With embers cooling at the end of day 0 of the Electronics Entertainment Expo (officially, E3 kicks off tomorrow with the mayor welcoming us gamers to the city), the writing staff attending E3 from Aggrogamer.com wanted to send out a recap of what we’ve seen and heard in our short time here today.  We hope you are following us on Twitter as it is the fastest and easiest way to follow David, Binh, Ben, Mike and myself as we attend the media briefings, industry appointments and walk the convention center floor.  If you haven’t picked up the new Aggrogamer.com widget for Android phones, now is the best time with our thoughts on the day’s news and announcements sent right to your phone.  Let’s get into today’s events and happenings.

This morning began with the Microsoft media briefing where exclusivity was the name of the game.  Exclusive content, DLC and titles including Mass Effect 2, Halo ODST, Halo Reach and Left4Dead 2, along with Modern Warfare 2 map packs released first only on the 360.  Microsoft seems to be also jumping into the micro-transaction market with Joy Ride, a free-to-play wacky race game that uses your Live avatar with upgrades to cost money.  Enlightening was watching demo footage of Final Fantasy XIII being played on the 360.  The developers have a lot of work ahead of them simply based on what was shown compared to much of what has been seen from the Japanese-released PS3 demo.  The difference between what I saw from the PS3 version to the 360 version today is the difference between a 360 game and a Wii game.  I am sure all of us will be investigating this fully as the week progresses.  I will take leave of Microsoft by discussing its beginning with the full unveiling of The Beatles: Rock Band.  It opened with a CG movie that looked beautiful in cel-shaded goodness.  The actual in-game graphics left a slightly sour taste in my mouth when they weren’t that spectacular, although better than Rock Band 2’s graphics by a goodly amount.  

Moving on to the Electronic Arts media briefing, they focused on the piece that showed the most in need of improvement: EA Sports.  This included showing Fight Night: Round 4, which looked spectacular from the character movement to the shadows to the fluid physics.  The new announcements of their new Mixed Martial Arts game and the new Online Madden Leagues brought people’s attentions back around.  Their media briefing ended with a new trailer from the MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Although they could have done without trotting costumed jedis onto the stage, I would say the trailer was mind-blowing with the caveat that Bioware needs to make the game play like that trailer.

The last media briefing of the day was Ubisoft.  A sort of mixed bag of demonstrations and news, they first announced a brand new service to come out this year called uPlay.  Crossing over multiple titles it will (hopefully) bring Ubisoft communities together for a place to talk games, share information and purchase DLC.  After this they pushed James Cameron onstage to discuss his work on Avatar.  While he was interesting and involved, he spoke a good 10-15 minutes too long.  Ubisoft showed they really know the casual and tween markets with Imagine, Petz and something called Academy of Champions which can only be described as Harry Potter plus Mario Strikers with Pele as Dumbledore.  The trailer and demonstration of Red Steel 2 on Wii brought on more questions than definitive answers.  The Wii Motion Plus usage to demonstrate one-to-one mapping of your wiimote to the sword was impressive, but as David pointed out to me after the show, they did not exclusively show sword usage.  You will be guaranteed a hands-on by me before the end of the week.  The Splinter Cell Conviction demo was amazing.  As I tweeted earlier tonight, I don’t even enjoy these kinds of games and I wanted to play it.  Assassins Creed 2, a highly anticipative title from Ubisoft this year, was only a CG trailer and while the trailer looked impressive, that says nothing about its quality.  The Your Shape game along with the special image capture video camera for Wii was intriguing, but we need to see it playable before dismissing anything.  Other games like Rabbids Go Home, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash-Up and Ruse were not impressive at all.  

The writing staff ended the night with dinner out together as a group with pictures forthcoming.  That’s it for tonight, stay tuned to Aggrogamer.com/e3 for all the up-to-date news from E3 that you can handle.