With day 2 of E3 being finished and the third and final day soon to begin its time for some impression of the event so far.

This years E3, in my personal opinion, has been a huge improvement over last years event. For a while now I have enjoyed E3 as a big event and the downsizing of last year was a bit of a dissapointment, although that didn't hinder it from being enjoyable and full of big announcments. A primary reason that I think this years event was so much better is that there was no big hardware announcments, forcing 'the big three' to focus on the games, and thats certainly something they did.

My reactions from the press conferences were mixed to say the least, they all had some big annoucments, even if there were no true 'oh snappp!' moments. But I think that Nintendo's conference was the most dissapointing, with nintendo almost saying that with all games for core gamers out, they have sidelined us as a section of the industry and are now focusing on the growing casual market. Which, to me, made no sence. Ok so these conferences are aimed at the media and to a growing degree core gamers, why would Nintendo announce all these games for Kids and Casual gamers? When this type of audience generally won't have a clue what E3 is. As for these game they announced for the casual gamer 'Wii Sports Resort' and 'Wii Music' they seemed as if they had been more created for young kids rather than a casual market (Just to clarify, I see a casual gamer as a person above the age of 13 and generally people who work who come home to and play 1 or 2 hours of games), Wii Music especially, as there seemed to be no skill in a game that looked like a game you could only stand for about 10 minutes.

No new Metroid, Mario or Zelda games was very dissapointing. Ok so there was a new Animal Crossing games announced, but its not really a game that I'm much intersted in. Even a showing of the GTA for the DS would have been good, but no dice.

The Wii Motion Plus stuff looked neat, but I'm thinking how long before it becomes a gimic, for example the Star Wars lightsaber duels with this new peice of technology looked impressive, but I'll save judgement until I play it for myself. On the other hand maybe Nintendo saw with Red Steel that Sword Dueling cannot be done with what is currently available and brought this out to solve the problem. Ok so I look around and I see that my room is already covered with Nintendo Periphicals that only get used once, is this just another one to add to the pile? We'll see when other games start to use the newly added functionality.

Moving away from the Nintendo conference I saw the Sony conference, now before you pass judgement on my judgements I've never really been a big fan of Sony's so some of my views coming away from seeing this conference might be a little baised. The conference hall that Sony had was very impressive, with lots of big bravia screen and neat sound and light effects. The conference began well with the use of LittleBigPlanet to show financial figures, which I thought was an excellant idea, maybe this was a way of keeping media interested and allowing 'ol Jack to throw out extra figures, increasing this 'Year of the PS3' hype solgan that he threw out many times during the conference.

That slogan atcually really started to get to me as did alot of his Playstation marketing talk, I mean did we really need to know all this history of the company, it just seemed like time wasted that could have been used on Playstation stage demo's. That atcually moves me on, In my opinion there weren't enough stage demo's. Too much pre-rendered stuff suggesting that all these big titles like 'MAG, DC Universe Online, Playsation Home, The Agency, Killzone 2' will be shown again at E3 in a more finsihed state next year. Ok despite there were alot of solid announcments of games for the core gamer which in my opinion ranked this conference ahead of the Nintendo one.

Microsoft comments MIA? Well sort of, I never atcually saw this conference Live and to date I haven't caught up on it either, as I'm having trouble with the Gamespot stream.

Gamespots show coverage this year was also, despite some missing and unfamilar faces, an improvment on last year, with more coverage from the show floor rather than just from the studio. Showing all the big games gives me another reason to be back here.

Ok, thats a wrap for now, as this is getting long. So yeah I suppose you can call this me being back, and I'm glad to be back. I'll be watching the last Day of E3 along with Microsoft conference impressions (even if they are a little late),

'I'm Back'

Will,

Hey there,

I suppose some of you will remember who I am, honestly it's been so long.

Yeah, here's all the new graphics for my profile that I promised long ago, I think it looks much better. Now I'm not really back on Gamespot, I'm just sort of 'poppin back' to sort out some things are do a bit of profile house cleaning and to see all the E3 coverage. I'm gonna fully be back on Gamspot eventually, just a few 'logistical' things to sort out, heh.

So things have changed around here much. If anything this is going to be a sort of Last Chance Salloon, after all the changes the site team has gone through I don't trust GameSpot nearly as much as I did when I first started on here. But with everything, it deserves one more chance. After that I'll be having a minimal presence on here and I'll be shipping my stuff over to the giantbomb.com when it launches.

Its been fun taking the time away from the site, but for now I'll be looking over Gamespots E3 coverage. Let the gaming knowledge flow back into my crainium!

'I'll be back'

Will,

Well while I was away I kinda went and...

Oh and some other stuff with a certain MMO happened. That image basically describes what I have been doing, well um kinda anyway...

Hoping to be back soon,

Will.