E3 2005: End of Wednesday

Wow! I got back to the hotel from a long day today and was surprised and honored to see a lot of responses to my last post. Some folks thought maybe I was being underhanded by making fun of MS and not mentioning that I work for Sony – sorry about that, I don’t try to hide that I work for Sony, not at all. But this page is filled with my candid opinions and if you heard some of the stupid things I said at the panel I was on this morning, you’ll know that I have a lot of candid opinions. 🙂
What I’m sad about is that Microsoft didn’t need to have the shills there. The crowd was prepared to love the Xbox360 press conference! The inside of the Shrine auditorium was really beautifully set up for the event, the slides and messages and videos covered 180 degrees of my field of vision. The sound system was absolutely top notch. They had some nice videos, and of course the hardware looks great. So they just didn’t need that group there.
One of the responders pointed out that having shills spread throughout an audience in order to spread excitement works much better – I agree with that, based on my experience taking courses from Landmark Education a few years ago. That definitely works. Though I’d hate to see anyone doing that at E3; it’s so dishonest. And certainly, if you’ve ever been to a Nintendo press conference, THEY definitely don’t need to do that! 🙂
As the first day of the conference, today was absolutely crazy. This has got to be the most people at E3 ever – it was difficult to get around the show! I mentioned that I was on a panel this morning, we did a panel on Next-gen business issues along with Scott Cronce of EA, Marcel Samek of THQ, Simon Jeffery from Sega, and others. I hope that our comments proved to be useful for some of the attendees. I always worry that we’re just sitting up there blabbing on and it isn’t actually useful or interesting.
My day was largely made up of meeting after meeting, so I won’t get into that here. I was pleased to see the Namco Katamari ball and the Batman Begins batmobile, and I like the Game Boy Micro quite a lot. I haven’t seen much else yet, so if you’ve heard some buzz please pass it along so I can check it out in my little bits of time over the next few days. The only thing I didn’t see today that I was bummed about was the Big Cheese grilled cheese stand that’s usually outside. Where did that go? I’ll look more tomorrow. 🙂
For those of you who are at E3, I hope you’re having a great time!