The time it took to read from my experience landing in Los Angeles to now might have taken what, fifteen or twenty minutes? To be honest, that’s about how quick the week actually felt by this point. Between all of the good times with nine other people, all of the games played and seen (my final count comes to about 39 or 40 E3 games between all platforms), and all of the writing and exercise done, the week had become something of a blur.

Even more than that, all of the constant stress I was putting my body under was starting to get to me. By Thursday night and Friday morning, my legs were crumbled to the point where I was in a continuous half-limp. This didn’t fully happen until the end of the day, but my Thursday was much slower because of it.

The day started with a breakfast of barbecue pork, fried rice, scrambled eggs, and white toast at the breakfast place in the hotel, which was obviously a bit more ethnic than I’m used to but still capable of giving me the energy I need for the final home stretch. For the first and last time, I headed to the convention center by myself, which was unusual for me as someone who spent his entire life living in rural Massachusetts and got by for the whole week by following the experience and literal footsteps of weathered E3 veterans. It was not a difficult walk at all, but knowing that I could easily make that walk by myself had a small and perhaps somewhat pitiful sense of pride to it.

Though I did have an appointment that day, I spent most of the early part of my day piggybacking onto two other appointments. After buying a commemorative E3 shirt, I went to an early Square Enix appointment with Justin and Jonny to see if they needed help (and to play the insanely fun Saint’s Row IV and promising Deus Ex: The Fall for iPad).

After that, I used my down time and darted for the Microsoft booth to try a real Xbox One game. I did try some golf game they had there, but the Forza 5 line was appealing enough to justify waiting 10 minutes for a single race. The controller more or less feels like a better Xbox 360 controller, but as someone who considers himself anything but pro-Microsoft, the rumble in the triggers felt pretty great, and made the game feel more immersive than it had any right to.

My journey in this booth ended when I was looking at the console itself placed under glass like a museum exhibit. I said hi to someone there who looked a whole lot like NWR Publisher Billy Berghammer, who I had met on Tuesday. My memory failed me, and the person I did say hello to was actually a retail representative for EA. Turning lemons into lemonade, I used this opportunity to talk to this guy about the Xbox One and what he thinks about it's consumer-unfriendly policies. It was a fine conversation, and at a certain point, I jokingly asked him “Are you responsible for this?”. He smiled, and said that there is absolutely no way EA could have gotten its hands dirty in the production of a console. If anything, he hazards a guess that it was almost assuredly a gross miscalculation of trying to appease publishers on Microsoft’s part than anything else.

Completing my next-gen experience, I decided to bite the bullet and head to the nearby PlayStation booth to get a swag bag (which included a shoulder bag, trial codes, and a branded water bottle) and wait in line for 30 minutes to play Knack, the character platforming game launching alongside PS4. Neal was less impressed, but the game played to me like Crash Bandicoot and a child-friendly God of War combined into one, with a healthy serving of Katamari Damacy. It’s pretty great. After the demo, a man from MBC Dubai named Raffi stopped me for a camera interview about my thoughts on Knack and PlayStation 4. It was weird.

I had nothing to do by this point, so I once again (politely) crashed an Ubisoft appointment to see if Kim, Jonny, and TYP needed any help with what I assumed were a plethora of games. They had it covered as well as you would expect from NWR (above and beyond), so I used the appointment to see a 20-minute demo of Watch_Dogs, which looks really fantastic (despite the game over-exposing everyone for the past year).

Following this, I left, went to the SEGA booth to ask about the Yakuza series (they are extremely aware of how many people want Yakuza 5 and the franchise in general in the west, and it definitely isn't dead, but they couldn’t give me anything else useful), and re-played things at Nintendo’s booth until my Majesco appointment in the mid-afternoon. During that appointment, I played Phineas and Ferb for Wii U and watched a game tester (who was also a professional dancer) play Zumba. Need I say more?

It was 3:00 P.M. by this point, with two hours until the show floor closes for good. I went back to the media room to write about Zumba, and spent 45 minutes replaying the Tearaway demo (it’s so much better the second time) and the two levels of the Donkey Kong demo I never got to play through the first time.

And before I knew it, it was 4:00, the final hour of E3 (the day ends at 5:00 instead of 6:00 like on other days). It was a sad reality, but also a struggle and a scramble to play “the right games” and make “the right memories” before it closed down. I went to the SEGA and Natsume booths to try Sonic 3DS and Hometown Story (they’re both fine, though Sonic 3DS is oddly much more fun than the Wii U version to me), headed to Ubisoft to try to see the South Park game (but they had shut down the guided demo already), and walked around a bit noticing that everything was either closing down, had no interest to me, or had lines too long to justify waiting in. 

So I went from one show floor to the other, first-party centric one a little disappointed with nothing to play, only to have the amazing experience of running into Wombat from the CAGcast, one of my favorite podcasts (and podcasters) of all time and meeting him as someone listening to the show since I was thirteen years old. It would have been nothing to some people, but it made that final hour pretty special to me. More importantly, he's an extremely cool and nice guy.

The day closed with the Pikmin 3 demo and the disappointing experience of waiting in line for Mario 3D World five minutes before the show floor closes only to be turned away and see the guy standing behind me playing that same demo as I walked away.

To follow such an awesome experience with such a dud really bummed out the cynic in me, and E3 ended with me watching people file out and waiting outside Nintendo’s booth with the rest of the gang as the massive adventure was coming to a terrifying and conclusive end. Until Charles Martinet came into the picture, that is.

Whether it be some deity pitying my weird combination of genuine disappointment and vague entitlement for a “memorable conclusion” or something else entirety, our day on the show floor got a very pleasant bookend when Kim, Andrew, and I took a great photo with Mr. Mario himself, Charles Martinet, coincidentally standing right where we were re-grouping.

I’d like to say the day ended in fireworks, but after our final great dinner in the hotel Indian restaurant (this time it was Indian curry!), the entire trip ended with rounds of Brawl, Cards Against Humanity, a series of goodbyes, a midnight showing of Man of Steel where the most fun came from insulting it after-the-fact, and an extremely real conversation with a certain someone about the human ego. It was a very special day all-around, but calling it anything but melancholy as our numbers dwindled would be a total lie.