E3 2011: The B.O. Report

The plug was finally pulled on E3 2011 late in the day last Thursday afternoon. As thousands of attendees either sped to the airport to catch early evening flights or else retired to hotel lounges for much deserved drinks at the bar, the overproduced, overheated booths--including that daunting dragon looming above the Bethesda booth--was all being dismantled. Digression: Where do all the trappings of the booths go? Is there a landfill that gets stuffed with these things? Does the 50-foot TV in the Sony booth get shipped to Jack Tretton's house? Can the dragon be recycled?

E3 always has a mirage quality about it. For a few short days each year, it suddenly appears in in the shimmering heat of downtown Los Angeles, rising in the place where there previously was nothing (convention centers are always vacant, anonymous spaces waiting to be filled), sucking vast amounts of electricity from the power grid, and becoming a physical manifestation of a medium that becomes more ephemeral with each passing year. As games lose their status as physical objects, as game stores become less necessary--love them or hate them, it's only a matter of time before the GameStops of the world are forever shuttered--gamers have fewer real-world destinations to travel to and gather in. And, despite the old saw that gamers are antisocial nerds, I believe that we actually like to gather. We need to gather. We need to physically see one another, and have actual conversations--not comment-thread conversations; not message board posts, or curt twitter exchanges. We need to hug, to tell each other how happy we are to see one another, and to sometimes, on occasion, even discuss things other than videogames.

That's why, more than ever, we need PAX. We need Fan Expo in Toronto and Comic Con and the Game Developers Conference. We need regular excuses to sit across from one another, if only for a little while. One of the favorite topics of conversation at E3 this year, and every year, is the poor hygiene of our fellow gamers. Fact: body odor runs rampant through E3. We pretend to all complain about it--approximately 20-percent of all E3 conversations are centered around gripes about body odor and/or bad breath. Yet, in some strange way, I think that we secretly like the odors. Not simply because they give us common conversation ground, uniting people in an us-versus-them dynamic (we smell good, they smell bad), but because the odors somehow work to make the silly, ephemeral experience of E3 that much more tangible and real.

Because there is nothing more human than B.O. and bad breath.

On my way home on Thursday night, I boarded the plane and discovered that I was to be seated next to a man who honestly could not have smelled any worse. I was initially furious with the situation, and with this man. He was quiet. He didn't take up much space. He read the in-flight magazine and dozed. But his B.O. was not of this earth. I privately begged the stewardess to find another seat for me. "I'm sorry, sir, but the flight is sold out," she explained.

As the plane leveled off at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, as the man napped next to me, I suddenly made the executive decision to stop breathing through my mouth. I decided to embrace the man's B.O. I took it in. Jesus, it was strong. But, really, after a few whiffs, it wasn't that bad. The poor guy was probably a developer who'd just finished a 14-hour shift on the show floor. Who knew what he was leaving behind in L.A.? Who knew what he was headed home to? He was probably a sweet man. He probably had simply forgotten to pack his deodorant. He probably owned a dog, or maybe even a couple of cats. He probably loved videogames as much as, if not more, than I do.

When our plane finally landed later that night, I hustled through the sleepy airport, past the dark Hudson Newsstands, past the beverage refrigerators humming away in the shadows, leaving behind E3 2011, this man, and his wild, piquant B.O. once and for all.

E3 2011: Day 3

I'm staying at the Wilshire Grand this year, which is only a few long blocks--all the blocks are long in L.A.; you might describe this as a long-blocked city--from the Los Angeles Convention Center. It's pretty great here. My room is quiet, and small, and fairly clean, and only smells slightly of the hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies who slept here prior to my arrival on Sunday afternoon.

Yesterday when I was out convention-ing, someone came in and made up my room. In addition to performing the expected duties of collecting towels and sorting the bed, the house keeper also saw fit to affix some sort of transparent advertisement thing to my bathroom mirror.

Now I've seen some pretty insidious ways of trying to get messages under my radar at E3 before--room keys being branded, "protests" being orchestrated in front of the Convention Center, etc. But looking at my face in the mirror and seeing it literally surrounded by a message--ironically it was from Microsoft, and yes, it was regarding the Kinect--caused me to physically recoil from the mirror, cringe, and reel about dramatically like Fred Sanford having a fake heart attack.

