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I spent time -- too much time -- attending press conferences at E3 on Wednesday. I wish I'd spent those hours playing games. When I did finally get to play it was 2PM (note that my day started at 7:30AM) and I was at E3's not-so-fancy show floor at Barker Hangar, a large building at the Santa Monica airport.

You couldn't meet with any game companies at Barker; those private demo sessions were held a few miles away in a strip of beach-front hotels. But at the hangar, you could bounce from kiosk to kiosk, playing lots of stuff in what amounted to a free arcade. I don't think the E3 organizers were confident people would trek out to Barker. So in the notes e-mailed to show attendees, they printed a reminder: go to Barker and you'll get a free hat.

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CULVER CITY, California -- E3 isn't really a week a long. It's just one 120-hour day, interrupted by a few short naps.

Because of that I don't feel too bad that I've fallen behind in my blog dispatches. Tuesday wasn't that long ago. In fact, it seems like it happened just this morning.

Tuesday was when I thought I had what would be my most prototypical and most animal-oriented experience of E3. I was wrong. Two moments on Thursday would earn those labels. More on them in a later post.

E3 wasn't really happening yet on Tuesday, not until the evening Microsoft press conference. But earlier the day, I took E3 by the lapels, shook it and made it happen.

The fine folk at Disney Interactive took two of their top E3 games to the MTV News office in Santa Monica and showed me:

• "Hannah Montana: Music Jam," which is a clever enough game (trust me!) that I'd recommend even the most macho gamer to check it out. Why? Because it turns the two stacked screens of the Nintendo DS into the strings of a guitar. Strum the strings with the stylus. Change chords with the buttons. The lower screen can also be used as a stylus-tappable drum kit. And you can sing into the microphone, recording a full composition into the game. Players can link DS systems over short-range wireless to form live multi-"instrument" bands.
• "Turok," which is not just a PS3/Xbox360 first-person-shooter, but, the developers' attempt to make the world's best first-person-stabber. I was told that they want to make the knife one of the best weapons (and, from what I could tell, the enemy-eye-gouging guarantee that this game will be M-rated). The allure, as it was with the series a decade ago, is the ability to hunt dinosaurs. The thing I found most engaging during my hands-on demo was the ability to trick dinos into attacking my enemies for me. I commanded. I conquered.

In the afternoon, I went to the Hotel California to meet people from maverick publisher Gamecock, who weren't actually officially part of E3. They just showed up. More on these guys next week. For now I'll just mention that while I was there I played:

• "Hail to the Chimp," the most graphically intense party game I've ever seen and the only one that is based on a political election in the animal kingdom. I give this game points for having a hovering trap in one level called the Cloud of Scandal. It slows you down and makes you lose. More on this one next week...

I should note that the Gamecock event is where I had what I thought would be my most special E3 moment. As I and the rest of the MTV News E3 crew pulled into the Hotel California parking lot, Gamecock co-chief Mike Wilson was pulling out. He was noticeable: he was driving a red roadster; he had a cameraman sitting on his passenger's-side-door filming him; he wore a rooster costume. He pulled out onto Ocean Avenue. He turned toward me, picked up a megaphone and said: "See you later, Stephen."

I knew the new E3 was different. I just didn't realize it would be like this.

The E3 press conferences are in the books. You can read about each of them at MTVNews.com: the Microsoft one, the Sony one, and the Nintendo one.

But only here can you get a bona fide blog bonus to my MTV News coverage: a comparison about what really (didn't?) mattered. How many times did each company mention its competitor? What was the largest, most wildly impressive large number mentioned at each one? What was each company's most embarrassing technical glitch?

On with the comparisons...

Games Played Live On Stage:

• Microsoft: “Rock Band,” “Madden NFL 08,” “Project Gotham Racing 4,” “Gears of War” (PC), “Call of Duty 4,” “Assassin’s Creed” – that’s six.
• Nintendo: “The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass,” “Metroid Prime 3: Corruption,” “Wii Fit” – that’s three.
• Sony: “MotorStorm,” “Killzone 2” – that’s two.

Biggest Number Mentioned:

• Microsoft: $38,000,000,000 (global size of video game market projected by financial firm Price Waterhouse Cooper by year’s end, a stat Microsoft claimed would soon mean that people spend more money on video games than they do on music)
• Sony: $26,000,000,000 (sales of PlayStation 2 hardware and software in the U.S. since the PS2 launch)
• Nintendo: 230,000,000 (number of DS Wi-Fi Connection-enabled gaming sessions since Nintendo's Internet service launched for the DS)

References To Competitors By Name:

• Microsoft: Two “Wii”s; Two “PS3”s – both while talking about how Microsoft has sold more software this generation than Nintendo and Sony.
• Sony: Zero “Wii”s; Zero “Xbox 360”s
• Nintendo: One “PS3;” One “Xbox 360” – in a chart showing Nintendo Wii’s proportionately greater sales in 2007

Most Prominent Technical Glitch:

• Microsoft: During live demo of “Assassin’ Creed,” a bad guy is hurled from a virtual Jerusalem roof. He goes flying and then hangs awkwardly in mid-air. Producer Jade Raymond, who has been narrating the demo, goes silent, meekly groans, then moves on.
• Sony: Sony president of worldwide studios Phil Harrison needs three tries to snap a photo of the crowd with his cell phone. Otherwise, things run smoothly.
• Nintendo: The first person on stage demonstrating Nintendo’s new “Wii Fit” appears to have a malfunctioning set-up, according to Nintendo star designer, Shigeru Miyamoto. The board doesn’t read her balance properly. A read-out projected on a monitor on-stage implies that she's wildly wobbling, but she's barely moving. Miyamoto apologizes and moves on. The next two of Miyamoto’s guinea pigs have a better-functioning experience, using different Wii Balance Boards.

