And our GC06 Leipzig coverage is done! Oh, I've got other experiences to relate, and some of what I intended to write I ultimately didn't. I played the Wii... it was a surprising disappointment. I played God of War 2.... it's great, and exactly like the first. There were many booth babes and German sausages. There was much beer. But ultimately, I'm long gone, and I've said nearly all I have to say.

But in case you missed any aspect of it, here's a quick round-up of our GC06 Leipzig originals:

• GC06: If You Hate RTSes, What Do You Say To Bruce Shelley?
• GC06: English Training in German
• GC06: The Exhibitor Party
• GC06: Florian Eckhard Plays Wii Sports Golf
• GC06: So You Want To Be A German Guitar Hero?
• GC06: Battalion Wars 2, The Perils of the Wii and Ina the Nintendo Booth Babe
• GC06: A Very Special 'Preview' of Viva Pi ata
• What's Coming From GC06
• GC06: Major Nelson Alludes To Exciting Masturbatory Functions of Vision Cam!
• Great Conversations with Microsoft Booth Babes: Viva Pinata
• GC06: The Amazing World of Pong
• Great Conversations with Microsoft Booth Babes: The Halo Water Wheel
• GC2006: Settlers Booth Babes Build Road
• GC06: Halo's Water Hampster Wheel
• GC06: An Infinity of Gaming Mannequins
• GC2006: SOCOM 3 Booth Induces Myopia, Vertigo, Erectile Function
• XNA Goes Euro Collegiate, 360 Storms Soviet Bloc
• Microsoft's Upcoming Accessories, 360 Wireless Peripherals on PC by Fall
• Xbox 360 Owns Football, or FIFA07 and PES6 to Sony Denied
• GC06: The Wacky Words of Microsoft Game Studios' Chris Kimmel
• GC06: XBLA Community's Tiki Lounge
• GC06: Quasi-Live Blogging the Nintendo Press Conference

From the moment I'm introduced to Ensemble Studios' Bruce Shelley, I can tell my bumbling, "Is that pinata gay?" style of gaming journalism just isn't going to fly. A gruff but pleasant bear of a man, he carries upon his broad shoulders the impenetrable gravitas of a Kentucky tobacconist, or a man who feels very passionately about bottle caps, or any other aficionado of a passion the appeal of which completely eludes me.

In this case, that passion is RTS games. The game he's about to show me in Leipzig? Age of Empires 3: The Warchiefs, the upcoming expansion pack to the critically-acclaimed but, by me, completely ignored RTS title Age of Empires 3. I don't know anything about Warchiefs. And I don't really know anything about the Age of Empires series except that I can't stand the entire genre.

"I don't really know how familiar you are with my games," Shelley says to me as he loads up The Warchiefs on his laptop.

"Um...." I stall, looking to be politic. "Just a little, really. I'm not a big RTS gamer. Frankly, I find them unplayable."

The room goes quiet. Shelley just stares at me, his face an emotionless pall. Michael Wolf, Microsoft's Games for Windows dude, begins to visibly twitch in social discomfort. Panicking, I ramble on:

"I mean, the flesh is willing. God it's willing! But the jelly of the mind is weak, Bruce. it's so weak..." I shake my head back and forth while googling my eyes around, to emphasize the fact that, as a fetus, my capacity for RTS appreciation was permanently crippled by the high vodka proof of the fluid in my mother's amniotic sack.

"I often think that I would really love the genre if someone... Logitech maybe... came out with some sort of cyberoptic cable that I could just insert into the jelly of my eye and that would directly interface with my brain. Because that's the only way I'm ever going to be able to play one of these games, Bruce. With current technology, it's just a constant exercise in fighting the interface for me."

The silence is interrupted only by the sound of my arrhythmic heart pounding in nervousness through my sunken chest. Did I really just start-off a one-on-one session with one of RTS gaming's design gods that I hated his games? After he'd rushed back from an autograph session to pander to me, a mere doofus? My bladder surges in nervousness.

Finally, Shelley emits a ponderous sigh.

"Well, you know, we try to make our games keeping guys like you in mind," Bruce kindly says. "In our single player games, you can pause anytime to get your bearings and issue orders. A lot of guys didn't want that feature at Ensemble, but I made them put it in. So it's almost turn-based. We try to make them as accessible as possible to as many players as possible."

Silence again. I have no idea what to say. Everyone in the room is conscious of the fact that I'm an idiot. I am relieved when a stern looking German girl in a Microsoft t-shirt comes into the room; she sternly commands me to have a Diet Coke.

"I don't want a Diet Coke," I respond.

She seems outraged. "What? You don't want a Diet Coke? But you're American!" It's as if I just told her I didn't breathe oxygen.

"Irish, actually. A regular Coke would be fine."

The fury of her eyes clears to a Euro-conspiriatorial glimmer. "Ah, yes! That explains it!" she says, gives the rest of the room a deeply distrustful look, then wanders out of the room to get me a Coke.

(Later on, this same dollsome serving wench will confess to me over a steam tray of goulash that "These Americans will order an entire hog for lunch, but then wash it down only with a Diet Coke." The food service at Microsoft's GC06 booth is apparently an incredible cultural conflict for all involved; Microsoft's Michael Wolf will later admit to me that for the first few days of the conference, the German hostesses who had been hired to serve them completely denied access to any Americans attempting to enter the booth's kitchen, and that these same Germans' incessant efforts to bring Diet Cokes to the Americans in the various show rooms was a mysterious recent development about which all Microsoft employees had become deeply suspicious.)

"Anyway, let's show you Warchiefs..." Shelley continues. He boots up the program: I see an opening screen with some attractive polygonal Indians dancing around a fire. There's also some teepees. I write "teepees" down in my notebook.

