Friends, gamers, countrymen, I come not to bury E3, but to praise it. People far and wide have indeed been saying that the show "sucked." Gamesindustry.biz reported that David Perry, founder of Shiny Entertainment and chief creative officer at Acclaim, called the show "broken", "stupid" and an "embarrassment." Now now, David, I could say the same things about Shiny's masterpiece Enter the Matrix from 2003, but aren't you glad I'm not going to bring that up? We came back for Path of Neo in 2005, and we're glad we did. Come on, deep, cleansing breaths now.

Typical E3 critic

Because you see, this show most assuredly did not suck. The format was a little strange, sure. You could even make an argument that the format sucked. But just as the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal, the format is not the show. The show, in fact, is the games. Remember them? As it turns out, the games this year are really goddamn good. True, there was no antic circus-like atmosphere and there was not punishingly loud music pumping from five million speakers all playing different EXTREME things. Also there were no hot chicks in fur bikinis with swords, and there were no full-sized wrestling rings or fire eaters or giant fake dungeons or half-pipes. And yes, this lack of baroque bullshit means less airtime on CNN during the week of the show. But that doesn't mean the mainstream media aren't paying attention. They're just consuming it as intended, as a preview of what's coming down the pike this fall during the heart of the AAA Q4 video game release season. The deep game bloggers cover it for the people who (like me) follow this stuff closely. However, CNN's audience doesn't care about the new Prince of Persia game until it comes out and their nephew is whining for it.

I'm not going to try to spin the absence of booth babes as a good thing.

At the old, crazy E3 I saw grown men wait on three-hour lines to see games that have to do with cute blue hedgehogs. This was disturbing. And journalistically, the old E3 was the end of days. It was the place where productivity went to die, an arena where spectacle trumped content and everyone played to the lowest common denominator. At this year's show, Sony was demoing a game called Flower. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen done with software. One of its creators described it to me as a "poem in game form." It contains no guns, swords or Japanese people wearing superfluous buckles, and Sony made the courageous decision to back it anyway. Would you like to know what happens to a game like Flower at the old E3? It crawls into a corner and sobs until the pain stops because someone has curb-stomped it. The old E3 was all the worst parts of nerd culture mashed up with all the worst parts of frat culture. When these two natural enemies join forces it can only presage the eldritch touch of Satan. Imagine a giant steaming helping of brain-dead rah-rah awesome bro 'tude combined with sweaty, hygenically challenged man-children futilely chasing their ever-receding childhoods. The old E3 was a three-day migraine with a side order of Asperger's Syndrome, which turns out is neither pretty nor pleasant. Plus, some of us were trying to get work done. Seriously, no one likes a good party more than me, but a good party has to ebb and flow or people get exhausted. The old E3 was like a four-day bender with your friend who just discovered how awesome crystal meth is. It's entertaining at first, then it gets tiring, then annoying, then scary, then you wake up in jail without your pants.

Fire dancers, contrary to popular belief, do not enhance one's appreciation of video games.

Now, I will grant you that the new E3 is small, and holding a small event in the gi-freaking-gantic Los Angeles Convention Center makes it feel more like an optometrist's convention than a weekend at Burning Man, but I think the ladies doth protest too much. The people whining about E3 sucking smell fearful and defensive and worried about their own place in the hierarchy of coolness. Like this party wasn't anywhere near extreme enough for them. News flash: The places you go don't define you; the thoughts you think about them do. Get some freaking nuance and go play some games. Anyone who pines for the old E3 isn't paying enough attention to what was being shown at the new E3.