E3

Soon after I got back from Japan, I flew down to California to meet up with Shishka and Rayme and some of their friends for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Maybe I was too tired or too frayed by rubbing against advertising and consumerism in Shinjuku and Akihabara, or maybe the games that are getting pushed now just aren’t for me, but the whole thing was kind of disappointing. The advertising strategy for games in the USA seems to be Ugly Guys Yelling. Sports games, first person shooting games, crime games, they all feature an Ugly Guy Yelling, usually in conjunction with uninspired grayish gradienty floaty screen shots or demo videos, which are supposed to look revolutionary or at least state-of-the-art, but invariably leave me totally bored. I’d rather have a game that looks like Guilty Gear XX, a game where you can tell someone sat down and drew a bunch of beautiful two-dimensional pictures, than nearly any three-dee game, all of which seem to have the same dark, fakey, total lack of visual style. The whole thing felt a lot like Hollywood movies, where companies try really, really, _really_ hard to make you think that something is really, really, _really_ great, but if you ask an actual human who actually cares, they’ll admit that the stuff is crap. The most fun of the whole trip was going to the exclusive Bungie party thingo with Shishka and meeting important members of the fan community I never even knew about. I’m no Halo fan, but it sure was neat to mingle with such a group. I also got to meet the AI dude for Timesplitters 3. :D Anyway, Nintendo can always be counted on to have something nice. Here’s the only semi-worthwhile photograph I took on the whole trip.