"Okay, so in this expansion, there's three new Native-American tribes you can play as. You can play as the Iroquois, the Sioux, and the Aztecs... they are good at economics."

"What was the middle one again?" I ask.

"The Sioux."

"How do you spell that?"

"Ess. Eye. Oh. You. Ex. They're very famous," Shelley explains.

I immediately feel like an idiot. "Ohhhh... the Sioux," I say weakly. "You know what it is? It's one of those words I'm always reading but never hear pronounced." Like phallus, I think, but I can't use that example, because I don't know how to pronounce it.

Shelley kindly passes over the non-sequitur, while I write Sioux down in my notebook, put a few exclamation points next to it, then triple underline it. I fumble in my mind for a question to ask that does not betray me as a gibbering fool. Finally, I happen upon one.

"Let me ask you a question. Obviously, when you're dealing with a game in which you take actual races and cultures than then start giving them character traits, bonuses and weaknesses, the spectre of political correctness is going to raise its head. How do you work around that?"

Shelley goes contemplative, "Well, Microsoft has a team that makes sure that nothing we do is going to offend anyone. But we sometimes run into problems. For example, in one of our games, we had the China Sea. Except the Koreans don't like that, so we had to call it the East Sea. But for the Japanese, it's the Sea of Japan. So for each of these countries, we had to have a different localization."

I find this aspect of game design absolutely fascinating, and want to ask him follow-up questions like So would you be prevented from making, say, the Jews in a game good with economics by Microsoft's sensitivity department? but Shelley is already fiddling around with stuff on screen. I decide I should pay better attention.

But my eyes immediately glaze over. The game is absolutely beautiful looking, full of neat little flourishes and technologies, but none of that can change the fact that I am watching someone play a game which, by its very genre, I will never be able to enjoy.

The test map is set in a beautiful, impressionistic painted desert, glowing with violet and peach hues. Shelley starts showing me cool things, one following another in rapid staccato succession. Under the watchful eyes of any old RTS hand, or someone with a genuine enthusiasm for the Age of Empires series, these moments would be reacted to with deeply rooted observational understanding, peals of delight. But to me? My only response is pedestrian word flatulence.

Bruce Shelley shows me...

Warchief's Treaty Mode, in which the players agree for the first twenty minutes of a multiplayer match to be a time of peace, where warring on the other side is not possible. My earnest response: "That seems useful!"

How the Indians Can Get Ninja Units. "The Native Americans had ninjas? Huh."

A really cool Civil War era ironclad boat. "My great great grandpa helped build one of those!"

The petards, which are bomb carrying demo men. "Hoisted, if you will!" Everyone looks embarrassed.

The new saloon structure, where a player can recruit mercenaries, such as pirates. "And zombies, I hope!"

The European Civs' new 'Revolution' option, which turns all citizens into militia but does not allow them to gather resources anymore. "Didn't that happen in the Revolutionary War?"

A Native American War Chief, which is sort of a hero unit that lends bonuses to all units around it. While Shelley is playing with it, it gets shot and lies writhing on the ground. Shelley tells me that the cry it makes literally translates to, "Every moment I live is agony!" "Wow! Just like Sartre!"

And so it goes. After awhile, Shelley pretty much forgets that I'm even in the room, which is a big relief. I start twiddling my thumbs and watching him play, occasionally writing down observations of importance in my notebook. "Big blue thing" one such note informs me. "Europeans have Native American embassy as a building," another more helpfully describes.

But I'm not into it. And at this point, Shelley isn't even pretending to be demonstrating the game to me — he's just sitting there, a big smile beaming on his face, playing the game he's created with genuine fondness.

For a while, I sit there in his presence, honestly charmed. That one man can have such childlike passion for his own games fills me with the feeling that all is right in the world.

But after awhile, I begin to twitch, grow uncomfortable. Exactly how long am I supposed to sit here, watching him play his game? I've already been there forty minutes, yet he shows no sign of calling an end to the session, or excusing himself for another interview. Am I supposed to sit there for forty minutes? Fifty? An hour? Will I simply wither away, my only moisture supplied by an incessant German-supplied IV drip of Diet Coke? What is the expectation here? I'm not a games journalist. I'm just a fucking blogger. Do these sessions just roll on interminably until one or the other of you passes out? Bruce! For the love of god! STOP PLAYING YOUR GAME ALREADY!

"Ummmmm..." I eventually hazard. "Looks great! But I think I've seen enough." For a brief second, I worry that he might burst into tears. But Shelley sighs, apparently in relief: it's what he's been waiting for since the second I walked in the door.

"Oh, okay! Great! Well, thanks for stopping by!" And with that, he folds my tiny hand into his own gigantic mitt, like a bear cradling a fragile little bird.

But if you like RTSes, which I don't, Age of Empires 3: The Warchiefs looks totally great. Florian Eckhardt

Fun Leipzig anecdote, from an anonymous but totally journalistic source! Upon witnessing the bedraggled state of IGN's GC06 team at the Nintendo press conference last Wednesday, said source asked why they looked so wasted. "Dude," one IGN editor confessed, "Last night, after we landed, we hit the strip club, and watched two strippers suck hot wax out of each other's ass!" The IGN team then spent the next five minutes exchanging high-fives.

Why such an impressive gonzo tale was not posted as news on IGN's website by these princes of gaming journalism is anyone's guess. Especially since it's certainly more newsworthy than this: courtesy of IGN's news feed, comes this exciting announcement: the jacuzzi of IGN Xbox and 360 Editor-In-Chief Doug Perry is no longer functioning.

Doug Perry's jacuzzi is in dire need of repair and, at this point, is non-functional.

As a result, all bikini-bashes and super fun summer flings have been put on hold by Perry, the editor-in-chief of IGN Xbox and IGN Xbox 360.

