So, thanks to an acceptance letter to a certain school in LA, a super cool sister, a super cool game artist person, and other super cool people and objects, and not thanks to work that is due this week at said school, I was able to go to E for all for part of a day this year. Now that I got that outta the way, I just wanted to put my own experience into words. It did feel a little empty on the expo floor, and there wasn't anything that hadn't already been seen at one or two other shows before this, so I played my rock bands, got my swags (mostly non-game related stuff oddly), and got a picture with chobot, and by then there was only bout an hour left to go. So I decided that with said remaining hour I'd bite the bullet and wait in the long line to play Smash brothers since I hadn't tried it out yet. In the end I waited about 35 minutes to play it, I played it, was kinda pissed at using the wiimote controller to play it, but liked the gameplay and got a odd yet cool looking nintendo shirt, and then hung out with dtoid people afterward. But most of that is beside the point.

While waiting in said line, I met up with this kid who lined up behind me. I'd say given his size, voice pitch, and empathy for pokemon, he was probably about 12 years old. Normally I set aside the scaring away of little children for other events, he seemed quite friendly and entusiastic about smash so I asked him how many times he had been through to play the game. He said he this will have been his seventh time through, and that in his past play throughs, he had won half of his first round plays, and out of those three, had won the "championship round" once out of that. He then went on to show me that he was wearing three of the cool yet odd nintendo shirts, each over the other, and then noted that his parents had the other three.

Finally, he went on and embelished me with a story of how he was from Canada and that he saw E for all was being held in Los Angeles and how disappointed he was that he wasn't going to be able to go to it, but then how his family decided that they'd make the plane trip down to L.A. just this last Thursday and how excited he was about coming down here. And trust me, given how much he'd cheer when someone who chose pikachu to play as, or when the guy using yoshi got the powerball thingy (which acording to him yoshis is by far the best), this kid was not disappointed at the number of people or developers that showed up at E for all. It was when I realized this that perhaps, E for all isn't really meant for gamers on the hardcore spectrum. Rather, it really is E for all: for the non-gamer who hasn't been able to try out a wii and just wanted to try out wii sports, or the rhythm game player who hasn't had the chance to check out rock band, or like this kid who got his chance at a life time to go to a video game expo and play the shit outta a game he was really psyched about. If that's what its all about, then I'm glad E for all happened. Even if it wasn't necessarily everything I expected, doesn't mean it wasn't what I felt when I was in disneyland at a kid...pure exileration and a endless desire to wait in line to go again.