Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the 2003 list of nominees from the Game Critics Best Of E3 Awards. This conglomeration of journalists from most of the major magazines and websites will announce the winners on June 10th, but the nomination statistics show some interesting trends, with the army tactical combat game Full Spectrum Warrior the most-nominated title, and the PC leading the nominee breakdown by platform, closely followed by PS2, Xbox, and then Gamecube.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out a Computer And Video Games article interviewing Yuji Naka, boss of Sonic Team and creator of Nights and Sonic The Hedgehog. He discusses the shown-at-E3 Sonic Heroes, the forthcoming Gamecube exclusive Billy Hatcher, and also deals with the fact that a Sonic Team employee jumped ship to work at Naughty Dog with notably sharp words - "Some of the details [on the original Sonic games] ..were done by the guy who's working on Jak and Daxter right now. He was involved until Sonic 3, and after that for eight years he didn't do anything in Sega, so he was quite useless in Sega. We really didn't need him." Elsewhere, Naka interestingly reveals that Billy Hatcher started life as a four-player fighting game.

Thanks to Voodoo Extreme for pointing to GamingNext's new interview with Gabe Newell of Valve Software - he's the managing director and co-founder of the company currently working on Half-Life 2. Topics include the scalability of the Source graphics engine: "A lot of the tricky work in Source is getting it to work across a wide variety of scenes (indoor, urban, outdoor) and across a wide variety of hardware. Not only do you have to run acceptably fast on a TNT or an Intel 810 based PC, but you have to fully exploit the capabilities of the current and next generation high-end cards." On a related note, the 500+MB Half-Life 2 gameplay/engine demo (BitTorrent link) from E3 is a must-download if you haven't seen it yet.

Thanks to Shacknews for pointing to the Computer and Video Games site, which has an interview with Eiji Aonuma, the project director of Zelda:The Wind Waker for Gamecube. Among the subjects discussed are a Wind Waker sequel, of which Aonuma says: "..as I did between Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, I will use the same engine and the same graphics of Wind Waker for its sequel. However, I do plan on powering everything up a bit." He suggests the sequel should be playable for E3 2004, and also discusses other subjects, including the choice of cel-shading and puzzle design for the original Wind Waker.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that several sites have now posted their Best Of E3 awards, including Gamespy's Top 25 awards, and separate best-ofs from IGN PS2, IGN Xbox, and IGN Cube. Oh, and the Gamespy editors also found a grilled cheese sandwich to be one of their biggest E3 highlights.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the announcement on the official Blizzard website that "..we have decided to extend our StarCraft: Ghost development schedule." The tactical-action game being developed by Nihilistic for all 3 major consoles will now come out in 2004, and the official site at Blizzard has more details, including a number of new E3 previews.

Courtesy of PlanetGamecube, we have their recently-typed-up E3 interview with Denis Dyack, the boss of Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness), who are currently working on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for Gamecube. This enhanced remake of the original Metal Gear Solid for Playstation is due out for Xmas 2003, and Dyack gives some hints as to how the original's content may be enhanced - "If you think about the first game and how it's all set up, and then think about the dynamics of the second game, it should be a completely new experience."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamespot news story indicating that the console (PS2 and Xbox) versions of Star Wars Galaxies are now on hold. Although they were announced at E3 in 2002, and may appear eventually, a Lucasarts spokesman said of the MMORPG: "We are currently focusing all of our efforts on the successful launch of the PC version of Star Wars Galaxies." Meanwhile, the Star Wars Galaxies official site at its publisher, Sony, has links to some new mini-previews and E3-released gameplay movies from this title, which also has a thorough fanpage at RPGPlanet.

Thanks to Janko for pointing out a press release at Reporters Without Borders denouncing the US authorities for deporting French games journalists sent to cover E3. The complaint alleges that "..these journalists were treated like criminals - subjected to several body searches, handcuffed, locked up and fingerprinted", after arriving in Los Angeles on (arguably misleading) tourist visas to cover the E3 trade show. It doesn't seem to have been just the French, either - messageboard reports indicate at least 5 British journalists from a variety of publications had a similar treatment. Who'd have thought attending E3 could be so.. dangerous?