"I feel drained, no pun intended," said Perry, clearly distraught.

He later added, "Actually, pun intended."

What is this pun he intended? Psychic seances with Lewis Carroll's disembodied spirit turned up no answer. "Whatever the fuck he's talking about, that's not a pun," Carroll ectoplasmically noted, his lower lip quivering in contempt. Has the hot tub been drained? Or is Perry referring to his own scrotum? It's really anyone's guess.

Only two things are for sure. One: this is an important scoop for one of the internet's premiere 360 news sites. Two: gaming journalism just found it's Bangs-Kael Frankenstein hybrid. Florian Eckhardt

Doug's Jacuzzi Busted [IGN]

Remember when I said Battalion Wars 2 was ugly? "How ugly is it, Florian?" you might well have asked yourself.

Well, frankly, what I played was a lot uglier than this. In fact, I have a hard time believing this is the same game. The level I played in appeared to take place in a diarrhea patch, not this lush forest. It definitely didn't have helicopters and tanks. Maybe Battalion Wars 2 isn't going to be so bad after all. Florian Eckhardt

I actually sat in on this exact session with Assassin's Creed producer Claude Langlais and watched him narrate the E3 video demo to a totally silent audience of journalists. But what I didn't pick up on was the fact that there's not one, but two 360s there. But Assassin's Creed hasn't been announced for the 360 yet.

Not that anyone doubts that a 360 version is imminent, but come on, just announce it already. Florian Eckhardt

Assassin's Creed running on a 360, again? [Xboxic]

You'd think I'd speak English well enough to be able to ace English Training for the DS Lite. Ironically enough, though, this was not the case — I didn't account for the fact that it's an English training game in German.

"Das mitsprechen ist eine der grundlegendsten und effektivsten Lern-methoden uberhaupt," I read aloud, caking the DS Lite screen in phlegm as I tried to mimic the harsh German gutturals. I have no idea what this means, or what I'm supposed to do. The diagram on the bottom screen seems to indicate that I have to use the DS Lite wifi to beam an apple somewhere.

I keep on clicking "Welter" until the entire demonstration loops around. At one point, the DS Lite asks me to write the sentence I hear. "He is very beautiful," a voice commands. Um... okay.

"He is very beautiful," I write. I am wrong. I listen again. "HE IS VERY BEAUTIFUL," I try writing in all capital letters. Nothing.

Finally, someone leans over my shoulder, watches me try to write "He is very beautiful" one more time, this time in cursive, and says rebukingly: "It's she. SHE is very beautiful." I try it. It works. I walk away from the display with my head down, certain that every skewed gaze in the Leipzig Convention Center is cast judgingly upon me. Florian Eckhardt

It's the GC 2006 Exhibitor Party in the Volkspalast Leipzig — an evening of pedestrian decadence swaddled in a level of mundanity surprising from such a creative industry.

Am I an exhibitor? No. As my attire — dirty jeans, red Converse All-Stars, a t-shirt emblazoned with a crimson Asiatic cryptogram which (I only learned from a Chinese menu many years after purchase) proudly proclaimed me to be Number One — all attest the fact that I am a bum.

It's really not my kind of party. My kind of party involves having punk rock girls spit swigs of whiskey into my mouth on the dance floor. But I have come in search of a scoop — I have been told it will be athrob with game developers, some of whom might drunkenly spill some insider secrets which might very well make my name in gaming journalism.

As I first walk in, four stern Aryan godlings, naked and spray-painted gold, dangle on rope swings from the ceiling. "Yo, how's it going!" I say to one of them. She cracks a grin, which threatens to compromise the ostentatiousness of the entire event. A beefy security guard quickly advances, shrugging his mighty and magnificent shoulders as if to loosen them up before clobberizing me. "Woob woob woob woob!" I shriek as I run off.

The booze is plentiful and free, so I begin sucking down scotches as I wander the club. The dance floor is the nexus, violets spakling on gleaming ebony; While the Bright Young Things of Gaming twirl in shafts of light like vivid butterflies caught in a column of deep forest sun, I find my abortive attempts to join the pirouette thwarted by sneers, violently waving fists and cries of "What the hell is wrong with you?" Slam dancing does not appear to be the rhythmic melee of choice for an event like this.

Depressed, I wander around, looking for a "scoop", like someone notable and drunk enough to make out with me while I take pictures with my camera phone and upload them to Kotaku. But I don't recognize anyone... although ostensibly an industry party, the industry — like most industries — appears to be comprised entirely of an anonymous armada of vapid, pretentious poofs.

Biomasses of chicness tend to have their own natural filtering mechanisms, which sucks more desirable socialite particles to the center while naturally expelling viral elements that might pollute the party with their own inherent lameness. The crowd has not sucked me in; it's spit me out. I find myself on the fringe of the party, sitting with the losers of gaming. I am already drunk.

This group includes one of the Rockstar Vienna guys, now apparently jobless. He hands me a depressingly plain business card that has obviously been printed on his personal printer and tells me to send him an email in two or three months, when maybe he has a job. He mentions how surprising it was that Rockstar Vienna was closed down...

"I mean, it's not like we didn't release some great games? Right?" He grabs my arm and squeezes it, indicating a desperate need to be validated. "RIGHT?"

"Dude, totally," I assure him. Then it hits me, "Hold on. Didn't you guys do Max Payne 2 for the PS2?"

He begins twitching all over, "That wasn't our fault, that was Sony, and that's the reason I'll say until the day I die that Sony are a bunch of TOTAL FUCKING ASSHOLES."

This is the single best quote of the entire conference.

