CES 2009: The Gaming Showcase of Mystery

Imagine, if you will, that all of CES (which includes over 130,000 attendees) has been shrunk down to a scale model roughly the size of a football field. Or better yet, the map room in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Off in the far corner, there's an extremely small, tiny, miniscule hut. Way back behind the big temples and buildings and such. See it? Probably not. Well, there's no headpiece to the Staff of Ra to illuminate it, but that's representative of the "Gaming Showcase" at CES.

The real thing is off the beaten path, and none of the people staffing the information booths had heard of it. They kept sending us in endless loops back to the Hilton, where it most definitely is not located. In fact, we saw so much of the Hilton (which is now sadly missing the defunct Star Trek: The Experience) that we memorized the entire layout of the place. Finally, after throwing away all of our maps and tosing caution to the winds, we accidentally stumbled across it in the South Hall.

It was full of wholesalers, the ever present Entropia Universe, Boomchairs, third-party peripheral accesory makers, headphone manufacturers, and a very sad dearth of games. In fact, we only saw one game being shown off. It's called Merchants of Brooklyn from Paleo Entertainment, so check back for a writeup on it shortly. Until then, enjoy the Gaming Showcase gallery below, and pray for us to unearth another secret room contaning the Ark of the Covenant of gaming. Or some energy drinks and granola bars.