A brawl at Nintendo's booth last night left dozens of gamers stunned -- and wanting more.

Nintendo unveiled a spectacular video of Super Smash Bros.(R) Brawl for the company's upcoming Wii(TM) console. The amazing footage also revealed a variety of new Nintendo characters who will be playable in the game, including Meta Knight, the sword-wielding nemesis of Kirby(TM); Pit, the angelic archer from Kid Icarus(R); Zero Suit Samus, the powerful Metroid(R) series heroine minus her versatile armor; and Wario(TM), who demonstrated a noxious attack of gastronomic proportions.

Nintendo also revealed that the game would include Snake, the gritty soldier from Konami's hugely popular Metal Gear series.

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Gordon Ross, CEO of Genuine Games, has a vision for tapping into that elusive female market. His small Scottish game company has its sights set on creating non-violent, family friendly game content that's easy to understand and easy to play. His goal is to make games the casual gamer (target market being ages 8-25 but includes all ages and both genders) can pick up and have fun with for a short time without a big time commitment.

The company's publishing a series of vocational simulations under the title of YooStar publishing, that he hopes will draw in a whole section of the public who currently doesn't play games. The first title, "Fashion Salon" is what you'd expect in a girl game; it's pink, it's got a simple interface (almost childlike actually in simplicity) and is extremely simple in concept. You get to make the "clients" over in a very simple way; makeup, hairstyle, hats, etc. by clicking on big pink buttons. There's unfortunately no way to do more complex alterations like say changing body type or a character's facial structure. You are then graded according to the level of success achieved through the makeover. And how is success determined?

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Wednesday - the third day of the convention and the show's going full throttle. I got to to the L.A. Convention Center late afternoon, just in time to be shut out of all the parking lots in and around the venue. Here's a lesson to all of you wannabe E3 attendees - DO NOT wait until 4:00 pm to arrive at the show unless you enjoy driving around and around the convention center for an hour praying for a metered spot to open up.

After finding a place on a side street to stow the car, I ran to the show swimming upstream the whole way in a river of exhausted, schwag-carrying, badge-wearing zombies. Upon entering the main concourse, I stopped to catch my breath and was greeted by the familiar Vegas-like din of music, announcers, blaring video screens and people yelling into cell phones. As I hesitated on the concourse stairs, Michael Madsen breezed by looking greasy in dark glasses. How Hollywood. Not five minutes in and already my first celebrity sighting!

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The big thing about Windows Vista is that the brand is wanting to reestablish itself by making the system a good game platform and making sure that everyone knows about that fact.

Windows Vista will ship with both Direct X 10 and Direct X 9, which is a first for a Microsoft operating system. From the get go you can get gaming with the Game Explorer (which acts a lot like Windows Media Player in regards to the information that displays), and you can see all sorts of information that attaches to that game you are currently playing.

Windows Vista has also added a 3D version of chess to the mix as well as making sure all the older games (Minesweeper, Solitaire, Hearts, etc) look updated for the new system. Scalability was added to this OS so that it will always fit the screen you are running it on. We were told of a “Big Bertha” screen where older Windows apparently appear as a little blip on that radar somewhere on the screen.

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You play as an Agent, who is basically a supercop that has been hired to patrol the city as the current police are basically void as a presence in this future city. Your mission is to clean up the city…literally. There are no cutscenes, there are no missions, you simply run around cleaning the street of perps. Does it work?

First off is the look, which is that of a game that wants to walk the line between being realistic and cell shaded. The cell shading technique isn’t as prevalent as something like Viewtiful Joe or Okami, but it does have a lean that way where there are black lines around the character and environments to give you that unique feel.

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Bioware brings you what looks to be the next transformation of their usual combat/turn based system. But though the action and fighting has changed, the never ending questions and scenarios are all solidly there and do an excellent job of making it seem like you are playing a movie instead of a game.

To make things easier, I'm going to try something different and break these impressions into categories.

The Chat
Stories are told through dialog, and Bioware is famous for doing games where the characters (both user controlled and NPC) speak a ton and have a lot of dialog choices. Typically these Bioware games will do an extreme closeup of the character who is talking, so their face would take up most of the screen, but that isn’t the case with Mass Effect. In Mass Effect you still have dialog options and trees, but it behaves closer to the way you would speak in a normal situation. There are also good and bad choices, so for instance (as they showed us) you can go up to someone and ask them where so-and-so is and then depending on how that goes you can make goodie goodie with them or do the evil thing…pull a freaking gun on them and point it straight at their face.

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Many people didn’t like Perfect Dark Zero…I among them. Many more wanted them to go back to doing a Banjo and Kazooie game or a Killer Instinct. Would Rare listen to the fans? Nope. And for that…thank you. I can’t wait to get my hands on Viva Piñata.

Our hand guided tour of Viva Piñata starts with a pile of trash called your land; I mean this ground is busted and trashier than some LA streets (and trust me…I’ve seen a flattened dead rat on the sidewalk while staying here for E3). This is your garden on Viva Piñata Island, and it is your job to spruce up the place and make it a paradise that any lovely piñata creature would want to stay at. You absolutely have nothing in your garden when you first start out, but you do have a few tools like a shovel and some grass. Now, here is where the fun begins.

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What do you get when you put a bunch of eagerly waiting gamers in a room with a Gears of War screen displayed on all the monitors? Probably drool. But what do you get when you tell them they get to play the multiplayer that they haven’t even really talked about til now? Sheer utter joy!

