By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to E3, the video game industry’s annual hypefest/meeting of the minds in Los Angeles.
Although the conference doesn’t officially begin until Tuesday, Microsoft kicked things off Sunday night, with a bizarre party that, according to folks who were there, felt more like the meeting of a cult. Cirque du Soleil was there, and everyone was asked to wear these weird poncho things. The big news of the night was that Project Natal, Microsoft’s forthcoming add-on for the Xbox 360 that will allow you to play games without any controller at all, will henceforth be known as Kinect. For a recap of the titles they showed off, I suggest you check Kotaku. And if you’re curious about just how weird things got Sunday night, MTV will broadcast a tape of the proceedings, commercial free, at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday. It’ll also be on Nick at Night at 9 the same night.
Expect to hear a lot more about Microsoft’s plans, including Kinect, this morning, when they give their big keynote presentation to scores of media, enthusiasts and maybe some somewhat disinterested celebrities. I won’t be on hand for Microsoft’s event, but it’s going to be airing live on G4 TV, which you probably have if you have digital cable or satellite TV. It’ll also be streamed live at GameTrailers.com and a bunch of other sites. Things get started at 10 a.m.
Though I won’t be making it to Microsoft’s event Monday morning, I plan to attend press conferences from Electronic Arts at 2 p.m. and Ubisoft at 4 p.m., along with some sort of Activision event at 9 p.m. I won’t be live blogging everything here, but keep an eye on my Twitter feed both Monday and throughout the show. Depending on how soon I can get to my hotel and checked into a room, I may even stream Microsoft’s press conference live and Tweet it.
As for the rest of the week, I’ll be catching Nintendo and Sony’s keynote presentations on Tuesday morning before spending the rest of the day Tuesday, plus all day Wednesday and Thursday wandering the E3 show floor, touring booths, meeting with publishers and checking out a handful of titles behind closed doors.
I’ll be pretty busy during the show itself, which runs until around 5 or 6 each day. So expect lots of Tweeting during the day with more substantial blog posts each night and morning. Each night, I’ll write a post recapping what I saw that day, with more detailed posts on each game as I can work them in. (I expect some of these will continue into the next couple of weeks, since I’m covering the show solo and seeing literally dozens of titles.) I’ll also put up a post each morning previewing what you can expect to hear from me on Twitter throughout the day.
If there’s a particular game you’re interested in hearing about, feel free to sound off in the comments or send me a reply on Twitter. Though I don’t always answer right away, I try to get back to folks.
If you’re an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 fan, you should be able to follow along pretty easily at home. Both Microsoft and Sony have gotten pretty good at providing hours’ worth of coverage from E3, which you can download or stream to your console via Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network for free.
