The official day one of E3 2009! Techpedition will be here all week, but here’s what we came across on the first day. We had a long day ahead of us, but we wasted no time getting started. The day started with Kary, Carl and me attending the Nintendo Press Conference…kinda.
The Nintendo Feux-Press Conference
Since we aren’t the IGN, or Gamespot, Nintendo stuck us in an overflow theater, so we watched the conference on a giant screen in an adjacent building. This was only a minor set back. As you can see by our live blog, Carl and Kary were able to rig up a make shift internet connection in the wifi-less Nokia theater. The biggest and most important things to come out of the conference were:
Mario Galaxy 2
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Metroid: Other M
Wii Vitality Sensor
Wii Fit Plus
Now, the Vitality Sensor may just be the most ridiculous piece of hardware to hit the market since the Virtual Boy, but the Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid announcements were genuine surprises. This year’s press conference was miles better than last year’s and I see myself playing a lot of Wii in the coming year.
After that we ate at the tiny Mexican place around the corner from the center (I think it was called Fernando’s). We then made our way to the expo. First on the agenda was The Beatles: Rock Band. Kary and I had scheduled a hands-on with the game at 12:30 and that’s exactly what we did. The developers gave us a preview of the new features, songs and instruments, before turning us loose on the hardware. The Beatles Rock Band plays like Rock Band, but has a very Distinct Beatles flavor to it…more on that later.
We then knocked out two other Rock Band Games, Lego Rock Band and Rock Band Unplugged. Lego Rock Band was simply a Legofide version of the game…that was strangely satisfying. Rock Band Unplugged was a cleaned up and modified version of Frequency. This doesn’t surprise me because Harmonix has expressed interest in making a new Frequency game for years now.
Other games I touched today include Brutal Legend, Tony Hawk Ride, TMNT: Smash Up, Wii Sports Resort, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Resident Evil: Dark Side Chronicles, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time and Guitar Hero: Van Halen.
The show room floor wasn’t as busy as I imagined it would be, but the lines at many of the major games were long as hell. Halo: ODST, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, God of War 3, and Zelda: Spirit Tracks all had almost unbearable waits. Each booth had a different feel to it. The stand outs were Nintendo, Harmonix, and Sony.
Towards the end of the day, we were trying to gather the crew and Kary got a chance to feel on the new PSP Go. Carl played a lot of Tekken 6 and Knots got an ear and finger full of Overlord 2. As a team we were apart most of the day but came together at 2:45 for the Pepsi/MTV Games: Rock Band online video contest. We did a killer version of Squeeze’s Tempted that should be hitting thee site pretty shortly in the Video Features section.
After picking up some McDonalds…we called it a day and headed to the hotel to begin reporting our findings. In the immortal words of the Monkees…”Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Day”…see you then!