Woohoo! Party! Toga toga toga! Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that wild, but it was fun. Now I’m not exactly the most outgoing person in the world (far from it actually as anyone who meets me can probably attest to) so I went in experiencing the C3 party a bit differently than your more social butterflies.

First off, I walked my way there, and E3 is so much better when it isn’t crowded and there are only a few people littering the hallways and not hundreds. I walked my way to the hall where Microsoft’s booth was and got my pass. We then got to walk down this red carpet (just like Oscar night) and followed it all the way to Microsoft’s shiny booth…where all their games were still powered on! Hooray!

If you’ve been to E3 before one thing I’ve learned is this…you don’t get to eat…not if you got appointments you have to get to, so bags of M&Ms have been by friends these past two days while at the convention; I simply don’t have the time to go stand in line for an hour maybe and then finally get the chance to sit down somewhere (if you can find somewhere other than the floor) and eat. So, with that in mind, I headed straight for the food…finger food. Yes, that is a sad face I’m giving you now. Content to eat something I had some square cheese, some strips of some spiced bologna of some sort or another and then finally a chocolate chip cookie. Needless to say I filled my belly with several chocolate chip cookies.

After my nourishment it was off to play some games, but what is this? I see free swag being put on a table nearby…free Xbox 360 Live Gold Memberships for a year. Holy sweet swag in heaven! I cherished this gift so much I made sure I was touching it at all times with my feet when I wasn’t holding it and keeping it firmly grasped in my arms when I was walking around.

Given the relatively short (and sometimes none at all) lines, gaming was a much more sped up process that was similar to Wednesday before the show opened up to everyone and was only available to media. I played the new Sonic, Dead Rising, Enchanted Arms, FEAR, Lost Planet, Rockstar’s Table Tennis, Crackdown, Too Human, and what I didn’t play I saw…such as the new Splinter Cell where you have to help Fisher untangle his parachute before he becomes a flattened smear on the world below. Dead Rising and Lost planet were my favorite of the bunch, and so you can look for those impressions hopefully coming up shortly.

I continued to eat cookies and mingle a bit, mostly hanging around the area where the table tennis tournament was happening, being played with the Rockstar game. I wish I could’ve got in on the action, but I wasn’t around them when they announced registration would begin shortly.

Overall the C3 party was very relaxed and easy going. People got to hang with other people, eat, play games, or do any combination of the three. I was doing so much gameplay I actually stayed about fifteen minutes longer than I should have. Once we were ready to go we had to wait for security to grab us and take us to the exit so we didn’t go and try and steal anything from the other booths that might not have had security going for them. If I was ever invited back again I’d go…if only because I would get the chance to play some interesting games and hopefully snag another free year of Xbox Live Gold Membership.