Introduction

It's a big business

Though it's billed as a big kid's circus, and rightly so, the Electronic Entertainment Expo is a lot more than just fun and games and booth babes and free beer at the G.O.D. lot. The video game industry is a huge business now, doing around $8 billion a year alone in the United States. Though the bulk of that is console related, the PC portion of the pie is nothing to sneeze at.

The publishers at the E3 need to find a way to make an impression on the thousands of media hounds milling about the show floor. If free beer or scantily clad models can help them get the message across, then by golly the publishers get what the press (us) demand.

Dungeon Siege

Spider?

Making sacrifices

After the pictures of booth babes are long forgotten, and after all the little tchotchkes (trinkets bearing a company logo) break or get lost, and long after the glitzy lights and booths are taken down - only the memories of the better games live on.

Amidst all the glamour and flash (or flesh?), our goal is to report on the best games we see at the show. We'll do it if it means we have to glance past the booth babes and stare at computer screen instead in order to pepper developers with a steady stream of questions.

Skeletons!

Another angle

We'll keep away from the booze and stay sober enough to remember our appointments. We won't even let the allure of wonderful tchotchkes and other gifts keep us from objectively deciding which games are worthy of coverage. Yes, we do it all because we love you, our readers. And uh…because we're paid to work down there, not screw around. There's only one thing we won't do. We won't skip a party at the Playboy Mansion to write up extra reports, because, let's face it. You wouldn't either. More on that later.