Day One Impressions by Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik   Posted on May 11, 2006   After walking a little ways through the wonderfully sunny smoggy city of Los Angeles, we arrived bright and early at the Los Angeles Convention Center this morning. Fortunately the lights were on as we headed to the Media Center for our badge holder pick-up, unlike last year when some poor booth worker happened to plug in the device that shut down Los Angeles’ power grid for several blocks. I enjoyed ESA President Doug Lowenstein’s speech about the state of the industry this year more than I did last year, as it really tied the gaming industry in with other sectors of daily life. For more information on that, see the news article about it. When the show floor doors opened at 9 AM, it was for pre-registered media and certain VIPs, retailers, and exhibitors only, cutting down on the crowds drastically. Taking advantage of the early access hours provided to us as media this year, we headed straight for Sony’s booth to play some of their PlayStation 3 games. I’ll save the details on each game for later. After getting a few PS3 games in, the graphics of Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2 seemed brutally ancient. Aliasing alone in the games made them rather painful to look at, so we decided to head over to the South Hall to take a look at anything interesting before the masses flooded the expo, as the line for the Nintendo Wii was already staggering. A personal note to Nintendo: please take an idea from Sony and put your playable units in a public area so that you don’t have to wait for hours to play. As usual, the south hall was jam packed with loud noises, flashing lights, elaborate booths, gimmicks, and of course, games. The first thing we saw when we walked in was a huge half-pipe promoting the Tony Hawk game. We went back later when the performances started and caught a glimpse of some pretty cool skateboarding. We managed to catch some previews and playtime with a few games before I suddenly realized that I wasn’t able to walk from place to place anymore. Oh, the floor was now open to all 70,000+ (approximately) attendees. For some reason the crowds seemed excessively bad this year, even when compared with last year. Not being able to move at all is rather annoying, and I’m sure that if a 12 year old kid can get in (I almost knocked one over by accident) then there’s still tons of Best Buy cashiers claiming that because they scan the barcode on a game they should be allowed into E3 who are being allowed passes. We managed to see a lot today, and pretty much all of it was impressive. Here’s the scoop on the highlights: WarHawk Huxley Tabula Rasa Rainbow Six: Las Vegas Spore Haze Gundam (preview coming soon) Genji 2 Gears of War Enemy Territory: Quake Wars NCAA Football '07 Madden Football '07 (Wii) Prey See Also Day One Photo Gallery Where's Waldo @ E3 Contest