I had to cut and paste this form Joystiq.com because it was some damn good.

For more than a decade the Electronic Entertainment Expo was a must-see event for game retailers and media types. While it's true that in recent years E3 had become an exercise in wretched excess, that was, in fact, a large part of its charm. By day E3 featured massive, massively noisy game displays laid out end to end to end in the cavernous main halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center . By night dozens of game industry parties kept L.A.'s bartenders and sushi makers off the unemployment lines and gave a generation of scruffy game journalists an all-too-brief taste of the good life. In 2006, its final year as an extravaganza, a reported 80,000 people streamed past E3's exhibits.

But beyond that, E3 put the modern video game business on the map. You could be certain of national T.V. coverage from all of the major networks. The top newspapers were there as well. The media coverage of the show's bright lights, booth babes and nonstop bells and whistles made mainstream America sit up and take notice of a form of entertainment it had previously held to be child's play, and for geeky children at that. Of course, the gaming press went absolutely nuts during E3 week, pushing screen shots and trailers and interviews and whatever else it could get hold of to millions of eager readers.

To paraphrase Mick Jagger, I used to love you, E3, but it's all over now.

After the 2006 show game publishers decided they were spending too much money. Doug Lowenstein, the respected ESA president who started E3 in the mid-90's, read the writing on the wall, polished up his resume, and moved on to greener pastures. In between Doug's departure and the arrival of his replacement, Michael Gallagher, the ESA threw together a low budget, patchwork show in Santa Monica for 2007. For a variety of reasons, it bombed.

With the show back in L.A. this year, attendees were hoping to recapture some of that old E3 glory, but it was not to be. If anything, this year's show was worse than Santa Monica. Not only was it poorly planned and poorly executed, but holding it in the LACC was a cruel, if unintentional joke. E3 veterans who recalled the glory days when the massive confines of South Hall and West Hall were filled to the brim with towering game exhibits stared blankly at the locked doors of those once-bustling rooms. This year's show floor, such as it was, amounted to four rows of small booths in a drab room off the Convention Center's main hallway. Compared to E3's better times, it was the equivalent of holding the show in a closet. One major industry figure I spoke to quipped that the Into the Pixel game art exhibit had more square footage devoted to it than the show floor. At one point in mid-show I stood next to a former high level game company exec who waved his hand at the nearly vacant lobby outside West Hall and summed up his feelings in a single word: "Appalling." Ubisoft North America president Laurent Detoc, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "E3 this year is terrible. The world used to come to E3. Now it's like a pipe-fitters show in the basement."

I can't disagree.

But it wasn't just a couple of money guys complaining. Game industry worker bees complained that scheduling press conferences on the same days that the expo was open led to no-show appointments as some overbooked media types opted for the press conferences instead of their scheduled meetings. And then there was the embarrassment of having only 50 people show up for Gov. Rick Perry's keynote. Or less than a hundred for the ESA CEO's state-of-the-industry speech. And, without the big E3 buzz, the national media stayed away in droves. It didn't help that there were no major announcements or surprises to speak of at the show. GTA on the DS? Cool. Got any game play footage? No?

Never mind.

You can lay some of this, of course, at the feet of the ESA, which operates the show. On the other hand, it was the game publishers who wanted to spend less money on E3. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Without the substantial E3 revenues of the big years, the ESA was forced to raise its membership dues, reportedly by as much as 400%. And some publishers(Activision, Vivendi, LucasArts, id, Crave to date) have bailed because of that. Don't be surprised if a few more jump ship now that the show is over, leaving the ESA in even worse financial straits. Eventually the lack of revenue, be it from E3 or membership dues, translates to cutting back on the services that the ESA provides to the industry: lobbying, IP protection and free speech issues.

So, were game publishers better off with an expensive E3 and a healthy ESA to represent their interests or with a terminally ill E3 and a fragmented, underfunded ESA?

The answer seems obvious. What's also obvious is that you can go ahead and schedule that trip to the beach you were planning for next July. You won't be coming to Los Angeles.

E3 is dead.

Sony had the best press conference but all three were very lacking. The BS Nintendo had to say/show was pretty much what I expected and have more or less forgotten about that company as a whole. My Wii is official a Super Nintendo; lol, as if it were ever anything else right? While the Final Fantasy 13 announcement was surprising it was also inevitable. Good news for 360 fans, but at the rate SquareEnix is going the 360's successor is likely to show up before FF13 does. You know I'm right. Microsoft Wii-a-fying the 360 was disgusting, though I am very happy for 360 owners finally getting their own XMB. I guess Sony knew what they were doing after all. I know MS said their focus (like last year) was on games coming in 2008, which is cool and all, but if that's all we can expect in 2008 I'm a bit disappointed. Aren't you? Like I wrote at the beginning of my entry I think Sony had the best conference of the three, but it too was uneventful. In a trip to ass-backwards land the best part was the LittleBigPlanet number crunch demo. Who would have thought, right? It also seemed they were sick of Home, as nothing new since last year was shown; especially considering the length demonstration given at the 2007 conference. All these boring and wasteful pressers set a bad tone for myself in what to expect during the three days. Luckily the actual show was substantially better and Gamespot still have the best E3 coverage with their live stage demos. In my eyes the big three don't care about E3 anymore and I wouldn't be surprised to see it canned.

Even so, the number of surprises and big reveals were the leanest in memory, and I would normally feel disappointed by the lack of new games being displayed if it wasn't for all the game play footage and demos available. What I mean is, in the past E3 has been clogged with too many teasers and/or CGI videos and missing serious face time with the hottest titles. This year so many great games we already new about from last year were there in the pixel, on full display for anyone to check out and jabber about. When it was all said and done three games have been burned into my brain. Far Cry 2, inFamous and Dragon Age: Origins. Other notable games were Left 4 Dead (nice graphic update from the last build), Prince of Persia (love the design direction), Street Fighter 4 (sweet **** jesus), Postal 3, Resistance 2, and (as always) LittleBigPlanet. Of course there were other notable games present such as Bionic Command, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Resident Evil 5 and Killzone 2; they just didn't show enough new content to standout.

Then we have a game like Fallout 3, which for me was simply underwhelming. It did not at all look terrible, just very uninteresting. I'm going to continue fallowing its development and hopefully the game is a lot more fun than it looks. God of War 3 is the prime example of what I was writing earlier about a lack in surprises and CGI teasers. As far back as last fall, during the launch for Chains of Olympus, we knew Sony was working on God of War 3; so an announcement with a CGI teaser wasn't surprising or exciting. Quite frankly it felt like a waste of time and money. There was also a no show for Wipeout HD, which I recently read has a severe technical problem no one at Sony can figure out as of yet. A statement from SCEE hopes to have the game available by Xmas. Long delay eh? However the biggest disappointment was lack of information on the new Twisted Metal game for PS3, which David Jaffe acknowledge was in the works. Come to think of it, was he even there?

All in all E3 2008 was alright. I really appreciated all the demonstrations of very polished looking games we got to see. However, if E3 2007 was a shadow of its formal self then E3 2008 was a casket prep. Either bring it back in a meaningful way or kill the best so studios, journalist and gamers do not waste their time or money.