Trade show takes new tack

E3 was different this year. Since its inception in 1995, the annual video-game trade show had become a circus of video-game excess, with 60,000 fanatics taking over the Los Angeles Convention Center ("This is the only event that makes the attendees at [San Diego's] Comic-Con look like Ocean's 13 ," quipped comedian Jamie Kennedy while hosting Activision's press briefing.)

After last year's event, the Entertainment Software Association (the industry group that produces the show) decided to scale things back. It was an attempt, it said, to return E3 to what it was initially designed to do: give industry members a place to meet, and media a one-stop shop to collect information in advance of the critical holiday shopping season.

Formerly known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the show was renamed the E3 Media & Business Summit. The 60,000 attendees of previous years were cut to around 3,000 who were personally invited to attend the show, and the exhibitors list was restricted to the bigger, established video-game publishers. The event was moved from May to July, and from downtown L.A. to oceanside Santa Monica.

One thing's for sure: the environs of Santa Monica are far more pleasant than the cement of the L.A. convention site. But if there was anything notable about this year's E3, it was that nothing significant happened.

In 2005, the Big Three console manufacturers–Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony–all released details about their next-generation hardware platforms. Last year, all the excitement was about how the Wii and the PlayStation 3 would fare against the Xbox 360, which had been released six months earlier. But now all the hardware is out there, either in the homes of gamers or–the industry shudders at the thought–sitting on the shelves of electronics retailers.

Even without any glitzy hardware to flash, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony still took the opportunity to hold lavish press conferences. Microsoft had cleverly gotten its bad news out of the way a week before E3 when it announced that it was extending the Xbox 360 warranty to three years. (Last year, the company extended the initial three-month warranty to one year.) This accompanied a begrudging admission that the failure rate of Xbox 360 machines was about one third. In releasing fourth-quarter earnings last week, Microsoft revealed that it expects the revised warranty policy to cost it more than US$1 billion.

Microsoft held its annual press briefing the night before E3 officially started, in the outdoor amphitheatre at Santa Monica High School. The lone hardware announcement at E3 was of a Halo-branded Xbox 360, which will be available when the game Halo 3 is released on September 25.

Sony also dropped some big news just before E3, cutting the price of a PlayStation 3 console with a 60-gigabyte hard drive to $549, and announcing that an 80-gig model will be available in August. The new model will ship with the racing game MotorStorm and will retail for $659. What Sony didn't make clear at the time was that it is phasing out the 60-gig model, so when stock of those machines runs out, the only consoles available will be the more expensive 80-giggers.

At its press conference at Sony Pictures Studios in nearby Culver City, Sony revealed a new, skinnier, lighter version of the PlayStation Portable game unit. The updated handheld will be able to display video on a television screen using a video-out port, and will be available in the standard Sony "piano black". Two other colours will be part of special retail packages: "ice silver" with the game Daxter, and a "ceramic white" version stencilled with Darth Vader that will include the game Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron.

Of the console developers, Nintendo had the most interesting hardware to show off this year. At its E3 briefing, held at the Santa Monica Civic Center, the company revealed three new video-game interfaces for playing games on the Wii.

The first, called the Wii Zapper, is little more than a plastic housing for the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, but it turns the controllers into a two-handed gun, ideal for first-person-shooter games. The second interface is the Wii Wheel, which will be packaged with Nintendo's upcoming Mario Kart, a Wii multiplayer racing game. The third–and most intriguing–peripheral from Nintendo is the Wii Balance Board. Resembling a low step-aerobics platform, the wireless Board senses weight distribution. As such, it assesses your balance when you're standing on it, which means it can be used for any number of fitness and conditioning games.

But for all the hardware the Big Three tried to get us excited about, this year's event was a return to the days when software took centre stage. In my next column, I'll review some of the titles I saw in Santa Monica that gave me more than enough reason to get excited.