The multiplayer is a team based combat that plays just like the normal game does during single player. Though it is team based, you are still free to run around and put your own plan into action…which is of course how I play. I beat to the sound of my own drummer.

Ideally though, you’ll want to play as a team so that way you can plan together and flush the opposing team into corners so you can easily gun them down…or chainsaw…but enough about the love of my life for now. We didn’t do voice chat, but we basically knew, “Don’t shoot friend…kill others.” So we always started out the same…running straight for the first cover, but then one guy would go this way, one guy would go there, and I’d be jumping from cover to cover like a mad fool.

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NCsoft is showcasing PlayNC, a collection of four games that have a very different pricing model than what we typically see. Four games are included in the PlayNC model: Dungeon Runners, Exteel, Soccer Fury and SmashStar. This line of free games is intended to expand their player base, reaching out to players that aren't familiar with MMOs.

These games are free, which means you won't buy a retail box and you won't pay a subscription. There will be payment models for advanced game play and content, but NCSoft has expressed that you will be able to have an enjoyable play experience without paying.

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The game has you play the role of what looks like some specialized riot police force. As the game begins you are presented with your missions, which is to head down the street to help some other medical officer who is being stalked and kept trapped by the bad guys…a bunch of hockey mask wearing Jason clones who do everything from come at you with machetes to shooting firearms at you to throwing Molotov cocktails.

To face these enemies you do have a nice array of weapons. You’ve got an awesome shotgun that can really get the job done, you have got a machine gun which can rattle off a nice stream of bullets in one nice spurt. You’ve also got the pistol, but who really ever uses the pistol anyways.

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Line-up Includes Highly-Anticipated Titles such as The Da Vinci Code(TM), Prey, Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Warlords and NBA 2K7

New York, NY – May 10, 2006 – 2K and 2K Sports, publishing labels of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), today announced a strong line-up for Electronic Entertainment Expo 2006 (E3) taking place at the Los Angeles Convention Center from May 10-12, 2006. From 2K, the line-up includes titles based on blockbuster entertainment brands such as The Da Vinci Code(TM) and Family Guy and popular comic book franchises The Darkness and Ghost Rider, as well as original next generation games such as Prey and BioShock. 2K is also featuring highly-anticipated titles from Firaxis Games, including Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Warlords and Sid Meier's Railroads! as well as the Firaxis and Firefly Studios collaboration title CivCity: Rome. Other eagerly awaited titles include Stronghold Legends(TM) along with Dungeon Siege II(R): Broken World(TM) and Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony(TM), based on the acclaimed Dungeon Siege(R) franchise. In addition, the 2K Sports line-up features the next installments from top-rated franchises such as NHL 2K7, NBA 2K7 and College Hoops 2K7.

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ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – May 10, 2006 - Mystic Game Development, a pioneer in real-time character animation middleware, today announced that Sigil Game Online's Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was built using Mystic's EMotion FX real-time character animation technology as a core component. The MMORPG game, which received coverage in all 3 major US PC magazines recently, is being shown at E3 in LA this week.

“Having met and worked with the Sigil team since 2004, we set out to evolve EMotion FX as it was then, into the production SDK it is now. Put it this way, imagine having 2000 different characters and having to animate them all individually. Instead, you animate just 1 character and play back the same motion data on all characters, so saving a huge amount of animator time" said John van der Burg, Development Director at Mystic Game Development. "We are delighted to see what Sigil has been creating and look forward to playing the game".

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For this little gamer, whose speakers consists of only those two that are with my TV, I marvel at the idea of surround sound. I want a media room with a kicking sound system that really rattles your teeth fillings. For Xbox 360 owners Pioneer has gone and created just the thing for you…your own surround sound system.

When you sit down to give the system a go, you get blown away from the beginning. What game could they be using to boast dramatic music and booming sound effects? Why Halo of course…duh! When that Bungie logo came on with that blaring orchestra coming from all those speakers, it was like your butt was wanting to walk on its own, the vibration moved you so much. And then when the action got going and people were deathmatching each other, well, I don’t think there was ever a better sounding rocket launcher death just waiting to happen.

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You hear an idea and you are skeptical at first. I mean, I’ve never really cared for 3D…mainly because it sucks. Too many times the image doesn’t even really appear all that 3D to begin with, and even then it is pretty bad. Along comes the IZ3D monitor which has really changed my perspective on the idea of 3D.

The IZ3D monitor is a LCD 17’ display with a resolution of 1280x1024. Contrast ratio is 500:1 and the response time is 8MS. Now, I don’t know what game it was they were running, but it was most definitely in the FPS genre. The tech works by diverting the screen into two different base images that affect the pixels of the screen. By separating these images into two, it makes the eyes focus differently. When you put on the special eye glasses (thankfully not the stupid ones of drive-ins past, because these look like regular sunglasses) things really do pop out in a neat way. And the image wasn’t in red and blue either…it just looked like a blurry screen without the glasses.

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I like pics, you like pics, we all like pics! While I'm here in LA attending E3, I'll be trying to bring you as many cool pics as I can hopefully snag. Now remember, I'm a videogame writer...not a photographer! So when something is blurry or off center...all me and my lack of skills. I hope you enjoy what you see.

Thankeeka's E3 Pic Diary.

I'll try to update it as often and quick as I can. Here's what we have so far:

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