I'm honored to be a part of E3 history. I'd have never thought that anyone would displace Sony's infamous 2006 press conference, where they announced the price of the Playstation 3 to a surprised gasp from the audience. That conference also spawned various internet memes like "Riiiiidge Racer", "hitting weak points for massive damage", and "real time weapon switching". But a challenger comes! Ubisoft's 2009 E3 mostly content-free snoozefest didn't just lower the bar. It buried it deep and then zoned a landfill over it.

Things got off to a rocky start with various French businessmen droning on about confluence and convergence and online services called U Play, U Share, U Win, U Help, and U Shop (my response: "No U"). Then James Cameron came out - yes, James Cameron! - and spoke for nearly fours hours about some sort of fantasy RPG campaign he runs on Friday nights. Actually, it turns out it was all just the backstory to Avatar, his upcoming 3D cartoon which features characters like CG pipeline, a space marine, a "smokin' hot action character", ten-foot-tall blue giants, viperwolves, and the military/industrial complex. Apparently Ubisoft is doing a game based on Avatar. At least, I hope they are, because otherwise, Cameron totally crashed their press conference to pimp his movie.

Then came an unconvincing Red Steel 2 demo, in which the lead designer waved around a Sensor Motion Plus Wiimote to make lots of slashing happen onscreen so that the bad guys eventually fell down (I'm more convinced than ever a good swordfighting game on the Wii is impossible). Then another Shaun White snowboarding game called World Stage. Then an awesome awkward technical gaffe stranded the host of Talk Soup and Pele - yes, Pele! -on stage. Pele had to fill time by talking in Portuguese about how much he cares about the children of the world. Eventually the technical problems were ironed out and we were treated to a trailer for Academy of Champions Football (i.e. Soccer), in which Harry Potter-esque kids in a Hogwarts-esque academy play a Quidditch-esque game of football (i.e. soccer).

Then came the same Splinter Cell: Conviction trailer and demo that everyone had seen earlier in the day at Microsoft's press conference, followed by the terrible Ruse trailer we've already seen and laughed at a few months ago. The trailer features a pair of male models who wouldn't know an RTS from an RPG. They're playing Ruse, a World War II real time strategy game, on a giant iPhone table that will not ship with the game, much less be invented in any meaningful way any time soon.

Then came an interminable presentation about the Imagine brand's new Tween 2.0 line-up in which young girls can raise virtual hamsters and design jewelry that they can then send off for. A new fitness gamed called Your Shape will take a picture of you and then gauge how fat you are to customize a workout program in which you can win gold trophies in categories like Leg Modification. True story.

There was a very brief respite from awfulness during a Rabbids Go Home presentation. The game seems like Katamari Damacy with a customizable rabbid who lives inside your Wiimote. You can abuse him in horrible ways and then send him out into the game, humiliated and misshapen, to gather stuff, bonk dogs, and rip people's clothes off. True story!

Finally, the whole twelve-hour affair wrapped up with a look at a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game that plays like Super Smash Brothers, no look whatsoever at No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, and a look at a cinematic from Assassin's Creed 2 that's just a set up for a humorless instance of that scene in Indiana Jones when Indy sighs and shoots the swordfighter with his gun rather than taking him on hand-to-hand.

And throughout the entire evening, everyone mispronounced the company's name as YOO-bi-soft.