My first E3 experience

I've worked at Vox Media for nearly two years now, but Polygon has only been around as its own site since October. This is my first E3, and it's a little mind-boggling. This is just a stream of thoughts from my trip to the show floor today.

You show your badge to a man at the door, and then step foot across the threshold to enter the show room floor. Immediately you are hit with warm air, your first indication that the cavernous room is packed full of video game enthusiasts sampling the latest offerings from the industry's big players.

Lights flash, music plays, and colorful videos draw your attention -- bombarded with every possible sensation, your mind struggles to focus in any one direction. In a sprawling room filled with half-finished game demos, maybe that's how it was meant to be.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are lined up next to each other, muscling for space in the West Hall. My first stop was Nintendo, and the plush carpet was a pleasant surprise as I crossed into the hallowed halls of Mario and company.

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Dodging past diehard fans, I was impressed by the variety of new titles coming to Wii U in the coming months. Mario Kart 8 had excellent graphics and the new gravity system could be a huge factor in races -- can you imagine a gravity bomb that drops your competitors off the map en masse? Neither can I, but hopefully Nintendo can!

Feeling optimistic, I slipped over to the Sony booth, and boy was it crowded. The PlayStation 4 is the darling of this show and it was evident by the crowds. I wanted to hold the PS4 controller in my own hands, feel the weight of it (say that in a FIFA announcer's voice) but it was time-prohibitive.

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Finally, I strolled into the Microsoft booth. They had set up huge green walls and the warmth inside the walls was palpable.

I won't deride MS -- they have a lot of great first-party games in the pipeline that I would enjoy playing. The booth itself felt like a sound vacuum and was quite crowded by partitions in the middle of the room. At one point I was standing next to a guy playing Forza and I could hear nothing but sound of other booths. It was eerie.

I took a walk through the South Hall and finally got my hands on a game at the Sega booth: the new Sonic for Wii U. It was bizarre and a million things were happening at once, but I found it pleasurable. I don't often smile when I am playing a video game, but I found myself grinning at Sonic bouncing from world to world.

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I had my eyes on FIFA 14 but today it was impossible to get anywhere near the game. EA was a popular booth and I am going to try again, most likely on Thursday. I have to play this game and brag about it to my coworkers, many of whom love FIFA 13 to death.

All in all, it was everything I expected and entirely overwhelming. The show floor just dominates your brain. As someone who gets annoyed at crowds, I had to put aside a lot of internal frustration to slowly make my way through the throngs of people and see the stuff I was interested in.

E3 is one hell of an event. You'll never really understand just how big of a business video games are until you walk through this event, and you might also better understand why publishers are so interested in DRM and controlling the market -- there are countless dollars involved.

I'll leave that analysis to the experts. I'll just focus on finally getting to play FIFA.

Oh, then I tried vegemite after returning to the office.

All photos (and video) credit to David Zhou, our excellent Software Engineer. Check his Flickr out.