The room is stuffed with a handful of game journalists. It's dark. Drifting from the (very nice) speaker system are the sounds of ocean waves lapping against a boat. On screen, Lara Croft stands on the wooden deck wearing scuba gear. Thrifty girl that she is, it looks like Lara didn't want to spring for a wetsuit with legs in it. Apparently not worried by the deep cold of the ocean, she dives into the water. It's time for me to play Tomb Raider Underworld.

You make your way down the hallway in City 17, and push open the door into the bright sunlight reflected off of concrete. A Combine soldier stands before you, so you life your semiautomatic weapon, and as you pull the trigger and fire, the gun recoils in your hand. Another Combine stands across the viaduct, and when he fires at you, you feel the bullet strike you from the left, so you turn, and feel the gun jump in your hand again as you take him out.

That's the ideal experience with Novint's Falcon controller. The controller itself is about an eight inch orb that sits on your table, with a three-inch sphere sitting on the end of three arms coming off of it -- like a Soviet satellite sticking out of the globe. The idea is that you push the little sphere around to move your cursor, and the three arms provide resistance against whatever you bump up against. We got to use the controller at E3, and the verdict is that while it does provide a nice experience, the costs might be a little overwhelming for most players. More after the jump.

During our time at E3 last week, we were able to spend about an hour with a very patient Maxis Producer Thomas Vu, who guided us through a near-final build of Spore (the whole thing) and answered a barrage of questions. Here's what we gleaned from our play session, broken down into each phase:

• Part 1: Cell / Tribe Phase (after the break)
  
• Part 2: Civilization / Space Phase
• Part 3: General Information

Last week, a handful of Joystiq crew got to make fools of themselves on the mini-stage before Harmonix's Rock Band Bash featuring The Who. Set up for us on stage was the new Ion premium drum set for RB2. Over the span of the night, we drummed through a handful of songs to get a feel for the set.

After last year's detour to Santa Monica, E3 returned this year to its traditional home at the L.A. Convention Center. But the more things stay the same, the more they change, as they say (if they're a bit confused). Despite the return to the old location, much of this year's E3 had an empty, ghost town feeling when compared to E3s past. The general lack of participating developers and publishers, combined with the strict, invite-only attendee list combined to make a show that seemed incredibly small in the incredibly large convention center. To see just how small, check out our "E3, then and now" gallery, which compare scenes from previous E3s to similar scenes from this year's show.

Since we landed in Los Angeles for last week's E3, we've posted hundreds of articles. Knowing that there's a (very) small percentage of Joystiq readers who don't visit our site every 5 minutes, we've decided to collate all of last week's biggest news items to make sure you didn't miss the most important parts. (For breaking news from each of the big three press conferences, check out our highlights posts for each).

Microsoft

• Highlights from Microsoft's E3 press conference
• Install your Xbox 360 games to the hard drive, access XBLM on the web
• Details on the New Xbox Experience: search, hard drive play, alerts, themes, pics
• Castle Crashers, Galaga Legions, more on XBLA in 4-6 weeks
• Details on Lips: microphone, your songs, its songs
• Bungie: E3 game announcement pulled by publisher
  
• Square to squeeze FFXIII onto 360 with little compromise
• Portal: Still Alive additional levels based off Portal: The Flash Version, won't include GlaDOS
• Covenant playable in Halo Wars
• Too Human demo now available

In a nutshell, Flock is an evolved form of Lemmings: Using your ship and it's various beams, you guide sheep, chicken, cows and pigs past obstacles and into the Mother Flocker (be careful about slurring that name). The game will also feature co-op and a map editor. Although we weren't able to see either feature in action, Capcom's Kraig Kujawa told us their goal is to implement cross-console map sharing.

Before E3, the last time we heard anything about flOw dev Thatgamecompany's newest project was November 2007. Cut to last week, when TGC Creative Director and co-founder Jenova Chen guided us through an early build of their upcoming PSN title flower (note the 'o' is now lowercase).

Like flOw, it's really hard for us to confidently form an opinion on the abstract idea (check out PS3 Fanboy for their praises). We hope Sony decides to release a demo with this game. Videos and previews will not do flower justice; it's a game worth trying for yourself.

Each week Dennis McCauley contributes The Political Game, a column on the collision of politics and video games:
For more than a decade the Electronic Entertainment Expo was a must-see event for game retailers and media types. While it's true that in recent years E3 had become an exercise in wretched excess, that was, in fact, a large part of its charm. By day E3 featured massive, massively noisy game displays laid out end to end to end in the cavernous main halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center . By night dozens of game industry parties kept L.A.'s bartenders and sushi makers off the unemployment lines and gave a generation of scruffy game journalists an all-too-brief taste of the good life. In 2006, its final year as an extravaganza, a reported 80,000 people streamed past E3's exhibits.

But beyond that, E3 put the modern video game business on the map. You could be certain of national T.V. coverage from all of the major networks. The top newspapers were there as well. The media coverage of the show's bright lights, booth babes and nonstop bells and whistles made mainstream America sit up and take notice of a form of entertainment it had previously held to be child's play, and for geeky children at that. Of course, the gaming press went absolutely nuts during E3 week, pushing screen shots and trailers and interviews and whatever else it could get hold of to millions of eager readers.

To paraphrase Mick Jagger, I used to love you, E3, but it's all over now.

Yes, we are actually live blogging our own party -- we have an addiction. Stay tuned for images and updates from the party with special guest The Who [Update: Turns out The Who couldn't make it, but we do have Rock Band 2] and if you're within 100 miles, get over here!

During our guided demo of Microsoft's upcoming stable of XBLA games, Microsoft's Scott Austin informed us that all the games on display would be available in the next four to six weeks on Xbox Live Arcade. All of 'em. If you've been reading the impressions on Joystiq, you'll know that this a reason to be excited. For the record, the XBLA games being shown by Microsoft are:

• Bionic Commando Rearmed
• Castle Crashers
• Galaga Legions
• Braid
• Geometry Wars 2

We expected Microsoft to show off some cool XBLA games at E3, but we weren't expecting four to six weeks of win.

If you're interested in getting your hand on some of our over 200 lbs. of schwaggage, imbibing in free food and drink, and oh, meeting your favorite damn video game bloggers in the blogosphere, then get yourself to our Second Post-E3 Joystiq Meetup and Schwag-Off™. Find out how to get there after the break, and set your GPS to FUN.

Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty is the first (and possibly only) episodic DLC for the series. Community Relations Manager James Stevenson told us during a hands-on session that RC:QB is an "experiment" and that it could serve as either the start of an episodic series or just a transition between two disc-based titles.

The 3 to 4 hour game is built on the Tools of Destruction engine with some better lighting. Other than a new grapple feature, which is used for puzzle solving and world interaction, the game is in many ways an extension of the Ratchet and Clank series. Stevenson said the game was planned to be "more heavily focused" on platforming elements instead of the guns (although those are available as the game progresses).

A few things. First, I love the Silent Hill series. Second, E3 really isn't the venue for demoing a Silent Hill game. Even in Konami's relatively quiet meeting room, it was impossible to hear any dialogue or music in Silent Hill: Homecoming -- headphones were available, but they were broken ... grrr. Considering that the soundscape of any given Silent Hill game is responsible for half of the atmosphere (arguably more), it makes it hard to judge how the game feels. So, you'll just have to settle for a look at how the game plays.