Lunch at the Tech Museum Cafe is always a pleasure - and we considered the tiny companion a bonus. That is - until we realized that the room we were sitting in was actually infested with these crawly little guys. So we moved to the main room, with its sunny view of the park and passing conference-goers.

Every year I do a crawl of the booths to see how the GDC compares to E3 in terms of shameless and embarrassing promotions, babes, and graphic displays of violence and gore. Overall, I came away from the show feeling that with the exception of a few die-hard idiots, quality was up, and taste was improving

NVidia is definitely brining up the rear in the booth advertising category. Last year they had a van with this girl on the side, driving all over town. This year, they added some direct-gaze sex-me-please animations to her reel, and of course, leather pants (???). How fitting that the object rendering next to her vulva is a pig. 

Microsoft's campaign certainly took the cake, though.

There were miniature cut-outs of this character all over the wireless area - I grabbed a bunch and scanned one in.


Here she is, front and back.

Where to start? The body on this character was totally unrealistic. She's phallic, faceless. And the design on her dress looks like bizarre alien handprints... so she looks like she's been felt up by frogmen from Mars... who've been reading the newspaper.

I'll give you three guesses what her male companion looks like. Handsome face? Muscles? Bare chest? Not even. A boxy shadow with no features. In case you can't imagine that - here he is ... on the invitation to the Women in Development party. Am I ready to do things I've never done before? Like... to do that guy?

"Meet me on the Corner of Main and Unexpected... for a blowjob."

I'm thinking of bringing 3 of the breast-tastic stand-ups to E3, and handing them out to particularly lame booths - calling it the "Boobie Prize".

One product demo featured a herd of smooth-poly horses being knocked down (shot down?) by some unseen force - demonstrating the amazing realism of their deaths. It was absurd. Other demonstrations of this amazing leap forward in physics? A guy being thrown into a wall at high speed, and one dude kicking another dude in the nuts. All with the same smooth plastic-looking mannequin modeling style.

The girl in front of the hundreds of menus also cracked me up.

"Hi - how would you like to use THIS piece of software?"

ATI's booth (a stone cold repeat of last year) still maintained that grunge-rock tatoo and extreeeeeeeeeem sports feel. Nothing like a bunch of razor-lined logos to communicate the TOTAL GUT WRENCHING POWER of your ground effects, chrome exhaust pipes and spoilers. I mean, "graphics solutions".

Also saw Gordon staring intently at a laptop over in the Sony Online booth - cleverly hiding the rack of their totally lame boobie-mage of double-d might. Anyone who can explain what's going on in that last photo will earn my undying admiration. WTF?

Two photos from the front lines - first, Jeff and some relatively inoffensive, but still geek-bait babes who wanted to sell me something I don't need or want.

The second - Sean, my crawl companion two years running - with Noah, at the Facade booth!

The designers of ICO talked about their philosophy of subtractive design, and how they maintained artistic visions and aesthetic goals over the course of a long development cycle. The movies they showed during this presentation were spectacular, moving, and really conveyed a dedication to the "boy meets girl" story, tenderness, and vision. A real treat!

And here are Mahk and Andrew - just after winning their IGF award. I happened to come to the show just as they were being interviewed and photographed - what wonderful timing!

CONGRATULATIONS, Team Oasis!!!