It’s amazing how beneficial it is to get a good night’s sleep and a decent (if expensive) meal when covering an event such as E3. This morning I emerged from my hotel room with a renewed state of mind and made my way to the LA Convention Center for the first official day of E3 2010. A day that would include an introduction to Nintendo’s future, the return of an old PC developer friend, another entry into the resurgent racing game genre, several free-to-play MMOs, two TV series getting their very own video-game spinoffs, a new stealth-based sniper game, and the celebration of a gaming icon’s 30th birthday.

The day started out with the annual Nintendo press conference, the last one of these we would be taking in (we sadly didn’t get invited to the Sony conference, although I will be visiting their show-floor booth later on in the week). And it quickly became obvious that, of the four press gatherings we visited, Nintendo had done it best. They introduced 11 new games, mostly starring characters from gaming’s past, including Zelda (Zelda: Skyward Sword for the Wii), Mario (Mario Sports Mix for the Wii), James Bond (GoldenEye 2007 for the Wii), Mickey Mouse (Disney Epic Mickey for the Wii), and Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii). New DS games included Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and Dragon Quest 9, and mentioned for the second year in a row, Metroid: Other M for the Wii. But perhaps the biggest reveal in the show was information concerning the Nintendo 3DS, the company’s upcoming 3D-gaming device. The 3DS sports a wider upper screen than the DSi, improvements to the graphics hardware, a motion sensor and gyroscope, and a depth slider that allows you to choose how detailed you want your 3D images to be. Most intriguing, however, is the news that the 3DS will have the capability to show full-length 3D Hollywood movies, and the two cameras embedded into the device’s lid will allow you to take 3D still pictures. More than 20 third-party game developers have been signed to provide content for the new handheld, with many of those games promised to be available the day the system is launched (no availability date was announced), in stark contrast to Microsoft’s Kinect (the hardware formerly known as Project Natal), a system for which very little of any import will be available on release day. Lots of smack is talked daily about the Wii being a system for kids and old people, but you wouldn’t know it by the enthusiastic response Nintendo’s leadership received about almost every item they described during the press conference.

Not having an invite to the Sony conference gave me the time to visit the media room to write up the blog that I should’ve written the night before, had I not collapsed from exhaustion and lack of nutrition (good news for us writers: the show organizers ditched those god-awful Fata1ity keyboards from last year). A visit to the café in the convention center lobby corrected my food intake problem (notice I’ve avoided using the term “nutrition” again; you’d be hard pressed to find anything nutritious in this café), but it was costly at almost $15 for a cheeseburger, fries and a Vitamin Water. They’ve got you by the short and curlies, and they know it, so they charge you through the nose ($5.49 for a can of Monster energy drink?).

My first appointment of the show was with Bethesda Softworks to see Rage, the new apocalyptic shooter from id Software, their first new IP since their groundbreaking Doom and Quake series. In Rage, governments try to give humanity a fighting chance when it’s discovered that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth by building subterranean pods to hold the species’ best and brightest. Those on the surface who survive the cataclysm become bloodthirsty mutants who try to feast on the unfortunate pod dwellers as they emerge from their hiding places. Action takes place in a variety of environments, including Western settings and city subways. Despite being early in development (Rage is set for a release sometime in 2011), the game ran at a solid 60 fps on the Xbox 360 in my E3 demo. This combination of Borderlands, Fallout 3, Bioshock and Metro 2033 will also be available for the PS3 and the PC.

