the media newsroom which had a whole lab of machines and wireless access points.. Having the media pass was great.. I could get into all kinds of rooms I wasn't supposed to.. I won't tell anyone if you won't ;)

In a nutshell.. I had lots of fun -- will go again next year given an opportunity!