Hello fellow geek-bians. I’m sorry I missed you last week, but I was at E3, the gaming industry’s annual tradeshow/circus/bacchanalia wherein all the major publishers of videogames show off their wares with varying degrees of ostentatious insanity. It’s also the most exciting place on earth to be for a game nerd, which I most definitely am.
Since this all happened last week, and one week is approximately equivalent to a year in internet news land, I will limit my comments to the following statements:
Nintendo had a great showing: the 3DS is fantastic and works without glasses, while the new “Donkey Kong Country” and “Zelda” games play like a dream.
Microsoft’s Kinect is pretty lame, except when used for fitness or dancing games, which are fun and make you look like a prized ass when playing them.
If you like Disney, “Epic Mickey” will make you squeak with joy. “Portal 2” looks fantastic, and “Civilization 5” will wipe the floor with just about every other strategy game on the planet when it comes out this fall.
Finally, smaller games like “Super Scribblenauts,” “Rock of Ages,” “Lost in Shadow” and “Trine 2” rocked the creativity hard in a show filled with impressive tech, but not as much innovation.
As for the experience of the show itself, it’s always a haze by the end, but a few things stuck out. I noticed more women on the show floor this year, both female journalists (yay!) and “booth babes” (fill in your own response here.)
After the entirely booth-babe-less affair of PAX, it was almost weird to be bumping into glammed-up models on the floor &mdsah; especially those of the creepy-hot variety, like the zombie girls from “Dead Rising 2,” and the very pregnant (and terrifying) Alma from the “Fear” series. I’ve always been conflicted on the subject of hot women being paid money just to look hot and pose with sweaty men on a busy trade show floor, but perhaps that’s a topic for another Weekly Geek.
For fear of losing any more brain cells to E3, I’ll move on, but be sure to check out the Lesbiangamers.com E3 coverage for all the details.
I came across two very amusing bits of geekery yesterday that most definitely deserve a mention. The first is a fan-frakking-tastic Star Trek video, set to the oh-so-catchy “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha. It’s pure, nerdy gold, and also totally gay.
The second is the most glorious, goofy use of Twitter that the world has yet known. Topless Robot held a Tweets from the Death Star contest, wherein entrants with the funniest and cleverest 140-character messages from the Star Wars locale were highlighted.
A small sampling:
DeathStarPR and DeathStar Tweets are now active feeds, so this nerdy little gift can keep on giving.
