This was my first E3, so I didn’t quite know what to expect.  In many ways, it was like Comic-Con with less cosplay and more suits.  I’ll post more on my impressions soon, but here’s a start (since we began at the Sony booth).

Actually played with the Sony Move.  The exhibitor had a lousy “you’re doing it all wrong!” attitude and actually snatched it out of my hand (twice) to show me how to play golf as Tiger Woods with it. Well, of course we (myself and two classmates I was with) were “doing it wrong”.  It’s a new interface and we were exploring what it could do.  If it was as truly intuitive as Sony was hoping, there wouldn’t be this sense of “right or wrong”.  There was a very bad latency issue with the Move, something I’ve never gotten with the Wii (and let’s face it, the Move looks and acts just like a Wii-mote. I’ve yet to see any reason to expect anything else from it).

Another Exhibitor showcasing a Toy Story shooting gallery game told me that there was going to be Move-specific downloadable content (in the form of little gamelets that branch from a major release), but it seems that this was not fully thought through.  There didn’t seem to a be a Move-Specific gamelet for DC Universe Online or Assassin’s Creed or even Little Big Planet 2.  All in all, it seems that the Sony Move is not a fully thought out concept on Sony’s part and just an attempt to grab at the “cool interface” mojo of games.

Proving just how much of a late adapter I can be, I’m writing this from my iPhone as I walk to lunch. And yes, that WAS a building column that I almost just walked into.

Okay, I will admit that I have been keeping track of my comic books since I was a kid.  Initially,  I kept a log of the purchases in a loose-leaf binder-one page per title and I would note the issue number, month and year of publication (and, yes, I still have this notebook).  The initial idea behind this was to have a record of all comic purchases for insurance coverage (back in the day when there was an actual potential resale market for comic back issues – pre-1990s).  Despite the decline of that market, it still helps to have a record of a collection. Nowadays, however, I’ve upgraded to logging my comics in a database (which has quite a few more data fields than my old notebook).  There are databases on the market for book collecting, record collecting, and even game collecting, but oddly enough, the comic-specific database selection is slight.  I have found one that I particularly like and so I’m sharing it here.

The database is called, appropriately enough, Comic Collector.  The company behind it started in the late ’90s with a fun little database for CDs called “Keep It Compact” which I had used then to keep track of my then-growing CD collection.  I stayed with the company through various version upgrades and eventually they expanded their line.  I jumped at Comic Collector.  The one drawback of this software, for me, is that a Mac-compatible version has never been released (and there are no plans for a release).  It has been great for Windows users, though, and Collectorz is working on a browser-based, platform independent version.

Yes, I’ve finally set up a  WordPress.com blog because I liked the interface and the flexibility.  Give me time, I’ll be revving up to blog more often on here.