E3 2015 – Worth it?
I’m headed to the 2015 edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, and I’m wondering, as I sit in the airport waiting on my Jet Blue plane from Anchorage to Long Beach (then a train ride up to Los Angeles proper), will this trip be worth it?
What’s E3 but a loud, cacophonous trip into the heart of the video gaming industry? The folks at E3 want to impress three sets of people – the people who buy and distribute retail video games, the press that write about video games (that’s me!), and the folks that ultimately buy video games (consumers!).
I’m traveling freelance this year – that means I’m gonna write about mobile games over at 148Apps (hi Rob Rich!) and I’m going to find stories for a small handful of other sites that pay me for wording from time to time (Hi Maeghan!).
I’m also going to put the rest of my impressions here, for you. I hope you enjoy them.
Too many goddamn games
Yeah, this one, too. Pretty disappointing. Photo: Ubisoft
When I was a kid, I used to buy albums on cassette. They were precious; each $12 – $16 item (when new) was an entire night of experience. I’d lie on my bed letting the music (with my mono-speakered cassette player from RadioShack at first, then my Sony yellow Sports Walkman, then an actual stereo I bought from Sears) flow over me, and I’d stay very still. Listening to the music. Hearing all the lyrics, even the ones I had to make up in my own head.
When I started playing video games for real, back in, say, 2006 or 2007, I had a similar experience. Each tiny Game Cube disc was a watershed moment. I could only buy one at a time, at varying intervals.
As I moved into the Xbox 360 era and then purchased a PlayStation 3 (“It’s for my website, I promise! Tax-deductible!”), new games were still fairly far and in-between, downloadable and on-disc. Gears of War. Flower. Final Fantasy XIII. Each a unique, special moment.
Not so anymore.
You must be logged in to post a comment.