One of our readers (and kickass chick all around) by the name of Pinguino recently attended Anime Expo 2006 (http://www.anime-expo.org/) and decided to share her photos from the event with the rest of the xxgamers audience.

You can find more about Pinguino at her website: http://www.penguinpalace.com/

A collection of random images from the E3 2005 exhibition.  Warning, this article is extremely heavy on the images and extremely light on content.  If you're on dial up you may want to wait until the gallery is up and running rather than attempt to load this page.

 All photos displayed are courtesy of Dan Sandoval photography, Brian Witcherly and Nancy Wang, our kickass E3 photography crew!

I thought I'd post this for any of you that might be attending E3 this year.  I highly recommend checking out the exhibit if you have the chance.  While still somewhat small in nature, the Into The Pixel art exhibit helps recognize excellence in artistic design and direction within today's games.  While a great deal of focus has been placed on high end graphics in the end product, all too often the initial concept artwork and promotional pieces remain unrecognized for their contribution to the game development process. 

*****MEDIA ALERT*****

                2006 ``Into the Pixel'' Art Collection
       to Be Unveiled May 10th During Gallery Opening at E3Expo

      Third Annual Game Art Exhibition a Unique Collaboration of
    Electronic Entertainment Expo, Academy of Interactive Arts and
            Sciences, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art

                         Presented by GameTap

One of the biggest events in the year for both game professionals and game aficionados alike is set to occur this May at the LA Convention Center in, you guessed it, Los Angeles California. It's set to be a big year at E3 with two new major consoles likely to make an appearance and dozens of next generation games  sure to be on display.  From May 9th to May 12th, the city of Los Angeles will play host to an extremely varied

For those who have not been, E3 is a fantastic, somewhat varied experience.  Lines are often extremely long for anything that's received any publicity, people are absolutely everywhere, it smells rather odd in places, and finding someone who knows anything about a particular game, console, peripheral, etc can be exceptionally difficult at times.  Despite these annoyances and limitations, it remains one of the most appealing industry trade shows out there.  Game professionals tend to be gamers at heart, and E3 offers up a bevy of exciting new games and associated hardware to get their hearts all aflutter.  Pair that with a deluge of information and professional networking potential and you've got that perfect mixture; a professional event that doesn't take itself so seriously that it ceases to be fun.