There you have it. There can never be enough random knowledge to use to wage your very own console-war argumets. Consider yourself armed.

E3 is in full swing. I write as I sit at the Nintendo press conference. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime boasts about his company's roaring success. (He's talking more slowly than he usually does, which is really helpful!) More on that conference soon.

Right now, though, I'm ignoring Reggie to make sure you know about some recent stories I filed at MTVNews.com about E3 goings-on.

• Monday's GameFile covers the E3-week semi-unveiling of EA's Steven Spielberg games, at least the two code-named "LMNO" and "PQRS."

• This morning I filed a report stuffed with announcements from Microsoft's Xbox/Windows gaming conference last night. Check it out for piles of Bill Gates-branded details.

There will be plenty more. Guranteed. (And Reggie's still boasting! He did open this thing by saying that he's "happy." No kidding!)

SANTA MONICA, California — What secrets lurk back stage at a Microsoft video game briefing? On Tuesday night, the company allowed me and an MTV News producer behind the scenes at Santa Monica High School (that's Samohi to you).

I didn't just find the new Xbox 360 game-show style controller. I found star game designer Cliff Bleszinski and convinced him to strike a pose.

"Do you know why I'm here?" he asked me.

Sure I did, to announce "Gears of War" for PC. He admitted as much and then I asked him -- as I regularly do when I find him at things like this -- questions about a game he won't admit exists: the so-called "Gears of War 2." By the way, he's not to blame for the bad lighting in that picture. That would be me, reduced to using a cell phone camera, because I forgot to clear my honeymoon pictures from my digital camera.

Photo 2 shows what it looked like from the bleachers when Cliff took the stage to showcase "Gears." He's the guy below the yellow skull on the left.

Other "backstage" secrets include the Xbox 360 controller pillow, which was propped in a hotel room where they're going to be demo-ing "Mass Effect." Microsoft let us into the room so we could interview Xbox exec Peter Moore during an excellently-handled time warp of an interview. We pretended the briefing had already happened even though we were chatting an hour before. That's the magic of TV reporting! I'll have a Moore report later this week or early next.

Actually backstage were a trio of 360 controllers. Two were marked for Xbox executive Jeff Bell and New Orleans Saint Reggie Bush. They would use them to play "Madden NFL 08" on stage. And there's that new 360 controller again!

Last, I give you evidence of divine intervention at the Microsoft event. According to the script (wackily illuminated by that cell phone camera), the Almighty had a speaking part introducing Moore. How much did it cost Microsoft to score that exclusive?

Culver City, California -- Yes, E3 is smaller this year. It's not a circus. My cab driver didn't know it was E3, for once. And I've yet to spot any of the giant game company E3 billboards they usually set up outside LAX airport during the big show. This E3 is low-key. I'm kind of getting a do-it-yourself feel.

Case in point: my first E3 2007 game demo began on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and South Barrington Avenue outside a restaurant and across the street from a two-story strip mall that included an intriguing store called Sneeze Free.

I had told the publicist working on the Looney Tunes DS game "Duck Amuck" that I had heard great things about the game, that I wanted to check it out this week because I'm an E3 judge. But I also told her that my schedule was tight come mid-week. She suggested a dinner demo. So Monday evening she brought a black DS with a new build of the game to Wilshire and Barrington. I plugged in my headphones, and I started playing as cars whizzed by.

A friend showed up. So we went inside. I played the role of little kid playing DS in the booth while entrees were ordered, then eaten all around me.

The game's pretty cool. It joins "Contact" and the ending of "Conker's Bad Fur Day" as the rare bit of video game entertainment that stars a lead character that knows he or she is in a game. (EA's "The Simpsons Game" is set to join that list too.) Daffy knows he's in a game. He knows you, the stylus wielder, can control -- and sometimes illustrate -- his fate. And you know that your goal is to make Daffy miserable. Initially he appears on an otherwise white lower DS screen there for you to poke and prod. He talks back of course, which is more than you can say for the puppies in the DS' "Nintendogs."

I got a good "Wario Ware" vibe from the game. Like Wario, Daffy is a lovable jerk who is fun to torment. In this game, you're playing a bunch of mini-games that stress Daffy: split Daffy into smaller Daffys with strokes of the stylus, then split them again and again; sneak diamonds past Daffy in a faux-Atari-2600-style "Adventure" game ("Copyright 1979"); draw Daffy a horse and ride him into a wild west town so you can then deal him out of a card game and get him and his 10-gallon hat shot to cartoon ashes.

I took all this in before and after eating a plate of chicken and cheese enchiladas. That's what we call a working meal. I'm worried though: if the new E3 involves a meal with every game demo, I will soon be a very large man.

The down-sized show involves other scrappy solutions. I'm posting this entry from my hotel room where I have, packed in luggage, a DVD from games publisher THQ. The DVD was sent to E3 judges to ensure they see the company's games. Perhaps I'll watch it on my laptop while brushing my teeth.

At some point E3 will begin to feel more formal. Maybe it'll happen tonight when Microsoft holds their big press conference -- except they're holding it at Santa Monica High School. Does this mean game demos will be over at the lockers? Maybe they'll show me "Halo 3" in the principal's office.