Our group also includes a couple of paunchy, balding Germans: these guys created the Settlers series, apparently. They seem like earnest dorky dudes, and I like them immediately. We talk about the Settlers 2 booth babes, mostly about just how adorable they were with their whole sidewalk-laying act. They mention to me that even though they are now up to Settlers 5, Settlers 2 proved so popular that they just had to remake it. I continue to call over more scotches, hoping that my delirium tremens will pass for interest in a game series about which I know absolutely nothing.

Finally, the loser corner is rounded out by Barry, the earnest webmaster of a British Xbox fansite, 360monster.com. I actually know him from the Major Nelson teledildonics party at the Microsoft Tiki Hut. He is one of many European webmasters who has accepted Microsoft's dime to go to Leipzig; I have seen this group consistently escorted by Microsoft from developer interview to developer interview over the course of the conference. Despite the fact that Microsoft is actually paying people to escort the Xboxmonster.com guy around, it is obvious that he has been ditched.

Barry's a really good guy, but I'm feeling very much out of my league at Leipzig, and he's spending a lot of time bragging to me about his exclusive preview of Bioshock, or his hands-on time with Assassin's Creed, or the way he got Unreal Tournament 2007's producer to accidentally slip the fact that a PS3 version was, indeed, in development.

"And what scoops did you get?" he asks.

"Well, I posted a pretty good story about an erection I got at the SOCOM 3 booth..." I start. Barry cuts me off with a patronizing look of kindness and actually deigns to reach over and pat my knee comfortingly.

"Don't worry," he soothes. "You have to start somewhere, right?"

But before I can smash my snifter of scotch into Barry's face and force him to chew the shattered glass while I sit atop his sternum, wide-eyed and screaming, a huge fat man reeking of a thousand flabby folds of oozing putrescence drunkenly stumbles up, then unapologetically crashes down on the back of my chair.

"Oi oi oi!" he says. He sounds exactly like a fat, British Rerun. It immediately becomes clear that he knows Barry intimately and is positioning himself to join our conversation. His foul, swollen belly lays like a moist sack of instant concrete on the nape of my neck. Simultaneously, he silently but noxiously farts, and I smell the rotting corpse of the hog he devoured that morning. The stench causes me to experience a truly curious evolution of the gag reflex: the instinctive desire to vomit out my own brain.

This, gentlemen, is what hell is like.

But then I see Will Wright.

Gangly and awkward, with the adorable bumbling grace of a walking stick insect, he pushes by our table in the crowd, unassumingly dressed in jeans and a tucked-in green shirt. Wright's hand trails behind him, grasping the slimmer, whiter hand of an attractive blonde 15 years his junior.

I do not like the games of Will Wright. My lesbian lifemate Eliza Gauger once summed up her feelings about his games so expertly that I'm better off just parroting her: "Will Wright makes games I play for three hours and then put away for two years."

But I have 1000 euros worth of credit card expenses to turn in to Gawker for the debacle of sending me, a totally out-of-place misanthrope, to Leipzig. I need a "scoop" to justify my 130 euro a night hotel room, not to mention my endless cab rides and bottomless minibar bill.

"Fuck this!" I sneer, "MOTHER FUCK THIS."

I launch to my feet. I am going to interview Will Wright if I have to hold him down on the floor and shriek questions into his face.

Following a fleeing Will Wright and his girlfriend proves more difficult than I expect. There appears to be an equilibrium problem, introduced into my system at the end of a half a dozen double scotches. Nevertheless, when they pause at a doorway, leaning in for a kiss, I grab my chance. I thrust myself forward and disrupt what ought to be a magical moment of romance between the creator of Spore and his girlfriend by shoving my outstretched hand between them.

"How you doing," I salute. Will Wright blinks in shock; his girlfriend's lips press into a thin line of contempt at the drunken, disheveled jackass interrupting them during a romantic moment. Will Wright, though, is a champ. Recovering quickly from his shock, he greets me with a smile and puts his hand into mine. He has a drier and more powerful grip than I expect.

"Hi!" he greets. He is extremely pleasant and has the demeanor of a kindly but slightly befuddled college professor. In fact, he bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Donald Sutherland. I like him.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, but my name's Florian Eckhardt and I just wanted to tell you what a big fan I am," I say. This is not strictly true — I don't really enjoy his games. But I do admire his dedication and his imagination. It's not a total lie.

"Oh, thanks!"

Dead silence. I realize that I have absolutely no idea what to say next. But the moment is slipping. Both Will Wright and his girlfriend are now exchanging curious looks with one another, as if wondering what the best way to extricate themselves from a sudden confrontation with a doofus actually is. I can't let him get away: this is my scoop. GC06: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH WILL WRIGHT!

"Ummmm..." I stupidly prattle on, "Hey, I saw your Spore presentation today. It looks like it's coming along great!"

Even kindly Will Wright seems to be losing interest in this lame conversation. "Yeah, we've got a good team..." he mumbles, looking around desperately for an escape.

And then escape comes, engineered by his girlfriend. She points over my shoulder.

"Oh, look, Will," she announces with cold, transparent calculation. "There's some drinks we ought to have!"

And with the cool, breezy dismissal that can only be successfully employed by a beautiful woman, she brushes by me, dragging a relieved looking Will Wright behind her by the hand.

And that — oh my brothers — is the precise moment I realized I would never be a games journalist. Florian Eckhardt

Within the cool, secluded confines of another Wii booth in Leipzig, I had the opportunity to play Wii Sports Golf under the strenuous tutelage of another icy-eyed German booth babe.

Placing the wired Wiimote gingerly in my hands, she informed me: "Yes, OK. So to swing, you must swing it like this." Then she pantomimed a dapper golf swing of remarkable, slow-motion grace.

"Gotcha!" I proclaimed and immediately followed through with a violent, Tiger-Woods style pile drive.

