Electronic Entertainment Expo - E3 2009

As everyone’s mind moves from E3 and looks towards the next big games show in Germany we wanted to close off the E3 story with some great news from the judges from the event. As you’ll have seen from all the coverage so far people are pretty impressed with both Nitro and SHIFT but both games had particularly good sessions with the judges.

Need for Speed Nitro was voted Best Racing Game for Wii & DS by the guys at IGN.com where they said: “Nitro didn't have much competition this E3, but rather than taking a "default" spot on our best of E3 it defined the category. Bringing an all new development team, engine, and visual style Nitro is 100% Wii, and it's the start of something great for EA and Nintendo's console. Blazing fast visuals (60 frames per second) mixed with some classic arcade drifting to create a package that's more Burnout than classic NFS. It may be alone in its category, but it would have topped the lot regardless.”

IGN.com were big fans of SHIFT as they crowned it the Best Racing Game for PS3 at E3. In their summary they said: “There was a lot of good competition on the racing front this year, but Need for Speed SHIFT outpaced everything else thanks to its incredible dashboard view. Your vision blurs, kicks and reels with smacks from other cars and the environment, and the engine feedback even while you're racing clean is top-notch. All other racers need to take note at how to handle a realistic driving perspective.”

After E3 the Nielsen group ran a survey to find out which games had impressed people enough for them to become ‘instant buys’ upon their release and both SHIFT and Nitro were in the top ten for the most interesting games at the show beating such games as Beatles Rock Band.

At E3, Need for Speed SHIFT held a competition to win a brand new BMW M3. Mitchell Francis was the eventual winner but we wanted to show you some highlights of the competition.  Check out our video at NeedforSpeed.com...

Congratulations to Mitchell Francis, the winner of the Need for Speed SHIFT Hero Car Competition at E3.

Mitchell was at work when he got the call that he had made it to the finals of the Need for Speed SHIFT Hero Car competition. He just left work, came down to E3 and won! After he won he had to call work to tell his boss why he left and that he won. don't worry though, he still has his job.

We'll be posting complete coverage of the competition in the next few days so keep your eye on needforspeed.com.

While a lot of stands at E3 rely on booth babes and loud noise to attract people we decided to go another route and held a competition where the best SHIFT driver could leave the show in the driving seat of their very own BMW M3. Unsurprisingly this was very popular with 100's of people taking part in the competition over the past couple of days.

This afternoon the pressure builds as we pick the gamers with the best four times to race again using the BMW M3 GT2 around Autopolis; all four of them knowing only three people are between them and one of BMW's finest cars.

For more details on this competition, visit needforspeed.com.

Day 1 Results

Day 2 Results

Part 1
Greetings again from E3. Today I got to meet Mario and Sonic! Man, I know this is a bit immature of me but I've always wanted to meet Mario. Not so much Sonic but Mario; I tried to tell him to give up on the Princess but he wouldn't listen to me.

Anyways, I spend most of the morning at the EA Booth watching people play Need for Speed SHIFT and Need for Speed Nitro. I love watching people play the game as it really seems like people are enjoying playing them. I was chatting with Jesse earlier and he told me that yesterday he had to (very politely) kick a guy off one of the demo machines because he had been playing for half an hour.

There a couple other things going on here that I can't tell you about until tomorrow but it's been exciting and tomorrow you'll understand why. Today I plan on venturing out onto the E3 floor and finally start checking out some of the other booths here at E3.

I'll let you know how my journey goes later on today...

Part 2
My attempt to leave the EA Booth got as far as half way to the West Wing.  After I took a quick break for lunch I was walking over to the West wing to check out the Sony and Activisions booths.  I really want to go check out Blur and see if I could get my hands on God of War 2.  Unfortunately it wasn't to be...as I walked by our second Need for Speed booth in the corridor between the south and west I saw an opportunity to sit down and chat with a couple of our other NFS Booth Ladies.

Not being one to pass up an opportunity when it presents itself, I took the time to sit down and chat with them.  Kindall and Tanya were realy ncie and fun to chat to.  I asked them if they would be willing to talk to the camera a it for all you Need for Speed fans and they were happy to do it.  You'll see those videos on needforspeed.com in the next couple days, we still have the interview with Jo-Jo to show you.

After a bit, Kindall and Tanya had to get back to the booth considering that they were working, I then went onto with my original purpose to visit the booths in the west hall.  I GOT INTERCEPTED!  A fellow co-worker of mine says "DUDE!  We've been looking for you.  We need you to go back to the booth and get some footage of the [can't tell you yet] so we can [can't tell you yet]."  Being the good guy that I am, of course I went back and took the footage.

It doesn't help that the footage I got was for something very cool that we're going to tell you about tomorrow.

Until then...cheers!

- NFSDrew

During another hectic day I ran into SHIFT's Lead Designer, Andy Tutor and managed to pull him away from the stand floor for a few seconds for a quick interview. It's very brief but you can tell Andy's having a good time.

Visit needforspeed.com to watch the video.

Jesse has been super busy all day but he took the time out to talk to us about Need for Speed at E3.  Visit NeedforSpeed.com to watch the video.

NFSDrew\'s Video Blog

Part 1

This is the first time I've been to E3 and I have to say it is AWESOME! It's completely crazy. When the doors opened that was a horde of people rushing in to get in.

The first thing I wanted to check out was how people we reacting to SHIFT and Nitro. So far the reactions have been really good. Most people are blown away by SHIFT and were super excited to finally get their hands on it. Everyone who played Nitro had a great fun and were pretty hesitant to move on to the next game.

Overall, the first couple hours have been pretty cool. I'm now I'm going to go give away some VIP passes to the NOS Energy Drink / Need for Speed VIP party on Wednesday night.

Part 2

Wow, what are awesome day.  I didn't really get the chance to venture outside of the EA Booth but I enjoyed myself none the less.

Since my last blog I've been pretty busy.  For most of the day I wanted to get some coverage of people enjoying NFS SHIFT and NFS Nitro.  Most of the people who came over and played the game really loved it and went as far to say that it rivals Gran Turismo.

I also finally got some time to sit down with a couple of our lovely booth ladies Jo Jo Chen and Ellen Deng.  You're be able to watch those interviews on needforspeed.com tomorrow.  And don't worry, I'm not in-frame.

When I got the few free moments I did have during the day, I tried out Brutal Legend.  That game is going to be epic!  I only played it for ten minutes but it was enough time to decide that I am absolutely going to buy it when it comes out.

I don't know if you've heard, but NOS Energy Drink and Need for Speed are hosting a invite only VIP party tomorrow night starting at 8pm.  I have a few extra passes for this party and today I tried to give them away through twitter.  What I did was send out tweets detailing where I was on the show floor and the first person to find me won the passes.  Only one person found me today and I didn't make it hard.  If you want a chance to get passes follow @NFSDrew on twitter and watch my tweets tomorrow.

That's about all for today.  Tomorrow is going to be a super busy day so I'm going to sign off for today and head back to my hotel.

-NFSDrew