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And when E3 had kicked my ass, I found myself in Kentia Hall, looking for a place to rest. I found the Pyramat booth. The Pyramat is a . . . mat that you roll out and lie down on. The part where you rest your head is equipped with a slightly huge speaker. Your whole body can and will vibrate when you hook this thing up to your game system. The Pyramat people were kind enough to answer all my questions. For example, yes, you can use the Pyramat's speakers as a part of your surround-sound system. I played Halo for a little bit against a young girl with an "Exhibitor" badge. Whether or not she was with the Pyramat people, I don’t know. She sure kicked my ass over and over again. Which wasn't quite fair -- we were playing the cooperative two-player mode. On the final level, no less. After three deaths and respawns, I started shooting at her, too. It got ugly.
All the while, I was eerily pleased by how nicely the Pyramat's behind-the-head speakers reminded me of headphones. Big, loud, strong headphones. As part of a surround-sound system, this would rock. As a mat for lying on -- well, it's most definitely more comfortable than the concrete I was sleeping on when homeless in Tokyo. Okay, so maybe that's not the nicest way to put it. In fact, I might as well say that it was comfortable as can be. On a winter night, with a blanket, beneath my big screen television, when no one else is around, I'd rest on this thing, feeling like I've been inserted feet-first into, oh, Metroid Prime. That's good gaming.
Even better gaming, however, would result from playing game of the show 2003 F-Zero GX in tiny Japanese company Masaya's Mushaburui Racing Cockpit Simulator. Click the link for a picture of this sturdy, rugged product -- and even a picture of their sturdy, rugged T-shirt -- and come home a better man than before. I played a round of Gran Turismo 3, and it was like heaven. Though the unit set up for demo-ing was not complete in most ways, and the game screen was a computer monitor, I could picture a 65-inch plasma television and F-Zero, and I was near tears when sales manager Takafumi Umezawa selected a rally course and a Subaru Impreza WRX STi -- my favorite car on earth.
After I found the experience wholly pleasant and received the best free T-shirt of E3 2003, Mr. Umezawa answered plenty of my questions. They were working on a flight simulator option, 5.1 channel speaker stands with which to equip your chair, an LCD monitor stand, a vibration feedback chair pad, and the kicker: a Steel Battalion adaptor. Count my heart be-still. And read about it all here.
This chair has potential. The Logitech Gran Turismo 3 steering wheel is one thing; when used in conjunction with this chair -- which has a perfectly positioned platform for placing the pedals -- a large enough television, and F-Zero GX, you have a gaming experience that might make you vomit with joy. Face it: you, like me, are probably not going to be purchasing an F-Zero AX machine any time soon.
This is all well and good for F-Zero; it's when you tell me that I'll be able to fit a Steel Battalion controller in this and play Steel Battalion: Line of Contact on Xbox Live that I start to lose it. When I was at the Microsoft Booth, I thought that the neat setups they had for the new Steel Battalion were the ultimate way to play the game. Well, count me wrong. While Microsoft's E3 setup was certainly more comfortable than the only way I'd ever played the game -- in a soundproof-ish booth at Akihabara's AsoBitCity, day after slaving day, perched on a bench-bar one-quarter the thickness of my ass -- it doesn't hold a candle what I'm envisioning would be the Mushaburui experience.
If you paid $200 for Steel Battalion, you owe it to yourself to buy one of these. If you've owned and loved a Gran Turismo and always been cautious about buying a steering wheel because you don't know where you'd put the damned thing -- here you go, right here. The Masaya Mushaburui beats out the Pyramat for best of Kentia Hall -- and, hell, let's call it best peripheral of E3.
Now, if some Capcom person-in-power chances across this page and loves my writing enough to send me a free Steel Battalion -- well, coupled with my soon-to-purchase F-Zero GX, I'd have to shoot myself if I didn't get a Mushaburui sometime soon. Ahh. Now that would be good gaming.
Metro 3D's Smash Cars for the PS2, which Eric-Jon, Doug Jones, and myself played for an hour before the show floor opened on day one, is good gaming as well. Like a Mario Kart game with RC cars, with interesting graphics and nice physics, the game pleased me thoroughly. There's a nice, quiet joy in playing even the one-player mode. It's a checkpoint race game. The courses would be most accurately described as "environments." I'm mentioning it last because I'd feel wrong to lose it in the middle of this heap of writing. As the first game I played at E3, it deserves to be the last -- and not least -- mentioned. It is also worth mentioning that the little remote-controlled cars set up in the Metro 3D booth were an ungodly amount of fun -- an amount of fun soon to be my own, for Datel -- of all people -- were giving away the little things for free. It is by mentioning those little cars, winners of the freebie I didn't remember until two weeks after E3, and then more-than-thoroughly enjoyed award, that I avoid the typical "E3 was . . ." closing sentence in this, my first-ever E3 report. I'll see you next year, with a hopefully more-refined style.
We didn’t Get Kojima. The most we got was Penny Arcade -- and one Mr. Uchiyama. Thank you for reading, anyway.
--tim rogers will kill you and the night
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