I laughed a little--jesus, this was really something, putting shit in my room to get me to pay attention to it. Then I got angry. I thought, Goddamn it all, Microsoft. This is my goddamn room--my miniature fortress of solitude, my sole sanctuary away from the hammer and tongs of the show floor. Would you kindly stay the hell out of it?

I also discovered yesterday that the Wilshire Grand's days are numbered. The place is scheduled to be demolished soon, erased from the earth right down to the foundations, and that a new, more modern version of the Wilshire Grand will rise in its place. For some reason this makes me genuinely sad. I feel like I'm staying in the old ghost of a hotel. I'm looking out the window on the 14th floor even as I type this, peering down at the traffic on 7th Street and all the convention goers scurrying down the sidewalk, and I'm experiencing a twinge of vertigo, thinking about the fact that pretty soon everything around me--the walls, the floor, the ceiling; the weird toilet with the game show-buzzer flush button on the wall--will be gone.

Completely gone.

I think of all the E3 attendees who have stayed at the Wilshire Grand through the years, all the men--it's still unfortunately predominantly men here--who found some way to get to L.A., who found a hotel room (no small feat each year; my advice: book in January), and who found a bona fide reason to be here, and to be a part of this glorious medium.

I think of all the stories filed since E3's inception in 1995, back when newspapers and magazines were still viable places of employment, and all the blog posts and Tweets and Facebook updates and hands-ons impressions, etc. that are currently being tap, tap, tapped out in the rooms around me as I type this.

I think of all the showers and shits that people have taken here, all the hangovers that people have had to white knuckle their way through, and all the sad, lonely jolts of jism--hundreds of gallons of the stuff, no doubt--that have been spilled in these rooms after horny gamers have had to wait in lines all day while being surrounded by the cute girls in hot pants who have been hired by game publishers from L.A.'s seemingly never ending supply of attractive women who are very gifted at being attractive.

Oh, E3...

A bit of advice to the management of the Wilshire: Be sure to salt the earth after the old hotel is destroyed, or else the new Wilshire will likely be haunted by legions of typing, masturbating, hungover ghosts.

I'm off to the show floor. More soon.

E3 2011: Day 2

I went to the nearby Carl's Jr. yesterday morning to quietly enjoy a Breakfast Burger, which is one of my favorite things about E3. (The Breakfast Burger is a regular hamburger, but with an egg and some hash browns thrown on top. It's more enjoyable than it sounds. Better still, eating the B. B. is akin to a python eating goat; once you eat one, you don't need to eat again for several days, which is useful while at E3, where food is expensive, terrible, and extremely scarce.)

Unfortunately, Carl's Jr. didn't open until 6:30, so I headed for the nearby Starbucks and ordered one of those taste-free Ciabatta breakfast sandwiches, which I believe contains the following ingredients: sawdust, fur, air, and dreams.

After breakfast, I caught the shuttle bus downstairs in front of my hotel, which whisked me away in pee-smelling ambience to the Microsoft press conference. Things started off OK with an exciting showing of Modern Warfare 3--looks to me like Infinity Ward is doing fine after all the upheaval from earlier this year--but then took a turn when the whole thing devolved into a Kinect fiesta.

I don't love my Kinect. I don't even really know where it is at this moment. My living room is too small to use it. In order to use it, I have to upend my couch, standing it upright and completely out of the way, just so that I can convulse in front of my TV and be informed that the Kinect sensor is not currently registering my convulsions.

Trotting out people like Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot and Lionhead's Peter Molyneux so they could announce nothing less than ringing endorsements of Kinect was really where the train left the tracks for me. Subtext of these endorsement: See everyone? Even these guys just love Kinect!

I'm not buying it. I get the creeping feeling that many developers and publishers have been strong-armed into shoe-horning some kind of awkward, obtuse, superfluous Kinect functionality into their otherwise perfectly fine Kinect-free games. You could practically see the cashiers checks poking from Yves's and Peter's pockets, the gulp motions in their throats, and the the barrel marks on their temples from where the gun was held.

I understand that Microsoft has hitched its wagon to the soaring star known as Kinect. Or, maybe a better metaphor is that Microsoft married a beautiful woman who turned out to be a crack whore. But in order to save face, it now has no choice but to 1. feed her habit, and 2. pretend that everything is perfectly normal.

