Greeting from east LA, and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for
short.

Just to dispel the rumors, we didn't bring Asia Carrera with us. In fact,
we don't even have a booth here. I'm not sure what changed, but I think
we're moving her appearance to LinuxWorld/San Jose in August. In the
meantime, I guess I'll have to look elsewhere for porn stars to talk to.

Fortunately, I don't have to look very far. This place is CRAWLING with
booth babes. Interestingly enough, they usually aren't scantilly-clad...
er, actually, they ARE, but not in the standard, Victoria's Secret way.
With the exception of the Playboy bunnies (courtesy of CNet), most game
companies have resorted to dressing their babes up like their games'
characters. Laura Croft syndrome. In short, this place isn't so overrun
with scantily-clad women as it is overrun with scantily-clad women with
guns. Ah, all those years of fantasizing...

Actually, the h umorous highlight of the day goes to the GUY who's walking
around dressed like Laura Croft. Now that is a political statement! A
close second goes to the midget booth babe.

The general atmosphere around here is busy. And gaudy. And loud. Driving
into the convention center, there are 20-feet tall inflatable renditions
of the band Kiss. Once indoors, you can't hear yourself think.

Most of what I've seen here isn't particularly refreshing: it lots of
sequels and largely overdone concepts. Here were some of the highlights,
though:

- Dragon's Lair 3D. If you ever begged mommy for arcade quarters to spend
in the early 80's, you'll think this is really kickass, too.

- Meeting John Romero. He cocreated Doom and Quake with John Carmack. His
company, Ion Storm, just released "Daikatana", which is (surprise) a lot
like Quake. He basically blew me off when I asked about a Linux port, but
I really just wanted to mention him because he looks like Anthony Kiedis
from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Heehee!

- Playstation 2. Need I say more?

- Nintendo of America had a bar set up, and was selling alcohol. I felt
this was killing my childhood until it occured to me that the main
customers were probably NoA execs that had just returned from the
Playstation 2 demos. Oh, and there's another Zelda game on the way for
the N64...I played it, but it was in Japanese, so heaven knows what it's
about...

- Dave Taylor (also originally an iD guy, now a Transmeta genius) showed
off a Crusoe processor that can, on the fly, switch between executing i386
instructions and Java bytecode...this is more significant to the future
of computing than I can put into words, and Transmeta did it just to be
cool. Unreal.

- Bruce Campbell. Ran into him outside the expo. He's every bit as cool in
person.

- "Return to Wolfenstein."  Sure, it's not only another tired sequel, but
it's also using the Quake 3 engine. Nonetheless, it looked to be as
hour-wasting as the original, and much more gorey.

- Mplayer.com giving me a sticker that reads, "Still playing with
yourself?"  ...that one got stuck on my laptop.

- Halo. As Ani Difranco once said, "Beatiful, but boring." Emphasis on
beautiful, however.

- The Loki mosh pit at the GameSpy party. Also, the projection on the
wall of the original Tommy movie (the Pinball Wizard scene) and Tron were
only outdone by the classic arcade machines...it's been YEARS since I've
played Moon Patrol!

Must sleep. Will try to catch up on other (not necessarily) recent events
later.

Pumpkin Bromo,
--ryan.