E3 Diary: Day One

I’ve been following E3 for many years now and there are two types of announcement that always demand public attention: new hardware and exclusive games, particularly new IPs. This year we’ve brought both and, if the reception at the press conference on Monday night weren’t enough, you just have to look at the queues to get hands-on with PlayStation Vita and the array of PS3 and PSP titles available on the show floor.

Tuesday started early for me, partly because of jet lag but mainly because I wanted to get my hands on some of the games before the crowds arrived. First port of call was Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and a particularly thrilling level featuring a cargo plane. I don’t want to ruin it for you but rest assured that Naughty Dog’s genius set-piece design is present and correct in Drake’s third PS3 adventure.

I played it in the SCEE lounge, which is located in the business centre, away from the show floor, and where us employees that made the trip over from Europe hang out and invite journalists to play our games and grab interviews with their developers. This area is limited access so I took a few pictures to give you an idea. I love the creative work our events team does with this space each year.

As those of you that stayed up late will have seen, I worked with Jeff, Sid and Rey of the US PlayStation.Blog on a live video stream where we invited devs to join us at the PlayStation booth to chat and demo their titles. I spoke with a couple the guys from Zindagi Games and Santa Monica Studios about Medieval Moves and I have to say, even though I’ve been in front of the camera quite a few times, knowing it was going out live put some caused a few butterflies. We’ll be holding more live streams just like that later today and tomorrow, so please tune in.

I’ll pop another post on here tomorrow morning and my plan is to have a walk with the camera and take pictures of all the booths to use in a photo slideshow. If there’s anything in particular you’ve heard about and would like me to snap, please let me know.

Hope you’re enjoying all of the news coming out of E3 2011.