One of the most exciting parts of E3 each year is going to the various press conferences. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are known for bringing out their big guns and really wowing the audience, especially when they have big new announcements that knock us off our feet. Unfortunately there weren't a lot of those kinds of announcements at this year's event. Regardless, it's still fun to document the sights of the E3 press conference, so bear with me as I go through nine pictures of the various press conferences, from the big three to the smaller ones.
Every year Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony announce their upcoming wares days (and sometimes hours) before E3 actually starts. This year Microsoft had the first conference, scheduled the day before the E3 show floor opened for business. Microsoft's press conference was held in the West Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center, where part of the old E3 took place years ago. What you see here is the outside of the West Hall, plastered with Xbox 360-related window stickers. I don't know about you, but I think this makes it look more like a GameStop than a video game convention.
Here I am at the Kodak Theater. Does that sound familiar? It should, because it's the same place the Oscars and the American Idol finale take place. But this event wasn't about celebrities and karaoke singers; instead it was about Nintendo's most popular characters boring us for an hour and a half. Here we have Nintendo gloating about how well they are doing, all while forgetting about actually announcing anything. Believe it or not, our seats were about as close as the media could get. The seats in front of us were reserved for Nintendo employees and extra super special people. Not sure it mattered much, there was nothing at the press conference that required you to sit as close as possible. In fact, I would argue that it would have been better to be a full 9,000 miles away from this terrible press conference.
Towards the end of the Nintendo conference Reggie Fils-Aime says that he has one more "big" announcement and then introduces Shigeru Miyamoto to the stage. Could it be a new Kid Icarus game? Maybe Punch Out? Nope, it's Wii Music. No, I'm not kidding. Shigeru plays a virtual saxophone and talks about how cool it is to air drum. Surely this can't be the end of the conference, Nintendo has to have something even bigger to announce. Right? Nope, Wii Music is their big announcement. They even play a song from F-Zero, which of course makes me think that maybe they are going to, you know, announce F-Zero Wii. It would make sense, but no, F-Zero wasn't announced. What you can't see in this picture is all of the disappointed faces at the Kodak Theater.
At the Capcom press conference Defunct Games' own Patrick O'Connor manages to meet David Hayter, who plays Snake in the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Patrick claims to be a huge Metal Gear Solid fan, but currently he hasn't played through Metal Gear Solid 3, Metal Gear Solid 4, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel, or either of the two Metal Gear Ac!d games. I'm sure he's just getting around to them ... right?
Konami decided to introduce their Rock Revolution game by offering us an impromptu performance by The Sheenas, an all-girl Ramones cover band (no joke). If you squint your eyes you would almost think that's Joey Ramone on stage. Well, maybe you don't need to squint, this is kind of a blurry picture.
After successfully playing Blitzkrieg Bop, the product manager for Rock Revolution decided to pivot over to her game. This picture shows her with a Guitar Hero III control (since they don't actually have their own guitar) and a very sweaty drummer. Both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour managed to show off their game by giving us two guitarists, a singer and a drummer ... but Rock Revolution decided to just go with the two people. What's worse, this guitarist (who could successfully play bass in a Ramones cover band) failed out half way through the song. It wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement for Rock Revolution.