The only problem? The Wii cord was unexpectedly short. On the upper end of my swing, I felt the cord go suddenly and unexpectedly taut, which was then followed by a horrible crash of plastic and metal smashing against the inside panel of the door in which the Wii was hidden. *

Cataclysmically, the giant LCD screen on which Wii Spots Golf was being displayed distorted into a hallucinogenic mess of smeared polygons and erupting static.

For a couple seconds, we just stood there, pale as drowned ghosts in the black lit glow of the Wii booth.

"Holy crap," I whispered to the Wii girl, "Did I just kill the fucking Revolution?"

But, just then, the game came back to life; Wii Sports Golf chastised me for hitting the ball approximately 1000 yards too far.

I handed the trembling Wii girl back the controller. "I think I'd probably better try another game."

"Yes," she whispered breathlessly, rolling her eyes into orbs of milky white like a terrified cow. "Yes, go. Go now." Florian Eckhardt

* Edit: Just to clarify, I didn't actually cause the Wii to crash into the glass. It just got a bit of a violent jerk. I exaggerated the magnitude just to emphasize my own total stupidity, and to give you guys a laugh. But I really don't want anyone thinking that I actually hurt a Wii, or that this was some huge cataclysm. It was very cute and very small, but gave me quite a scare, which I thought I'd share with you guys for a laugh.

One cool thing that Activision is doing is pulling people out of the crowd to play Guitar Hero 2 on stage. If they can face the public ridicule and manage not to blow note after note through the nervous trembling of their pudgy, grease-moist sausage rolls, they get a free Guitar Hero 2 t-shirt. You can see that they are playing a co-operative duet: one player rhythm, one player lead.

Me? I'm PRESS. I just went up to a homoerotic booth babe and coldly demanded a t-shirt. With a wink and a sailor, he handed me one in five seconds flat. Power of the press! Florian Eckhardt

I was about to play the Wii for the first time.

Tossing our pretentious opening paragraphs aside with cool contempt, I was being led by Ina the Nintendo Booth Babe into a showroom, having been given a chance to play the recently announced Battalion Wars 2.

This was not a game I really cared to play. Even as a thousand journalists at the Nintendo Press Conference emptied their bladders in unison and sent a rolling tsunami of urine down upon the stage in reaction to the announcement, I yawned. Battalion Wars? Didn't the first one blow?

But when I got an opportunity to play Battalion Wars 2 on the Wii, I still jumped at the opportunity. Despite the fact that Nintendo wants me to hold a small phallic object in my hand and refer to it by a small child's euphemism for his own genitalia, I still hold the Wii with a sort of awe. But it's a hands-off admiration. I've never played with one before.

Ina placed the Wiimote in my hands gently."You hold this part in this hand, like this, okay? And the other part in the other hand, like that. Okay?"

"Yes, that seems intuitive," I agreed. Ina nodded emphatically. Holding things in your hands was intuitive. Ina turned on Battalion Wars 2.

My first impression was just how astonishingly ugly the game was. I was some hunched over, pixelated lump of polygons, running around in a 3D world that only scarcely seemed to be of a higher graphical standard than early Playstation 2 games. Everyone knows that Nintendo's not trying to compete with the graphical capabilities of the PS3 and the 360. But Jesus, surely the Wii can not compete harder than this.

Ina continued explaining the controls, "OK. So... you move like this." Ina exerted pressure on my wrist to roll it around, and my little army man on screen aimed his rifle in various directions. "And to jump your man, you must make this hand go up, like this." She grabbed my left hand and jerked it upwards, which did indeed cause my man to jump. "OK?"

"OK," I agreed. I was getting this stuff so far.

"OK," Ina went on. She liked this word. "So now, to roll your little man? You must do this." Then she grabbed my right wrist and attempted to snap the bone and drive the sharp, pointy edge through my flesh.

"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! OW!" I called. She stopped a few degrees before the bone would have snapped, sending an explosion of sharp, jagged bone splinters exploding out of my flesh.

"You must loosen your wrist!" Ina rebuked. She demonstrated the movement that I was expected to make in order to roll my little man. It seemed to involve a wrist that could actually spin 360 degrees freely in its socket.

"OK, Ina, I totally don't get that," I said to her. "Is it likely I'll have to roll?"

Ina tugged her lower lip thoughtfully, "Hmm. Maybe yes? To dodge enemies?"

"So I can die in this demo?"

"Oh! Oh, no."

"Yeah, I don't think I'll worry about it then. Strafing seems irrelevant when you're nigh-invulnerable." I thought this was a particularly keen observation.

"OK!" Ina chipperly continued. "So you move, yes? With the thumb stick. Then you lock on with this button here, and shoot with the trigger. OK?"

"OK!" I emphatically nodded. And then I tried it out.

The first thing I noticed was just how loose the controls felt. Turning my character around, in particular, seemed extremely difficult. I would have to whip my hand back and forth several times to complete the circle. Aiming was easy, since you could lock on to targets with a trigger button, but surprisingly unsatisfying. Yet I was still just thrilled to be waving around that cool Wiimote.

As I ran around, I realized I had no idea who the bad guys were and who the good guys were. But it didn't seem to matter much, since I was nigh-invulnerable. I just sort of ran on, waving my hand around, chasing these hovering stars that would occasionally pop up on the horizon, signaling my next objective. I was already bored. I noticed absolutely nothing about what sort of enemies I was shooting at, or what the level was even like, although I vaguely remembered some purple canyon walls and occasional barrages of guys that I'd just sort of run past. It didn't really seem to matter what I did.

Almost as if she was reading my thoughts: "I don't like this game," Ina complained to me. (Man, these German Booth Babes have proven to be a sexy and subversive lot.)

