Wooping Army gunships, genetically engineered show booth babes gussied up as vampires, supersized dudes weighed down by garish tchotchkes.... “Oh gawd,” said the Los Angeles locals as they rolled up their Hummer windows. “The gamers are back in town.”

That’s right, L.A. looky-loos—fear the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the annual game-biz trade show/cybercircus known less cumbersomely as E3 (which is what we’ll call it henceforth). And if you weren’t one of the 65,000 industry pros who trekked to this year’s 10th anniversary show at the sprawling Los Angeles Convention Center in mid-May, you didn’t miss anything—because we’re about to reveal all that was important.

More dazzling than last year’s expo, E3 2004 came alive with megagames—a mature-looking Zelda for GameCube, a playable Halo 2 (and news of its Nov. 9 release date) for Xbox, a polished Metal Gear Solid 3 for PlayStation 2, plus about 60 more hot titles you’ll read about later in the issue. But the biggest news came in the smallest packages: Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS portable game systems, both of which were unveiled and ready for play.

The only topic not under open discussion was the next generation of hardware from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. But guess what? We got them to talk about their next systems anyway. Flip the page for that info, full access to the show, and our rating for each system’s performance at the expo....

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Electronic Gaming Monthly.