You know how I said in yesterday’s write up of E3 that Wednesday’s events would be less jam-packed? Yeah, I meant more jam packed. Much, much, much more. So much more, that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to relate them all to you here (this is what happens when you also have a TV Watch for two-hour episodes of So You Think You Can Dance looming over your head like the sword of Damocles — or just Dante from Devil May Cry).

So I’m punting a bit and promising the highlights from Wednesday in a super-deluxe entry about Thursday’s offerings, which really do seem to be on the lighter side anyway. (Famous last words. See above for proof.) But I don’t want to leave you empty handed, so let me tell you about the two hours I spent in the thrall of Wil Wright’s gorgeous, ingenious and clinically addictive Spore. It’s one of the most intricate and dense life simulation games I’ve ever seen, and yet it’s intuitive enough to play that I simply sat down at a kiosk in the EA Games suite, grabbed a mouse, and within minutes had my own little cellular organism flittering away through the primordial ooze. And then I swapped out my dude’s flagellum (i.e. tail) for an extra eye and realized I’d stuck him with almost no method of forward locomotion, which made it kinda hard to, you know, eat. Or not be eaten.

Eventually, an EA expert came over to give me and my colleagues Wook Kim and Gary Eng Walk a proper tour of the game, including a database of thousands of user-generated creatures, which is when we discovered just how insanely flexible Spore’s creature creation engine really is. There are Yoshi-shaped creatures, Whack-a-Mole-shaped creatures, Pokemon-shaped creatures. There’s a creature that’s the spitting image of Hobbes from Calvin and Hobbes. What’s even crazier is that our guide told us that the Spore team often has no idea how people made these creatures.

Wook and Gary grew restless and moved on to check out other EA games in their suite, but I stayed parked right there, learning about everything from how to organize my own tribe, to how to navigate my space-ship to distant planets. Even the guide moved on to other people, but I stayed right there, mesmerized, and I only left because they were closing for the day and had to kick me out.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the Samuel L. Jackson martial arts game Afro Samurai, the all-new 8 bit Mega Man game (you read that right), the most violent game the Nintendo Wii is likely to see, and what it’s like to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" while barking in a dog suit while your friend is strumming a sitar.

There are only so many times you can watch a vaguely militaristic man, armed to his digital wisdom teeth, fire a pulse weapon at some marauding zombie/leviathan/genetic freak/Wookie before the bloom pretty much gets eviscerated from the rose. And I write this after just the (official) first day of E3 — I’ve still got two more jam-packed days of giga-pixeled decapitations to wade through. "Wait, Adam, do you mean to tell me that you’re actually complaining about getting to spend your Tuesday learning about videogames as your job?!" No, dear reader, I’m not, promise. (Before I explain why I’m not complaining, though, mega bonus points to my colleagues Wook Kim and Gary Eng Walk for doing me a solid and filling in so awesomely yesterday.) There was plenty to enjoy yesterday, and I’ll get to all that shortly. But it’s also my job to be honest, and, I gotta tell ya, this isn’t exactly turning out to be a blockbuster E3.

Exhibit A: Nintendo’s morning press briefing, which took placebright-and-early at the famed Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Surely, thecompany with the hottest home and portable consoles around bussed ingaggles of E3-ers from their downtown Los Angeles hotel rooms (anddragged me from my apartment ten minutes away) to the home of no lessthan the Academy Awards because they had something to seriously dazzlethe teeming sea of laptop-tapping jaded journalists and industrybig-wigs? (Whew.) Um, no. And after the jump,I’ll tell you what Nintendo did instead, along with the highlight’sfrom Sony’s confab, and which games made the biggest impressions.

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It is Monday evening here in L.A. and I’m stuck in a hotel room recapping the day’s events while my friend (and regular EW.com contributor Gary Eng Walk) is off having fun at a Gears of War 2 party.  And what, you are likely asking yourselves, is Adam Vary doing? Well, it turns out the eager young padawan — who’s supposed to be filing these daily dispatches — was called back to the office to fill in for a flu-stricken colleague. Because that’s the kind of guy he is: one who’ll use just about any excuse to get out of doing work. (I kid, I kid.)  Monday’s summary begins after the jump.

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I need your help, fellow gaming PopWatchers. I’m attending this year’s E3 — the annual über-dog-and-pony show for video games and consoles — for the first time next week, and while I’ll be ably guided by our illustrious gaming editor and E3 veteran Wook Kim, I’m still feeling kinda green about facing down the massive sea of booths and stages at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

So this is where you all come in: What games do you most want to hear about? We’ll have the big press conferences by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony all covered, but when it comes down to the individual games, there’s a frak-load to choose from. (Click here for a list of the titles confirmed to appear.) Should I focus mostly on the tsunami of action-based sequels — i.e. Resident Evil 5, and Fallout 3, and Resistance 2, Killzone 2, Far Cry 2, and Gears of War 2? Do I fixate on games like The Sims 3, LittleBigPlanet and Spore that are as much about creating your own universe as playing inside it? (I’m personally pretty jazzed about Spore (see video below), so you’re gonna hear about that one regardless.) Is there anything more you’d like to know about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed or Lego: Batman, or have those EW.com First Looks whet your appetite?

Hop on down our warp pipe to the message board level and let me know!