LOS ANGELES — If you’ve never been to the Electronic Entertainment Expo, just imagine a rock concert, party and video game arcade rolled into one.
Spread it out over 700,000 square feet, toss in 60,000 people over three days, and pump up the volume, fog machines and laser lights.
That’ll give you an inkling of what it was like at the just-concluded E3 show in Los Angeles, where game developers, publishers, investors, retailers, and print, broadcast and Web journalists — plus various industry hangers-on — tried out early versions of the games you’ll buy and play during the next year.
Game consoles and PCs made a good showing, but the buzz this year was clearly about online games for the consoles. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all say they’ll take their console consumers online in some form or another this year.

Sony and the Seals
Sony’s centerpiece was “SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals,” an online shooting game where you play as a member of an elite military commando squad hunting down terrorists. Set for an August release, when the Sony PS2 modem goes on sale, “SOCOM” is a more cerebral approach to the combat genre, requiring you to coordinate with your teammates to track and kill the terrorists in a variety of environments.
You’ll communicate with as many as 16 partners through on-screen text or by speaking into a microphone headset that can recognize and transmit any one of hundreds of preprogrammed commands, such as “Hold your fire,” “I’ve got the lead” or “Plant the explosives.”
Other PlayStation 2 games that looked impressive included “The Getaway,” a “Grand Theft Auto III”-type game scheduled for release this winter, and “Ratchet and Clank,” a three-dimensional platform game in the Mario vein. Neither is an online title.

Microsoft offerings
Microsoft’s offerings focused less on one particular game and instead showcased games that it is publishing itself, as well as some being published by other companies.
When Microsoft launches its Xbox Live network later this year, it will tout its online games “MechAssault,” where you climb into a giant robot to blow up friends and surrounding cities, and “Midtown Madness 3,” a racing game set in Paris and Washington.
For non-online games, Microsoft showed off “Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge,” a visually stunning aerial combat game where you pilot modified World War II planes. The Crimson Skies franchise, which is a ton of fun to play, first appeared on the PC about a year ago, and the Xbox version will hit this fall.
As for Xbox titles from other publishers, Ubi Soft’s “Splinter Cell,” a stealth/combat game similar to Metal Gear Solid 2 but with better graphics, looks promising, as does LucasArts’ “Star Wars” role-playing game “Knights of the Old Republic.”
But Sega had the best showing among the publishers with the Xbox-only “Panzer Dragoon Orta,” a shooting game where you pilot a dragon through apocalyptic landscapes, and the stylish PS2 title Shinobi, where you are a deadly ninja who slashes magical foes.

Lines for Nintendo
Nintendo’s titles for the GameCube — updates or sequels to its “Super Mario Sunshine” (Aug. 26 release), “Metroid Prime” (Nov. 18), the “Legend of Zelda” (February) and “Starfox Adventures” (Sept. 30) — had gamers lined up to test them. All four looked and played well, including Zelda, which created a stir a few months ago when it was revealed that the game was adopting the cartoonish graphical style called cel shading.
But “Metroid Prime” was head and shoulders above the rest. The graphics are amazing, the control is perfect and any doubts about making the jump to a first-person perspective were erased. The game is as intuitive and fun as “Halo,” the near-perfect Xbox launch title, and should be a big hit.
Nintendo hasn’t announced any online titles yet, preferring to see how outside publishers succeed in getting GameCube owners to play online.