Here is what I can tell you about Dragon Quest VIII: It is cel-shaded, and there are Slimes in it.



We like Slimes. Has there ever been a less threatening enemy in an RPG? I'd say perhaps only the Foppies from Earthbound even come close, but Foppies don't smile genially at you, and they have feet, which could theoretically be used to kick. So: no, there hasn't.



Namco had an actual "katamari" at their booth that was mounted on a big pole and could therefore be "rolled." If you gave something to the Namco representative nearby, he would stick it to the katamari. Anything I could write about how great that was would be pointless, because all the joy in the world can be seen on my face in this picture, and also on my many chins.



Now, as we near the end of this enormous E3 feature, we do what you always do at the end of E3: you go, "oh crap, I forgot to go to Kentia Hall!" Kentia Hall is the affordable, unpredictable place in the convention for the small companies, foreign niche developers, trinket distributors and inscrutable half-baked wacky crap to finally get the attention they may or may not deserve. I bet you can guess which category this product falls under! It's a motion-tracking "virtual-reality" helmet and gun combination that allow you to play an awkward, expensive round of Halo. The gun is a simple modified lightgun with no tracking features and about 11 less buttons than it takes to play Halo, and the helmet doesn't even simulate 3D. It's just two tiny LCDs that display the same thing. It's kinda fun to look around the game world with it, but it's also kinda fun to blindfold yourself and spin around until you fall over, which is actually pretty much the exact same thing as this helmet product but way cheaper. The future isn't here yet, folks.



And here's another great way to do worse at your favorite video games: a DDR-style floor mat designed for fighting games. There are a whole host of reasons why that's just not as good an idea as it sounds (remember Sega's "Activator?" Anyone else ever try to play Street Fighter with a dance pad?) but I took this picture for one reason and one reason only: IT HAS A BUTTON MARKED "OW." There's one on the other side that says "OB" so I'm sure it's a meaningful acronym, but c'mon... it's a fighting game pad WITH AN "OW" BUTTON. That's funnier than most things that are funny on purpose.



Also available to endorkanize the nation's floors is RedOctane's line of dance pads. This metal one here costs $200 and features indented arrows, supposedly like the arcade pads; maybe I was just tired from walking around E3 for three days, but I kept tripping on the metal edges. RedOctane was also promoting their "more than just a ripoff" DDR ripoff In The Groove, which I'd actually recently played at an arcade. I grilled the poor RedOctane guy about their arcade version, which had confused me completely with things like unexplained USB ports and score ratings for "HAND" and "BOMB." Anyway, Laurie and I tried the game out on the hardest setting, and as a reward for our three-minute display of sweaty nerd energy, they presented us with their last two remaining promo T-shirts. As with most geeky promo T-shirts, it's too bad I'm not enormous! I don't know if time just slowed down for our exhausted asses or what, but here's a note to the designers of In The Groove: three minutes is WAY too long to be doing the things those arrows were asking us to do. Fun Fact: the In The Groove songlist seems to consist entirely of original songs from the development team and music that can be obtained for free on the internet, such as MC Frontalot's "Penny Arcade Theme." Whether or not this is a good thing is completely up to you.