Well, it's not normal, Microsoft. It's pretty fucking far from normal.

To make matters worse, Microsoft then had to trot out child actors who were pretending to be gamers, so that they could demonstrate how much fun all of their newly announced Kinect games are. No one in the audience thought for one second that those kids were real. In fact, most of us worried that a bus en route to the town where the demon children from Children of the Corn reside had broken down out front, and that these hell-spawn had wandered in looking for souls to eat.

The only true innovation from the Microsoft press conference was something that I am currently calling "Kinect Demo Face." It is a serious condition that all persons who demonstrate a Kinect game on stage at E3 apparently suffer from. Symptoms include glowering, brow furrowing, dramatic exhalations, exaggerated movements, constipation, self-satisfied expressions, and the appearance that you are having far more fun than you actually are. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, seek medical attention immediately.

The new Tomb Raider game looked interesting, but something about it left me feeling vaguely unsettled and sad. There was something so cruel, and maybe something even a bit misogynist about the demo. If you haven't seen it, Lara Croft has the sh*t completely beaten out of her for three minutes. While sitting in an auditorium predominantly populated by men, something about watching this woman being borderline tortured on a gigantic screen in high definition was disturbing for me.

So thank the gods for Gears of War 3, the sole saving grace of the whole unpleasant debacle. I love how completely cheese-ball and backwoods and out of touch Gears is. Epic doesn't pretend that it's high art, or great storytelling, or furthering the medium, or that Marcus Fenix is a great character, etc. etc. It sets out to deliver a good, mostly sensical time, and that's all Gears 3 appears to be. Dear Cliffy B.: I like you. And in my dreams, you and Ice-T are actually friends in real life...

After Microsoft's Kinect-centric showing, the E3 playing field already seemed to tilt in favor of Sony, who moved their press conference from late Tuesday mornings to late in the afternoon on Monday this year. Our pee-scented shuttle got stuck in late afternoon L.A. traffic, and by the time we finally arrived at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the only seats left were in the nosebleed region.

We were all here for The Great Apology of 2011--sorry for the security breach, sorry PSN was down, sorry all of your credit cards were compromised, etc. Though I believe we were--everyone in the place--was already more than ready to forgive Sony and move on. Jack Tretton delivered the mea culpa with the right amount of sincerity and irreverence. I've hapred on Jack every year since he took over for Phil Harrison. But you know what? He's actually pretty good. And his Ridge Racer zing directed Kaz Hirai was really the only truly spontaneous, funny, and human highlight of the press conference.

I don't know what it is about Sony press conferences, but year in and year out they always feel like grim, grave endeavors, as if we're all on a great, arduous march towards Mount Doom. The place always feels dark, and shadowy. The music is always a little too loud, with a little too much bass, making it feel like we've wandered into the world's largest S & M club. And Sony always tries so damn hard, always feeding us food before, and feeding us food after, and making sure that everyone stays nice and lubricated thanks to their ubiquitous open bars.

Things got off to a terrific start with Uncharted 3. Jesus, was that ever fun to watch. Seeing Nathan Drake navigate a sinking, abandoned ocean liner was genuinely thrilling. Honestly, at this point, Naughty Dog just seems to be showing off. Their grasp of the PS3 hardware is absolutely unrivaled.

But was that ever a tough act to follow. Poor Insomniac had to try with Resistance 3. It did not succeed. It seemed so muted, and small, and so completely unsurprising and expected. Honestly, haven't I played this game, where guys run at me and I shoot them, countless times before over the last 10 years?

While Microsoft has its crack-whore wife in the form of Kinect, Sony has its crack-whore wife in the form of 3D. Why Sony is so bloody certain that this is The Future, at a time when the box office returns for 3D movies are already on the decline, is a mystery for the ages. Wherever Sony has buried "Home"--probably in a New Jersey marshland next to Jimmy Hoffa--they should also bury their borderline obsessive endorsement of 3D. Sony: It is never going to work.

The big news was the NGP, or rather Vita announcement. The hardware looks interesting, but so did the original PSP when it first shipped, complete with the now-absurd-seeming UMD format. If anything, the Vita seems too busy--it does THIS! and THIS! and THIS TOO!--and features too many bells, whistles, and more bells. There's something inherently insecure in this approach, when you just throw tech at a problem. The PS3 is also guilty of doing that--I have no idea what a fraction of the abilities are on the PS3, nor do I have any use for them.