"It totally sucks," I agreed. "But why don't you like it?"

Ina squinched one eye shut, sneered, then began nervously shuffling her long pink fingernails through her hair inan obsessive-compulsive display of distaste. Then Ina casually delivered the clearest summary of the violent geopolitical spectrum I'd ever heard in pidgin English:

"This game? It's war. War is for boys."

I nodded grimly.

Ina continued: "I like the game where you flip bunnies."

"I'm not familiar with that game."

I considered chasing her up on the facts of this bunny flipping game — was it, perhaps, an unannounced Wii game? Could this be my first GC06 "scoop"? — but, by this point, I'd noticed a quite painful throb in the muscles of the arm I was using to hold up the Wiimote. This distracted my thoughts. Aching spasms seized my rhomboids and deltoids. I realized that holding even a light-weight object in the air and pointing it ahead of me for five minutes was not really a skill evolution had embedded into me. In another five minues, I expected my arm to physically tear off my body and dangle from my spurting shoulder by a single string of torn, bleeding tendon.

"Jesus, this is pretty hard on the arm, isn't it?" I remarked to Ina. She nodded gravely.

"Yes, it is! But you can hold it in a different way to make it more com-for-ta-ble."

And then, Ina the Nintendo Wii Booth Babe did an amazing thing. She pantomimed holding a Wiimote in her right hand, lifting it to shoulder height, pointing the end at the Wii. This roughly simulated the way I was currently holding it. Then, she slowly lowered the Wiimote to directly in front of her crotch and began to pantomime jerking the imaginary Wiimote back and forth.

"See?" she remarked, "It's much more relaxing!"

And no doubt it was. But if there's one thing I learned in junior high school, it's the peril of openly jerking around your Wiimote in the presence of strange, beautiful women. Florian Eckhardt

Microsoft's Games for Windows dude Michael Wolf emailed me yesterday morning. He saw my post about Viva Pi ata. He wanted to win me over to this bright, beautiful world of animals and sunshine, and he did not want to leave uncorrected my impression that Viva Pi ata took place in a nightmarish world populated entirely by coulrophobia-inducing, chocolate-filled specters.

So Wolf shot me an invitation to come on by the Microsoft booth and get the producer, Chris Kimmel, to show me the game. I accepted. I wanted to ask some hard-hitting questions.

Unfortunately, I was double-booked. Parked in the waiting area was a three-man team of journalists from Actiontrip.com. These guys had a camera and a microphone ready, and spoke with suave British accents. Professionals. I eyed them nervously.

"Yeah, sorry, man, but these guys somehow got double-booked," Wolf very apologetically explained, "Do you mind going in with them?"

"You know," I replied. "I'd better not. If I go in with them, it's going to be the equivalent of kicking over their camera and jumping up and down on their mike. These guys are professionals. I'm a blogger."

"We're all professionals here!" Wolf soothed. But, of course, that was before I started hitting Chris Kimmel with my hard-hitting "professional" questions about the world of Viva Pi ata... questions which embarrassed and horrified all present.

Kimmel started off by showing how you start off Viva Pi ata by taking over a dilapidated garden from some sort of leafy wood sprite. An etched black line, indicating the size of your property, bound the garden. Anything within the boundary is something that you can influence. Throughout the game, this boundary will gradually expand... my understanding was that the boundary expanded as you brought more and more pi atas into your sphere of influence.

The wood sprite quickly handed over an extremely sorry looking shovel to the player, which Kimmel then used to profusely beat the cracked, charred earth into soil. After he had turned over most of the earth within his small patch of garden, Kimmel began spray-painting grass across the ground. And this attracted his first pi ata, a black and white 'Whirm'.

"We're hoping this game will appeal to children, casual gamers, and women," Kimmel said as the Whirm appeared. But I cut him off.

"Speaking of games aimed at children, I understand that pi atas can actually be broken open," I started, "At which point, other pi atas will try to devour the remains. Is that true?"

"Wellllllllll...." Kimmel demurred, "I think that's a bit of an extreme interpretation."

"So they're quislings?"

"... I mean, yes, pi atas can be broken open. And if you let the remains sit around, other pi atas can eat them. But the way they break open, they just sort of split, and all this chocolate spills out onto the ground."

"A chocolate offal, if you will," I clarified.

No one said anything. As sometimes happens when the person sitting across from you at a very serious business meeting screams, tears off his clothes, then spontaneously explodes, everyone in the room just sat around blinking for about thirty seconds. Eventually, Wolf chuckled nervously, and Kimmel changed the subject with graceful aplomb.

"ANYWAYS..." Kimmel said. "Once you get two Whirms in your garden, that fulfills the conditions to get the Sparrowmint."

"Is it coming to eat the Whirms?" I asked.

"NO."

My journalistic instincts kicked in. Would I get punched? I decided not to follow this line of questioning any further. Much as I knew my readers would want to know the gruesome detail of these cannibalistic feeding orgies — the papier m ch eviscerations, the slurping of warm, spurted paste — I felt that this was a subject Rare and Microsoft were not willing to consider in too much detail.

So I was surprised when Kimmel immediately volunteered the following information: "But the condition for getting two Sparrowmints to do the romance dance is actually to feed each one a Whirm." Ghastly.

Next, Kimmel demonstrated exactly how you get two Whirms to mate, or do "the romance dance." Not being carnal exhibitionists, Whirms (as well as all other types of pi atas) need a house in which to perform their shameful acts of moral depravity. Once the house is built, you have to perform a mating minigame.

"Are the minigames like Hot Coffee?" I asked.

