I was fortunate enough to get an invite and attend After Hours in person! I've never been to an E3 or any similar event, so it was a real treat for me. I am a big FPS fan so I spent much of the time laying the smackdown on the GameSpot crew and other attendees at the BF2142 kiosk. I got to see many new games and the closed-session BioShock demo was definitely cool. Playing the PS3 for the first time was definitely an "interesting" experience because I was involved in the silicon design at IBM, so I especially wanted to see the hardware in action for the first time. What was interesting is that more than half of the PS3 units were pre-production boxes in very large rackmount chassis. As far as the graphics quality of the PS3 games, Full Auto 2 was definitely eye-candy, but Mobile Suit Gundam was a bit choppy and full of jaggies (anti-aliasing problems). Also, the new controller was very to light vs. the DualShock 2 I'm used to, but perhaps after time I can get used to it. I also placed my hand next to a final form factor PS3 and man does it put out some heat! I could not find a single person who said they were going to buy a PS3 at launch, and I asked a random 10-15 people that were playing at the Full Auto booth. You'd think that coming to an event like this at least a few would be Sony fanboys! Don't get me wrong, the PS3 is a great machine and I'm sure it will do well in Japan, I just don't think it is worth the money vs. the other options on the market today. The lack of units shipped to North America before christmas will only exacerbate the situation and next thing you know it Sony will be #3... but that's just my opinion.

I got to meet a bunch of cool people including Greg Kasavin! Here's the picture to prove it:



- Dave, Greg, and me