Wheeeeeeee3

You know that super-creepy part of Pinocchio where the kids are all swarmed onto an island for what looks like nonstop leisure and gaming? Yeah, E3's kind of like that. Gigantic airplane-hangar-sized rooms, filled to bursting with monitors and controllers and bright colors and loud noises and free swag and exploited busty women (fewer exploited men, though -- there was very little content geared towards the ladies, and absolutely zero content geared towards friends of Dorothy). It was entirely too easy to lose all sense of time and place with all the gaming and blinkenlights, and to totally forget that there's a world out there where people don't spent twenty hours a day locked in pixely pleisure. And just as the kids on Pinocchio's Pleasure Island eventually turn into livestock, hard-core gamers have a lifetime of obesity and poor hygiene to look forward to. Ha ha ha, just kidding! Mostly.

Our favorite new product at this year's Expo wasn't actually being officially expoed, but even though they had no booth or even a product demo, we couldn't get enough of Ankama Studio's indie game, Dofus. Yeah, yeah, the title's a little unfortunate, but whatever. It's an online role-playing affair, designed to be accessible to non-hardcore gamers, kind of in the vein of The Sims plus Final Fantasy. Dofus takes place in a vaguely European-ish pre-renaissance countryside, and though players' main objective is to collect magic dragon eggs, there's a lot to keep you busy: voyages, mysteries, fights, stat-building, jobs, pets, and tons of new stuff that gets added on every week. For now, Dofus is only available in a French version (they've got 50,000 users, which is pretty impressive for a French-only game), but Ankama is seeking beta testers for an English version, and they hope to go live in the US in August. It's only $7 a month to subscribe to the full game, and there's also a feature-limited free version; it runs on PC, on Mac, and, awesomely, on Linux. It's even dialup-friendly, so honestly, what good excuse could you possibly have for not checking it out?

We were also intrigued by a new game from DTP, a German developer, called Tony Tough 2: A Rake's Progress. A vaguely creepy, dark-humored adventure/mystery game, it reminded us of those great old games that Sierra and LucasArts used to make. Yay for brainy point-and-click puzzle solving and weird plot elements -- the press kit for the game describes the Tony character as solving mysterys involving "a thief, ancient Indian-cultures, alien-landings, an abduction, and his fancy for wigs and tapirs as pets." And of course, we're all over anything involving tapirs.

We visited with a couple bay-area companies at E3 as well; one of our favorites was RedOctane, developers of fancy DDR mats as well as their new games, Get up and Move and Guitar Hero. The latter title really knocked our socks off; the game comes with a guitar-esque controller, which players strum and fret in time to music being played by the game, while cartoony rockstars rock out onscreen. There've been a couple iterations of this sort of game before -- it's basically DDR with music -- but RedOctane's version is the first to be done in the motif of American rock. The game was developed in tandem with Harmonix, a group of MIT Media Lab nerds, and a ton of for-reals musicians; and you can play along to music by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, White Zombie, Sum 41, Boston, and Jimi Hendrix. According to RedOctane's PR diva, "Slash saw this and was like, 'Whoa,'" which sounds like the sort of thing Slash might say. We love Red Octane because they love SF; one of the developers told us that the bay area is the perfect place to develop games because there's so much talent, so many great startups, and it's totally easy to get employees to move here. Aw shucks.

Another lovely bay area company: Ageia, makers of, among other cool tech toys, the PhysX card, which is basically like a dedicated physicist for your computer. These days, games rely pretty heavily on complicated physics calculations -- bouncing objects, exploding debris, water and particle effects -- and the PhysX card allows your CPU to take a break from thinking about all that stuff. It also allows developers to assign specific physical traits to each polygon, so that objects will "know" how to behave when collided with. Just as dedicated graphics cards grew to be standard several years ago, Ageia expects that dedicated graphics cards will become commonplace. Their equipment's being harnessed for games by Atari, and UbiSoft, and the makers of City of Villains and Rise of Nations, and will also make an appearance in the lovely new PS3. And of course, Ageia loves being in the bay area; though they have offices in St. Louis and Zurich, they told us that the bay area has tons of awesome graphics experts living here. Yay!