But they weren't. Rather, in the Whirms' case, you had to guide one Whirm to meet another through a rather simple obstacle course that reminded me very much of a bisected fallopian tube. These courses become more and more difficult depending on how rare the pi atas you're trying to mate are. After you succeeded in mating the Whirms, they would then enter their house, where they indulged in an impromptu dance number before Viva Pi ata tastefully faded out, mere moments before the consummation of their lust.

Once any one of the gender undefined Whirms gets knocked up, a pi ata stork will swoop down from the heavens and deliver an egg. Because the pi atas do not appear to have gender, and because the delivery method is by adoption, I personally like to think the brightly-colored rainbow land of Viva Pi ata is actually a pansexual utopia where even the gayest of pi atas will not be denied a child by a morally-draconian state or an invisible old man who lives in the sky. Bravo to Microsoft and Rare for their progressive stand against intolerance!

My time with Kimmel was almost up. Under the barrage of my obnoxious, clueless, incompetent, repugnant and quite frankly retarded questions, he had held up like a champ. I decided to throw him a soft question.

"Okay, so I see a lot of pi atas here, and you say they get rarer and rarer? So how exotic do they get?"

"Well, we want to keep some of that for a surprise, but they can become pretty rare and exotic, even imaginary. The example we talk about is a unicorn pi ata." Kimmel replied.

A million follow-up questions entered my head. How exotic could they get? Cthulhu pi atas? Nyarlathotep pi atas? Amphisbaena pi atas (self-devouring!). The possibilities were endless. I was just about to ask about all of these, visions of Kotaku headlines like "GC06 EXCLUSIVE: CTHULHU COMING TO VIVA PINATA!" dancing in my head. But, with a start, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to pronounce the names of these creatures.

"Nyarrrrrr...." I started, but stopped as a rope of drool began to ponderously dangle from my bottom lip. Everyone in the room had already come to an unspoken understanding that I was probably mentally handicapped. This just sealed it.

"Thanks for coming by, man!" Kimmel said with a bright grin, a firm handshake and another hand firmly pushing me out the door. "Tell everyone about Viva Pi ata!"

So I will! Viva Pi ata is looking to be a charming and delightful game, sort of a hallucinogenic, brightly-colored cross between Harvest Moon and Pokemon. Those who want to play it as a cute little sandbox game in which you raise adorable pi atas and feed them chocolate can do so — this is the element of the game that is aimed at children, women, and casual gamers. And it seems to do that very well.

But, if you share my particular cerebral cocktail of various mental debilitations, Viva Pi ata is also a game in which papier m ch ghouls feverishly prance about, feeding off of the steaming chocolate entrails of their fallen friends off the ground. These prancing pi atas may or may not be gay. In his house at R'lyeh, the green, sticky papier m ch spawn of the skies — Cthulhu — may or may not wait dreaming. And that's got to be worth a cursory look. Florian Eckhardt

The fetid, stinking, swollen horde, about to swoop down upon the show floors of GC 2006. Moments later, the barriers burst open, drowning me in a jelly-like effluvium of reeking gamer. It was very much like being swallowed by a large, living bratwurst.

I don't have any idea what the stats are now, but on the first day, there were 6,000 more gamers here than last year. Saturday's the busiest day. Fuck the show floor, I'm camping out in the business center today. Florian Eckhardt

Hours before my vacation to the Netherlands was set to start, I was asked to attend. This is not how it's done in the industry... appointments for conventions are hammered out months in advance, rigidly set. Moreover, I'm one man, with an alcohol-deduced level of enthusiasm. How could I compare to 1UP's own Luke Smith, who — during the Nintendo presser — actually flung a laptop over his shoulder like it was a piece of trash when it didn't have enough battery juice to complete a very important "breaking" post, then just grabbed another and continued writing?

So I'm not trying. The news I'm covering is more humorous, anecdotal. I am very unlikely to "break" any stories. But I've played some games. Met some people. Gone to some parties. And I have sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes snarky things to say about all of them.

• Florian Eckhardt's brief, abortive conversation with Will Wright... and his eventual shaming by Will Wright's girlfriend!

• A very special look at Viva Pinata... Hot Coffee and Quislings!

• Some hands-on time with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

• A duet on Guitar Hero 2 with a panty clad booth babe.

• Does God of War 2's three month old E3 demo still gelatinate?

• Five Cool Things You Can Do In Crackdown.

• A very special session with Bruce Shelley about Age of Empires III: War Chiefs... in which I admit I hate RTSes and find them unplayable.

• English Training for the DS... in German!

• Even game developers go to ostentatious, pretentious glamour parties.

And even more! Be patient. It won't be "breaking". I can't compete with those lifeless assholes. But it will be entertaining. Florian Eckhardt

Major Nelson — pictured above or maybe to the right limboing and insanely waving while screaming into a Mr. Microphone — dropped an exciting, electrifying, arousing, possibly titillating feature of the Xbox Live Vision Camera whilst demonstrating it at Microsoft's GC06 Tiki Tent: remote-controlled genital stimulation.

"When you press the trigger button, it makes the controller of the person you're talking to vibrate," said Nelson. "So two people... well, I'll let you fill in the blanks!"

I did. I became intrigued. I raised my hand to ask him if he'd ever tried this vibrating feature with anyone, and if so, with whom? Major Nelson pretended not to see my raised hand. Then I remembered that this was "journalism", and I wasn't asking Major Nelson for permission to evacuate my bladder. Sheepishly, I put my hand down.

He then handed over the Live headset to the crowd so they could try out the camera and talk to some random but dollsome Microsoft employee, code-named E. I immediately saw my opportunity.

Before I continue, I would really like to stress the fact that it is not that I am, in fact, a pervert. Rather, I'm a journalist. My job is to leap at the slimmest opportunities for a hot, sexy "scoop". This is what my journalistic ethics, my journalistic morals, my entire journalistic code of journalism demands!

