E3, entertainment something expo, basically the video game conference every year, invitation only. It's to see what's great and coming out. A few people in the blogsophere are talking about it. One person (Bill Harris at Dubious QUality) observed two very interesting macrotrends of game producers. 1) Women are now more into games than they were in 1999. My wife certainly seems to like them somewhat, which is shocking. The game design people need to realize that, though. The fact that it has cross-gender appeal is what makes The Sims and other design type games (ie Rollercoaster tycoon) huge.
2) The PC is dying as a gaming machine. Basically the consoles have similiar horsepower as a PC, and everyone can stick in a disk and have the console game working. NO compatibility issues. THe Xbox, which we have, is an Intel machine running Linux. I think it's a pentium 2? Anyway, it runs pretty much fine. Although while playing Knights of the old Republic recently the game went slightly wacky. The problem with consoles will always be their lack of sophistication. No matter how much graphical horsepower they have, many genres are just not possible on consoles. Real-time strategy, anything mouse based, anything with more than a dozen controls (flight sims, for ex). Anything remotely complex to play (because of the user stupidity issue, not becaues of the platform.

Anyway E3 time is always fun since you can see whats coming down the pipe. More and more I'm not very enthusiastic, mostly because I can't see myself actually enjoying these as I once did. Well, everyone grows up. And i'll still play the odd very interesting game every once in a while.