Next was a jaunt to the other end of the convention center for a visit to the Square Enix booth. This was the first of two scheduled meetings with Square (I’m seeing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on Wednesday). Today I got a quick overview of three new games. Front Mission Evolved is a mech-based shooter about three political factions that join forces to battle terrorists who’ve destroyed a space elevator. The single-player shooter also includes three, eight-player multiplayer modes (but, sadly, no co-op), and will be available September 14 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Announced just today was Mind Jack, a shooter in which you have the ability to hack into the minds of any of the characters in the game and control them until they are killed, after which you simply find another unfortunate being to inhabit. Mind Jack is scheduled for an October 2010 release for the Xbox 360 and the PS3. I was also walked through the multiplayer modes of Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, the followup to the controversial 2007 shooter about mismatched heroes. Modes include Fragile Alliance, in which you team up with rival gangs to hunt down terrorists (a trend seems to emerge); Undercover Cop, a stealth mode in which one player must cap all of the other players one at a time; and Cops vs. Robbers, a 6-on-6 Team Deathmatch variant. Dog Days releases on all three platforms August 24.

Moving on to SouthPeak Games’ booth, I got hands-on with Nail’d, another entry into the growing ranks of combat driving games. In Nail’d, you drive either motocross cycles or ATVs in 12-player races (with either human or bot opponents) on off-road maps that sometimes have you doing some unusual things, such as driving on top of speeding trains. The mayhem is set to begin this winter. Also, I was reintroduced to Two Worlds 2, a 20 to 40-hour fantasy RPG that I saw for the first time at PAX East a few months ago. Apart from the single-player campaign, the game also offers eight-player multiplayer and an extensive character customization system. Two Worlds 2 was originally slated for a September 14 release date, but the presence of a little game called Halo: Reach made developer TopWare reschedule for sometime in October.

Perfect World, developer of free-to-play online MMOs, has two such games on display at this year’s convention. Battle of the Immortals takes RPG gameplay in the Diablo/Torchlight direction and gives it the MMO treatment. Weapons level up along with the characters. All monsters (including bosses) can be tamed and turned into pets, which can be mated with other players’ pets to create new generations of stronger creatures. There are 50 vehicles and rideable mounts in the game, some of which can carry as many as six teammates. And for the solo players who don’t like to group, most of Immortals can be played solo, but you need to find friends to survive dungeon exploration. The game (available to play right now) is built to perform well on PCs with low specs, new content is released weekly, and the character level cap is set at 125. In a similar vein is Forsaken World, in which it’s your task to organize the citizens of the gameworld against a malevolent god. It goes into closed beta at the end of 2010 for an eventual release in 2011.

Developer BigPoint is primarily known as a browser-based action game company. Its 55-game catalog (which they plan to boost to 100 by the end of the year) boasts an incredible 130 million total players. Not being a browser game player, I didn’t know this until they announced their new game: Battlestar Galactica Online. I’m a Battlestar geek from way back to the original series, so I had to check this one out. In BGO you can play as either a Colonial Marine or a Cylon in space-based combat scenarios that can involve as many as 1500 players at a time. Shipboard missions are also being planned. Since the game is played in a browser, it’ll be playable on practically every PC configuration. Battlestar Galactica Online will debut this winter, but will only be available for download from the SyFy Channel website for the first 30 days of release.

In more TV show adaptation news, the popular live-action combat show The Deadliest Warrior is getting its own game. Based on the Spike TV series, Warrior features gladiatorial combat between seven archetypal combatants, such as pirates, knights and ninjas. Each match consists of three rounds. You can try your luck in single-player mode, then move to either local or online multiplayer tournaments. You can also try to intimidate your opponent using voice chat. Deadliest Warrior releases July 14 for the Xbox 360 for 800 MS space bucks ($10). A PS3 version is planned, with an as-yet unspecified release date.

My last appointment of the day was with developer City Interactive to see their new stealth shooter, Sniper: Ghost Warrior. You play as either a sniper or the shooter’s spotter, who lets him know when and where it’s safe to move and where his targets are located. In single-player mode, you slowly make your way through a jungle to rebel camps to steal intelligence items and waste bad guys with extreme prejudice. Multiplayer modes include standard deathmatch and team deathmatch for up to 12 players on six maps based on the single-player campaign. No co-op mode is included, which is a shame considering two-player co-op would be a logical addition, but it might appear in an eventual sequel.