So stealing the headset from some fan boys, I spent a requisite thirty seconds exchanging mundane pleasantries with E before demanding that she help me demonstrate this new feature.

"Hey, yeah, nice dog. No, I don't care about that Xbox magnet. What's the weather like there? Okay... uh huh. Yeah, look, I don't care. Let's just get down to the vibrating, shall we?"

This, gentlemen, is called seduction. But E was having none of it. And, needless to say, I am no longer welcome at any Microsoft parties. But Eliza and I will be testing this feature soon... and when we do, expect a full review! Florian Eckhardt

EDIT: Apparently, E's a dude. So I guess I wasn't talking to E, but one of his house guests. So who was she? Is she also a Microsoft employee? And will my entire body ever stop going sick with passion when I think of her adorable giggle and puritan moral values, demanding to be corrupted via 360 proxy?

I had the opportunity to try out Viva Pinata at one of Microsoft's 360 kiosks in Leipzig today. It was pretty, and I appreciate the way that Microsoft is trying to bring nightmarish surrealism into the lives of small children everywhere.

But one problem I had was that I just couldn't figure out how to play the game. There may or may not have been instructions on the German placard before me, but I didn't have the sturm und drang to read it. I was stumped. Puzzled, I called the nearest expert I could find: a Microsoft 360 Booth Babe.

"Do you know how to play this game?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so," she matter-of-factly responded, then gently pushed me aside. The booth babe proceeded to drop me into the middle of a completely barren, Lovecraftian world of sundered earth, black skies, and claw-like trees scratching their way out of their chthonic tombs. I screamed a little. This is apparently the world of Viva Pinata before you begin populating it.

"This is what I know how to do," the booth babe continued, choosing a packet of grass from a menu and using it to sprinkle seed across the cracked, lifeless earth. The booth babe let me try. I had fun with it for about ten seconds, then got bored. So started trying to build the rest of my own personal Pinata Land. It was not a success; I found the entire thing very confusing.

"I don't get this at all!" I finally exclaimed in frustration. The booth babe nodded.

"It is, I think, not for smart people, like you and me, but for little children," she explained. Which seemed like an odd thing to say, because I certainly wasn't smart enough to play it, and neither was she. Florian Eckhardt

Such as this version, Pong played with what appeared to be a magnetized table:

The only problem was that the ball didn't always or even most of the time seem to bounce off of the paddle, instead appearing to swoop under it. This caused the player on the right to sigh in frustration.

"Does it suck?" I asked.

"It's Pong." he responded, as if that said everything.

But Velocipede Pong was a lot cooler:

Pedal in one direction and the paddle went up; the opposite would lower it. These guys were having a blast, sweat spraying off of them in every direction as they furiously pedaled back and forth, trying to block each others' shots.

Finally, Shadow Pong, in which a moving player controls the paddle by sidling back and forth.

"How is it?" I asked one player as he wooted in jubilation at a goal on his opponent.

"Dude! It's Pong!" he exulted.

Today, I wandered back to the water wheel, well hoping that the stone's flawless marble underbelly would now be spattered with congealed brains, the trickling fountain turned ruddy with blood, the 360 booth babes pale and trembling.

But it was fine. There the waterwheel was, largely revolving as before. Pristine, mint. Curious, I sidled up to a nearby booth babe and put my arm around her.

"Hi there! So is this for Halo?"

The 360 girl had obviously no idea what I was talking about, but decided to humor me. "Ja!" she affirmed.

I got right to the point: "So. Jane. Has anyone killed themselves yet on this crazy thing?"

The 360 babe looked thoughtful, chewing her lower lip ponderously. I could tell she was going to be politic. "Well..." she eventually hazarded, "Of course this is always risk."

"Of course," I soothed. This seemed to make her more open.

"This one man, this very crazy man..." the 360 Babe googled her eyes when she said 'crazy', in order to facilitate universal translation. And then she proceeded to pantomime what must have involved a man splaying himself open like Da Vinci's Virtuvian Man to roll upside down in the Halo water wheel.

"Wow!" I said. The 360 Booth Babe agreed, and then proceeded to give me a demonstration of the many mechanical marvels of the wheel. She swore that the marble ring, which must way a ton, spinned only by the burbling of the underlying fountain. There was a brake to prevent it from going too fast.

But as she was showing me the wheel's workings, she mentioned that it was possible for someone to run inside the wheel too fast. When that happened, there was not enough water to keep the underside of the wheel lubricated.

"So what happens then? Does it grind to a halt and sunder in twain like the Ten Commandments, crushing any human guinea pig currently inside clean to death? Or does it merely go flying off the pedestal, to roll through the Leipzig Convention Center, gelatinating nerds and causing carnage?"

"Ja! JA!" she affirmed, then wandered away to help a little girl to climb onboard. To be fair, though, there may have been some translation issues afoot. Florian Eckhardt

This is the Team Fortress 2 trailer that Valve showed at Leipzig yesterday. What I am experiencing is a far more welcome boner than the SOCOM 3 one. Florian Eckhardt

It would have been best to capture it in motion, but that is beyond my meager photographic talents. These girls wandered around the showfloor in a team of four, with one leader, who held up a flag. When she pounded the base of the flag down once on the ground, the girls would pick up the piece of road behind them (with a cute little wiggle) and move it forward, ad infinitim.

Extra points for being reasonably proportioned, realistically dollsome and wearing togas. Florian Eckhardt

This human pin-wheel was the main decorative attraction of Microsoft's Leipzig booth today. That befuddled looking doofus isn't a paid model — he's just some random passer-by. The booth babe cheerfully encourages him to keep on grinding with his Sisphysusian toil. I'm just guessing, but I think it's supposed to be a Halo waterwheel. Florian Eckhardt