Maybe this was too much for our feeble bodies

You may have noticed a lack of posts lately. This is mostly because E3 is exhausting.

I have no idea how these small-time game journalists do it.

Speaking of, apparently to be a game website, you need to have the word ‘gamer’ or ‘game’ in the title or name it after a reference to a game (like an evil moustache). Fortunately, Excalibur sounds like it could be a game website so we’re not too often questioned about what we’re doing here.

We did a few interviews today but, because my throat decided to swell shut, not as many as we would have liked.

One of the interviews we did get was with one of the designers of Activision’s Tony Hawk: Ride. The fake skateboard seemed … unusual. I had no idea what I was doing, balancing back and forth, but apparently I was doing mad tricks and was a ‘natural’ according to the Activision rep. I felt like I had no control over what my character was doing. It has sensors at the front, back and sides but they’re a bit finicky; I think at one time the board read my ass as a hand grab.

I also got to play a tiny bit of Halo 3: ODST. Basically, here’s what I gathered: it’s like taking the feel of Halo 1, with health packs and shorter jumps, but placing it in the Halo 3 engine. Other than that … it was Halo.

So, unfortunately, we’re not going to get to all the games we would like to, like God of War III and Modern Warfare 2. The lines would take hours, so we would never get around to much else.

Anyway,we’ll have some great video in the next couple of weeks.

Now I sleep.

Flynn

The schwartz is with you, BioWare

What can I say? I’m a BioWare fanboy – there I said it, so get over it – but I’m not ashamed because BioWare has all the goodies this year at E3: Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The EA conference was a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly (Brutal Legend, Dante’s Inferno and Charm Girls Club) but BioWare was the highlight of the show with an exclusive look at three of their developing games. The announcement that Old Republic will feature complete voice-overs for every character (including your own) was impressive but puzzling. Their non-stop emphasis on the “fourth pillar,” the story, continues to anchor it in the MMORPG realm; without it they might as well call the the game World of Warcraft 2. I’m not bashing BioWare for this but if their “fourth pillar” crumbles, then so does Old Republic. After seeing their new trailer, it seems like LucasArts and EA are promoting this game like it’s the next “game I must play.”

I’ll talk more about Bioware and EA’s conference later tonight. I have to get to the Sony Press Conference.

Brent

Many a thing

First off, LA is a hellhole teetering on the precipice of consuming itself in a portal of douchebaggery, poverty and outright human filth that threatens to destroy us all.
I’ve been harassed by children, homeless psychics, dead cats, wandering alcoholics and creepy dudes in vans.

E3 is a whole different story. I saw the half-Beatles!

I waved at Tim Schafer! He waved back!

I saw virtual spooge on a giant screen!

No number of school girls questioning my sexuality can take this away!

Anyway, we’re dead tired right now. We’ll be doing a short podcast made up mostly of our rambling thoughts about Microsoft’s creepy new toy for the 360.

Flynn

Here at last

We’re here in LA – at the LAX to be more exact – and are waiting for the first press conference to start, the Microsoft press conference. It starts at 9 a.m. so we have a while to go before we’re doing anything useful—if reporting on E3 is considered useful. I’ll be updating this blog for the rest of the night.

Brent

I love you, man

Thank God there are people like my friend Nick, who can’t stand poor punctuation and bad grammar. He has volunteered his services and agreed to copy edit this blog for us during our E3 escapade. I want to thank him and let everyone else know that he will make our posts less … dumb.

Brent

The ultimate hero

Thanks to Flynn, we were able to get a laptop, so no worries—do you really care, though? We will be blogging the entire week about E3, so be ready. We’ll probably cover the same stuff everyone else is covering but I can guarantee that our blogs will be outdated and irrelvant once they’re posted. E3 predictions start tomorrow so, yeah … yeah, you don’t care.

Brent

We made a blog about video games!

Aren’t we original?
Anyway, this may be the last post to this blog as we are currently looking for a laptop to bring with us. Hopefully we’ll be posting little snippets about E3 and have some video to boot, as well as our own deep personal feelings.

Don’t change that dial, keep your hand away from the remote—same bat-time, same bat-channel.

Flynn

E3: A five-day adventure into the unknown

Yes, that is right: two student journalists from Canada are going to E3—un-fucking-believable. I don’t know why we have been given this opportunity, but we will take it—even though it’s costing us an arm and a leg. Anyway, we are both editors at Excalibur, York University’s community newspaper, and we thought we should start up a blog to give blow-by-blow details of E3 (even if no one is reading this). I’m the Video Editor and Flynn Daunt, my partner in crime, is the Science & Technology Editor. You can read and watch our main feature on E3 at Excalibur’s official website. We will be posting a few videos and articles a few days after the event but will be posting updates here until we come back. I would like to have some videos up during the event but we’ll have to see. I don’t have a powerful, Final Cut-equipped laptop to edit on and I surely can’t take the Mac from work with me. I might have to use Movie Maker—ugh. Before the conference, however, we plan to have some blog posts and podcasts on our predictions for this year’s E3. I’ll update this site later tonight with more information but for now stay tuned.

Brent