We also met up with Richard Boyd, the brains behind 3Motion. He's overseeing the development of new methods of interacting with games, which sounds awfully vague and highfalutin', but is actually rather cool. Instead of learning some arcane system of button-mashing to play games, 3Motion's technology allows games to recognize 3-dimensional gestures. So if you were using a controller with gyroscopes, for example, the game would be able to interpret the ways that you move the controller. Richard demonstrated a controller with two extendable joysticks for 3-D input, and there's a developer working with 3Motion on a game in which you cast spells by waving a wand in specific formations. And there's lots of speculation about the new Nintendo console maybe having gyroscopic controllers, which would certainly be a boon for companies like 3Motion. Richard wouldn't confirm or deny and involvement with Nintendo; all he'd say was that "Nintendo's been very cagey about what relationship their system might have with us," which is maddeningly secretive and we love it.

Speaking of Nintendo, we should probably mention what was up with the bigger companies at E3, even though you could read all about it in much greater detail in a million other places. First of all, can we just talk about how dickish that crew from VH1 was, cutting in front of all the lines and making everyone wait so they could tape their lame little segments? VH1, to you we say, "AS IF."

Anyway, the XBox 360, which could more accurately be called XBox One and a Half, was totally yawn-inducing; a minor improvement over the last platform, but the games don't look any more interesting: a fighting game, a WWII game, some sports games, a racing game, whatever. We're so over it. The PS3, on the other hand, had much greater allure. A four-hour wait in line was required to check the thing out, to which we said "no thanks." But we did say "yes please" to the four-hour line-wait for an opportunity to play Twilight Princess, the new Zelda game, for five minutes. OMG it is every bit as awesome as you can possibly imagine. There's awesome horseback fighting, great dungeon puzzles involving monkeys, and Link looks frickin' HOT. We're not ashamed to admit that we have fallen utterly in lust for him. Twilight Princess was being demoed in a tiny room that was decorated and lit to look like a twilighty forest; styrofoam trees, thunder noises and strobe lights, and a guy in a blacklit skeleton costume were all totally impractical, but typical of the lengths Nintendo goes to immerse you in their games. Yay, yay, yay, and yay.

Other Nintendo coolstuff: there was a half-hour line to play Nintendogs for a few minutes. The game's for the Gameboy DS system (that flippy silver thing with two screens), and involves little more than frolicking with puppies. You pet a puppy on the touch-sensitive bottom screen, while other dogs gambol around on the top screen; and if you're near someone else with the game, you can connect your Gameboys via the built-in WiFi and arrange for your puppies to play together. Puppies!!!

Nintendo's got a couple other WiFi-friendly games coming out; there's MarioKart DS, which allows you to race against people anywhere in the world as long as you're both in WiFi hotspots. We managed to pit ourselves in a race against SF-native Charles Martinet, who was videoconferencing with us from Seattle -- halfway through the game, someone walked by and asked our dapper, grey-haired racing partner, "who are you?" and he suddenly popped to life with the smorgasbord of voices that he performs for Nintendo: "It's-a me, Mario! And Waaaaario. And-a Luigi! And Waaaaaluigi. And-a baby Mario!" Of course, while all this was going on, we raced past him to first place. Pwned.

Buena Vista Games (Disney's interactive arm) had a pretty solid-looking showing: a Nightmare Before Christmas game that was very pretty, a Lion/Witch/Wardrobe game that looked very complicated, and a Chicken Little game that looked obligatory and forgettable. Kingdom Hearts 2, on the other hand, rocked -- it looks like it'll be a lot more dark and gothic and grim than the first game, as evidenced by the black-shrouded Mickey and the game's slogan: "If the world is made of light and darkness...we'll be the darkness." Auron made an appearance in the trailer, as well as a Pirates of the Caribbean universe.

Square Enix (which is pronounced eh-nix, not ee-nix -- who knew?) had a nifty showing as well, despite an unforgivably lame presentation. You had to show up early to collect Special Tickets to enter a tiny theater (though doors that were labelled "the doors of perception," good lord) and watch some game trailers. Our impressions: DragonQuest 8, an RPG, looks like a great combination of Final Fantasy and Dragonball; Advent Children, a movie-sequel to FF7, looks like it'll be everything the The Spirits Within wasn't; they're working on a handful of other FF7 spinoffs that all look compellingly melodramatic; and Final Fantasy 12 will, of course, rule. The FF12 cutscenes we saw were jaw-dropping and epic. Though there were no chocobos to be seen, the environments were stunning, the characters' stories clearly deep and thoughtful, and everyone was totally sexy. We may trade our crush on Link for a crush on Vaan. Or else we might just snap back to reality and stop lusting after fake people in fake places that don't actually exist. If we must. Sigh.

Check out the tons of E3 photos on our flickr account.
(Disclosure: our traveling companion and paramour works for a local game company, which probably hasn't skewed our coverage much since that particular company wasn't exhibiting anything.)