But Sony's greatest sin, as it is every year, is that it never, ever quits while it is ahead. Instead, what they deliver is two hours worth of news--talking, not showing--which could have been delivered in a far more exciting, teasing fashion in one short, compact, and efficient hour. You could literally feel the wind go out of the sails of the whole thing. At one point, during an especially long pause, someone kicked over an empty Corona bottle, which clanged and echoed through out the Coliseum. The whole place went silent, and suddenly, it felt less like a jazzy, cutting edge press conference from one of the world's strongest hardware makers and game publishers, and more like a tedious school assembly on fire safety.

Oh, and one more thing: Please, Capcom, for the love of god, take Cole Macgrath out of the Street Fighter-Tekken Vita game. That shit is fine for other games and series, but there's always been a purity about the Street Fighter games that should be maintained at all costs. I'm telling you, you open the door for this kind of thing, next thing you know Murray the Hippo and Ronald McDonald will be the final bosses in Street Fighter 6.

Last but not least: It was painful to see 2K's Ken Levine trotted out to deliver the de rigueur apology for not being completely on board with every piece of Sony tech. (Gabe Newell played the part at last year's E3.) Like Peter and Yves at Microsoft, Levine, check in his pocket, lump in throat, and fresh barrel-marks on his right temple, apologized for being skeptical about the PS3 Move, and that BioShock: Infinite will--surprise, everyone--suddenly, and inexplicably, feature Move functionality.

I understand these people have companies to run, and mouths to feed, and wives who need their crack, but will the last person who is not for sale in this industry please stand up?

[Insert sound of toe tapping HERE.]

E3 2011: Day 1

It's early here in downtown Los Angeles. Pre-dawn still. No one wakes up earlier during E3 week than I do. No, not even Reggie Fils-Amie, who may or may not be a kind of robot.

I'm up early because I always get up early. Man, do I ever enjoy that hour or two of quiet and peace--before the phone can ring, before the deluge of texts and emails and tweets and random, pointless information starts spraying all over the place--that only really happens in the early mornings. And that hour or two is especially important this week, during E3, when things start off loud and obnoxious--the Microsoft press conference, at the Galen Center on the USC campus, begins in less than three hours--and only get more so from there.

I'm here to see, and touch, all the newest games, the latest technology, etc. But to be honest, all I really want to do is play the games that I already have in my possession. At E3 every year, without fail, I have countless moments when I wish that I could, like Dorothy, click my heels and magically transport myself back to my couch on Beatty Street where I will continue trying to get all five of the lights in that one particularly hairy race in Blur.

I can't do that, of course. What I can do is bring a ridiculous amount of games to E3 with me. I have the PSP go, 3DS, iPhone, and iPad all with me. I do this every year. I think a lot of us do this. I decided on the plane down from Vancouver yesterday that Dead or Alive: Dimensions was going to be my obsession for the week. And if it should fail me at all at any point, Super Stickman Golf, Coin Drop and Pixeljunk Monsters--damn you, Dylan Cuthbert--are all right there to pick up any slack.

I'm also carrying Pilotwings Resort, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, Mario Kart DS, LEGO Star Wars III 3DS, GTA: Chinatown Wars (DS version), and for some inexplicable reason Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies.

I know. Embarrassing.

I remember once saying to Vic that we should do some kind of cooking show for gamers. You know, how to cook something healthy and delicious in the time it takes for DCU Online to update, etc. He asked me if I loved cooking. "Of course I don't love cooking," I said. "I hate cooking. And I'm terrible at it."

He said, "All I know is if you want to make a TV show about something, you'd better love it. Because you have to deal with it every single day, no matter if you're in the mood to or not."

So I'm heading out into my day, slouching towards the lumbering beast of E3 2011, with no less than three gaming systems on my person, with game cartridges stuffed into practically every opening in my pants, while dealing with the completely irrational fear that somehow, some way all my systems will suddenly lose their charges simultaneously, rendering me game-less in the midst of the one place on earth where there could not possibly be a higher games per square foot ratio.

If that's not love, I don't know what is.