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We're live at E3 2099 or at least E3 2008. Today brings a mess of new groups to the mix.

Nintendo Press Event
Sony Press Event
Crave Entertainment
Warner Bros
Bethesda
Ubisoft

I'll start off the first part of things with the Nintendo Press Event at the Kodak Theater.

The event kicks off quickly with some basic hype about the success of the Wii and DS, it also starts with a new face in the mix, Reggie takes a backseat to opening the show this year. The crowd is still hyped as always, almost insane if you compare it to restricted clapping yesterday during the Xbox conference.

The first items up are basic stories about interacting with the family and how the Wii has opened doors to being a group compared to venturing out and about beyond the limits of experience people have. Her example was that of an injured wrist from taking a fall on a snowboard into hard packed snow / ice. The story had an eventual result for things, it broke out the release of the new Shaun White snowboarding game for the Wii that used the balance board and Wii-Mote for control and trick handling, the result was pretty nice in presentation, the reactions were fluid and it seemed like they weren't struggling with it or faking it to a pre-shot demo. The special news of course is that Ubi has been working closely to make a respectable offering to the market with this game, and that since Shaun White is signing off they essentially needed to take his input on the game as well to keep his name on the packing.

The show progressed quite slowly for many, the news on the new MotionPlus was brought out a day early and probably could have had more of an impact on the spot instead of prior to the Microsoft event. The demonstration using Wii Sports Resort was pretty impressive though, the hand and arm shift was on the spot in game giving a large improvement over the standard Wii-Mote, the Frisbee demo was actually a nice example of using a snap of the hand and wrist to release an object,  I think it was interesting to see her have to fully gesture and adjust herself in her delivery based on the result of the first trial, for those used to just playing by couch it'll probably stand to mess with that habit quite a bit. Of course the sword fighting demo was huge, mainly because of it being a battle of suits with Reggie wanting total domination.

Animal Crossing City Folk came up after that, it was a bit of a strange trip to see them bringing Animal Crossing to the Wii, mainly because of how addicted people were to the game already in Gamecube and DS forms, the Wii continued to explore that field by making community ventures possible between friends, allowing messaging through the game or direct to the system instead and of course include things like Wii Speak to the picture where individuals or groups can chat on the fly with other parties in the ambience of their own room or apartment, although that could prove to be a bad thing for younger audiences in open parts of their home. I can't imagine that it'll be long before people start mic spamming through AC knowing the other person is trying to keep it down. The clip has more details for those interested, I think it's a good demo they ran compared to all other things that have come up.

I think the pitfall to a lot of this was that Nintendo made a large portion of their presentation about the numbers and less about the games, it seems like even a few years ago it wasn't this prominent and now it's almost a central hub for discussion. Given that people speculate on quality titles it seems like blasting away with some hot news would have been great to show people things were stepping up.

Wii Music was a closer for the event, the drum simulation was great to see as a starter but I think as that ended things kind of fizzled, for some reason many thought that the sax was somehow being played through the Wii-Mote but it seems to be overly simplified to honor the gesture of the hold but the execution doesn't really matter, on top of that it's more or less a case of playing until you finish the song and then it's over. I think that the idea of everyone trying to do it in a mass wasn't horrible but I couldn't help but feel it didn't have thunder to it like prior years have had. Wii Music will incorporate the simulator, the normal play and other modes including the conductor option which debuted around 2006.