Last Sunday, immediately after my Yongmudo belt test, I rode home as quickly as possible, took a quick shower, and frantically packed my bags. Tom and Dominica were on their way over to pick me up, and by 4pm, we were well on our way to Los Angeles for E3. We stopped off for lunch at a rest stop on the way down and ate some of Dominica's yummy tofu, humus, cheese, and other goodies. My week vacation was off to a great start.

We got to our hotel pretty late (I think it was somewhere around 9 or 10), so we went to sleep soon after getting there. The hotel itself was pretty bad. The internet hardly ever worked, and when it did, we usually had 3s one-hop ping times and 20-30% packet-loss. The place always had a weird smell, and I was allergic to something in the room (probably the same thing... mold most likely). On top of that, the manager was a complete scum-bag with horrible PR etiquette. We are definitely staying somewhere nicer next year.

On Monday morning, we headed over to the convention center to pick up my badge and check out the state of things as all the booths were being built. It's pretty cool to watch the construction process. Nintendo has some cool timelapse footage of their booth's construction on their E3 Media site.

After that, we just kicked it in LA for a few days. The expo was from Wednesday-Friday, so we had two days to just enjoy ourselves before the madness. We did some shopping, checked out eateries, and prepared for 3 days of E3. I found a nice cafe with free internet access and a friendly staff, so I was able to get some CyberArts work done from there. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate on our free days, so we never went to the sunny LA beach... =/

The convention itself was fun. I think the best booths of E3 were Tylenol (the booth with free massages), Intel (the booth with free internet and hot chocolate), and Nintendo (the booth where you wait forever for a brief moment of playtime... more on that later).

On our first day, we got there a few hours early by mistake which gave us tome to check out Kentia Hall. This is where all the small vendors are. It was pretty cool, actually. There was one booth which sold vintage games, so they had a ton of old arcades and vintage systems setup for people to play. After that, we found the Tylenol Ouch booth where we got free massages while waiting for the doors to open. On our first visit to West Hall, we checked out Nintendo and Sony. There were so many people cramming into such small space that after just a few games (Warhawk looked pretty cool, and I still suck at Grand Tourismo), we decided to leave that area and come back later. We went to Square, and unfortunately they were out of tickets for their show, but we did get to play FF3 for the DS (I am so excited about it. I really like what they've done with the touch controls). We then checked out Namco Bandai, Capcom, and the other South Hall vendors for a while. I definitely noticed that South Hall was much quieter than last year, and I certainly appreciated that.

After E3, we did some more shopping, went out to dinner at RFD with Ruth and Mara (both of whom are moving to the bay area next month... yay for more friends), and popped a tire. I had a spare, and with Tom's help, we were able to get back on the road super-quick.

Thursday was our Wii day. Because of the spare tire, we had to drive on city streets, but that actually got us to the convention center faster. We dropped the tire off at a tire-shop on our way to the convention, and still made it to the convention an hour before the doors opened. We waited in line for about an hour, and as soon as the doors opened, we rushed to the Wii line. Tom went right, and I went left around the booth. I got to the back of the line first and waited about 5 minutes before Tom and Dominica caught up to me from the other direction (good thing we split up). After we got settled in line, I headed off to Square's booth where I waited in line 3 times for tickets to their screening, then waited for the line to end so I could trade back the tickets for a later show-time (since we wanted to be at Nintendo for as long as possible). I headed back to Tom & Dominica at Nintendo, and we continued to wait in line for another 2 hours (There's a video at Nintendo's E3 Media site which shows the line on Thursday. You can see Dominica at the 1hour mark, but Tom and I were out of line for the restroom at the time).

The Wii was tons of fun. I played Golf, Baseball, Airplane, Wario Ware, Monkey Ball, Bomberman, Red Steel, Metroid, Zelda, Mario 64 (Virtual Console) and Sonic The Hedgehog (Virtual Console). Who'd've thought I'd play the original Sonic on a Nintendo console. There was a trailer for the new SmashBros, but there was no playable demo. I'm hoping that's because they wanted to showcase the Wii controller (SB will use the classic controller) and not because it's behind schedule. Nintendo really needs Smash Bros as a launch title for the holiday season. Overall, I was very impressed with Nintendo's booth and say with no doubt in my mind that this E3 was Nintendo's show all the way.

After the Wii, we ate and relaxed in the internet lounge (thanks Intel) before heading over to Square for their screening. Unfortunately, I wasn't too impressed with what Square showed us. Almost everything on the screener was on last year's reel. The only new content was from FF13. FF13 looks cool, but I'm a bit skeptical in this new age of SquareEnix quantity over quality mentality. I wish Square would scrap the cellphone market and put their efforts into making good FF games (like a PS3 remake of FF7 for instance).

On Friday, we all split up for most of the day. I checked out a bunch of PC games knowing Tom and Dominica wouldn't be as interested. I think my favorite PC game of the show was Oblivion. I was suckered into playing for about an hour. They fixed the one thing that drove me crazy in Morrowwind. You don't have to manually walk from town to town. You can open your map, click on a city, and get teleported there (the game actually forwards time as if you walked, so it's not exactly teleporting).

On the free schwag, I was disappointed with the lack of freebes this year. Last year, we came home with so many toys, but this year was severely lacking. Overall, though, I'm really pleased with what I saw from Nintendo, and I look forward to next year.