E FREE

Hideous as this may sound, I've not picked up a game for about a month. My 360 coughs under the weight of dust and my DS lies forlorn in the drawer under my TV. I've not been a good dad. Sorry guys.
It's not that I don't want to play games. Far from it. I've just not had any time to play games. My day job at Bauer Consumer Media of running the MATCH website has kept me busy, while my bosses have given me extra responsibility with MATCH's books and specials publications, which I hasten to add I'm loving. This has meant I'm working most nights once my little man is in bed, so that's why my 360 hasn't been turned on for weeks.
But I have been keeping up with all things gaming while I've been relentlessly busy. I laughed at this Wii Fat tee, tried out the new Double Dragon arcade machine where I work (FREE CREDITS!) and remembered just how button-mashing it really was, and also checked out the E3 rumour mill.
Ah, E3. Happy memories of tired feet, hangovers, Cali girls and the jamboree that was the Nintendo press conference. I did five E3 shows while I was on Nintendo Official Magazine. In my first year Nintendo unveiled Pikmin as their big title. Other years I played the DS for the first time, sampled Mario Kart: Double Dash, F-Zero GX, Resi 4, the PSP, Animal Crossing, Pokémon after Pokémon, but my favourite of all was when they showed Twilight Princess for the first time. 2004, if memory serves me right. My colleagues and I were going apeshit. A term I don't use too often, as readers who come down my way will testify, but it was like manna from heaven seeing Link ride out and hack and slash his way across the giant screens. The place was going mental. And I mean MENTAL. When the lights came up no one could believe it.
E3 was a relentlessly busy experience and one year, 2003 I think, we stayed in the middle of the ghetto. Oh, and I got so blasted on Long Island Iced Teas one night that I woke up, over an hour late for my interview with Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima. It was a day from hell as the din of hundreds of consoles made me want to curl up and die.
But that year I got a very special treat as EA took us on from LA to San Francisco for a few more days. Lord of the Rings, Tiger Woods and more were demoed to us in EA's giant Redwood Studios monster-of-a-building.
But that's not the best games press trip ever. That was with Ubisoft to see their F1 game in Montreal. That included getting lost on skidoos in the Canadian mountains around the time Blair Witch came out. That wasn't scary at all!