Thanks to Gamespot for this story confirming Eidos' Fear Effect:Inferno is officially 'on hold'. The third in the series of Resident Evil-styled 3rd-person action titles was shown at E3 in 2002, but not this year. It was recently rumored in development at Crystal Dynamics (home of Legacy Of Kain) instead of former developer Kronos Digital, but apparently progress has stopped for now. The first two games were particularly known for salacious marketing - thanks to Gamerspress for saving this advert for Fear Effect 2 which pretty much says it all.

Arathorn writes "TheOneRing.net has a Quicktime movie up of just over a minute's worth of live footage from Return of The King , as shown at E3. The quality's pretty abysmal, but it gives a much-needed taster of what RoTK's going to look like. The soundtrack (such as it is) is from the final act of The Two Towers." Update: 05/21 18:47 GMT by T : Reader Adam Roben has set up a BitTorrent session as well.

cethiesus writes "It seems Gamespy has posted their top ten picks from the 1903 E3 convention. Booth babes and magic lanterns, mmm." You've got to like the look of that high-tech 'dual monocle' technology, and may also be delighted to see that Duke Nukem Forever jokes were alive and well even at the dawn of the 20th Century.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to this interview with Chris Jelinek of Capcom, done by the unofficial SNK-Capcom.com site while they were at E3. The confirmed news in this article seems to be that the 3D Capcom Fighting All-Stars has been cancelled (although we never get a direct quote from Jelinek himself about it), but after much poking and prodding from the interviewer, Mr.Jelinek also mentions that they're considering a 'Vs. Vs' title, and gives the possible example of "Take, in theory, Batman vs. Spiderman.." So, DC. Vs. Marvel Vs. Capcom? With this blatant rumor, the stage is set for either rejoicing amongst Capcom fighting game fanboys, or derision amongst those fed up with Capcom recycling Street Fighter II for 10 years or more.

Now that E3 is done and the press have gone home, they're consolidating all their E3 reports into handy indexes. Here's the massive Gamespot index listing all the titles they covered, here's the IGN index for E3, and you can also try the Gamespy E3 index or a multitude of others via Gametab News. Do you have a 'best in show' for E3, or at least a roundly ignored game that people may have missed amidst the hype?

Thanks to an anonymous reader for sending us a link to Rare's official site, recently updated with screenshots, teaser/trailer movies and info about their three newly announced titles for the Xbox, following Microsoft's purchase of Rare for anything up to $500 million late last year. We covered Kameo, Grabbed By The Ghoulies, and Conker:Live And Uncut briefly in our E3 Microsoft overview last week, but there's extra info here, including the fact that the Conker title, besides Xbox Live multiplayer, also "..consists of the classic solo outing Conker's Bad Fur Day, here not only in its entirety but actually expanded with extra footage that didn't make the original cut." It seems Microsoft will let Rareware put back in certain things which Nintendo made them leave out?

Courtesy of IGN, who extracted the pictures from Nintendo's official E3 press booklet, comes pictures and more details of the Game And Watch E-Cards, the collectible data cards which you can swipe through your E-Reader add-on in order to load in classic G+W games. Although there's already Game And Watch 4 for GBA and several prequels for Gameboy, these e-cards look to include classic, if basic titles never converted to Nintendo's new-school portable gaming platform. Neat stuff.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out a patch for the PC version of Enter The Matrix, just a couple of days after its release, and a FAQ which rather horrifyingly orders you that "The Vampires should be dispatched in the rooms you find them in" to stop the game from crashing completely. If you add to this the almost complete lack of official reviews, do we get a still-decent game that simply happened to stealthily launch in the week of E3 (when nobody was around to review it), or a rushed license that's deliberately trying to take advantage of gamers who buy based on subject matter? Spoiler-free opinions welcome, especially from those who've bought the game.

So the E3 Expo in Los Angeles is finally done, and we wrap up our coverage with a look at the best of the other booths at the show, from Activision through Take Two to Eidos. Plus, we take a quick trawl round the evil troglodytic dungeon that is the Kentia Hall, deep below the main expanses of E3. Read on for info on virtual ping-pong, Starsky And Hutch, and Futurama....

Getting close to finishing up our three-day stint at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, this time we turn our attention to the Namco booth. So read on for info about Spawn, I-Ninja, and the can't-come-out-soon-enough Soul Calibur II..

Continuing with brief hands-on impressions from the most interesting booths at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, we turn our attention to Konami. Read on for info about Castlevania, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Gradius, Metal Gear, and more..