BY LOU KESTEN
\nASSOCIATED PRESS<\/p>\n
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Some closing craziness on the final day of the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles:<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the last decade, “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” owned E3. The “Rock Band” team got The Who to perform a free concert in 2008. “Guitar Hero” publisher Activision topped that in 2010 by taking over the Staples Center for an all-star jam with Eminem, Rihanna, Usher and Pharrell Williams.<\/p>\n
And then the bottom fell out of the music-with-plastic-instruments genre. But both games returned to E3 this year, with new installments for the newest consoles.<\/p>\n
No big concerts this year: “Guitar Hero Live” took up just a corner of Activision’s booth, while Harmonix and Mad Catz set up a “Rock Band” stage on a walkway between the Convention Center’s main showrooms.<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty indie at this point,” Harmonix CEO Steve Janiak laughed. “But there’s been a lot of interest. We’ve had lines of people queueing up in the sun all week to play.”<\/p>\n
Perhaps most important for the genre’s future: “There’s a whole new generation of fans finding out about it,” Janiak said. “There’s a lot of exuberance about our coming back.”<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Kanye West stormed into E3 – and he didn’t have to wait in any lines.<\/p>\n
The rapper surprised several attendees when he slipped into the Los Angeles Convention Center on Wednesday to check out such games as “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End,” “Halo 5: Guardians,” “Cuphead” and “Star Wars: Battlefront.” Patrick Bach, executive producer for the “Star Wars” multiplayer combat game, tweeted a photo with himself and the “Gold Digger” singer.<\/p>\n
“He liked it,” Bach said later in the Electronic Arts’ suite. “I think. It was really quick.”<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association, which organizes E3, says Yeezy was admitted to the trade show as a celebrity guest. His attendance wasn’t totally unexpected. West’s camp reached out to the ESA ahead of the expo to see if he could attend.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Josh Duhamel made E3 his own personal “Take your kid to work” outing. The actor brought his 21-month-old son Axl to the Activision booth to see the latest version of “Skylanders.”<\/p>\n
“It is unbelievable. Truly sensory overload,” Duhamel said.<\/p>\n
The actor, last seen in the TV series “Battle Creek,” voices a character in “Skylanders Superchargers,” which adds vehicles to the mix.<\/p>\n
“I’m trying to teach him that this is dad. This is dad playing High Volt,” Duhamel said. “He’s like: `Naw, man. That’s not you. … You’re not cool enough for that.’ But for me . it’s one of those things that you always sort of wanted to do.”<\/p>\n
He said he hopes Axl “isn’t permanently damaged by all of this overload. But I think he is going to be fine. He loves it. He’s having the best time.”<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Video-game fan Rosario Dawson was also at the Activision booth, playing “Call of Duty: Black Ops III.” She described the game, set in 2065, as “the future of war. … It’s drones, controllers. It’s a whole other world. It’s technology on a whole other level.”<\/p>\n
Dawson – seen most recently in Netflix’s “Daredevil” series – said she just has to keep herself from getting too intense when playing games.<\/p>\n
“I’ve had that moment. You’re, like, tweaking at 4 o’clock in the morning,” she said. “My brother is like: `Go to sleep. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.'”<\/p>\n
“Yeah, it’s not a good way to go,” Dawson reflected. “I mean, it kind of would be a funny way to go but maybe not the best way to go.”<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Across the street from the convention center is a Hooters. Behind that Hooters is a sort of Bizarro World E3, a parking lot where developers smoke, drink beer and show off some of the show’s weirdest games.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the world of Devolver Digital, which spokeswoman Stephanie Tinsley Fitzwilliam describes as a “renegade publishing label enabling and supporting independent game developers from around the world.”<\/p>\n
That’s no joke. The Devolver lineup this year includes a Polish game set in Japan, a French game set in the U.S.S.R. and a Spanish game set in California. What do they have in common? They’re all unapologetically gory and more than a little silly. (And then there’s “Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star,” a bird dating simulator from Japan via England.)<\/p>\n
The whole scene behind Hooters reminded me of the early days of video games, when publishers exhibiting at the Consumer Electronics Show got sequestered with the porn producers. It’s a gas to see up-and-coming game developers paying tribute to the occasionally unwholesome roots of the industry.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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