UNCONVENTIONAL: If you attended the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, along with about 60,000 other people, you were probably blown away by the massive audiovisual bombast. If you returned for this year's E3 Media & Business Summit, which only 5,000 attended, you might think the entire video-game industry had collapsed.

The Entertainment Software Association's deliberate downsizing of E3 has gotten mixed results. On the one hand, it's a lot easier to get work done, since you don't have to fight through scrums of attendees gawking at scantily clad models that companies hired to demonstrate their wares. And you can buy a cup of coffee at the Los Angeles Convention Center food court without waiting in line for an hour.

On the other hand, some of those present this year missed the old spectacle.

"Now it's like a pipe-fitters' show in the basement," Ubisoft North America president Laurent Detoc told The San Francisco Chronicle. Also, many of the games expected for the holiday season were announced weeks ago, so E3 surprises were rare.

Of the three major console manufacturers, Microsoft probably gave its fans the most to look forward to. Sony was a close second, but Nintendo delivered a lackluster presentation that left a lot of observers scratching their heads.

ANIMAL ATTRACTION: Nintendo's E3 press conference focused on three new Wii titles. One, "Animal Crossing: City Folk," was widely expected; it doesn't appear to break much new ground, but fans of the DS and GameCube versions should be happy. The second was "Wii Sports Resort," which will be packaged with the Wii MotionPlus, an accessory that boosts the accuracy of the console's controller.

The wild card was "Wii Music," the long-brewing project from Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto. In essence, it's an air-instrument game, in which you mime playing a guitar, a saxophone, drums or 60-some other instruments by waggling the Wii controllers. It's so simple that it's either brilliant or stupid. Asked if it isn't really a toy rather than a game, Miyamoto responded, "It's more interesting than a game."

None of these titles got the kind of response that greeted the announcement of Rockstar Games'"Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars" for the portable DS. And gamers can at least take heart in the knowledge that Nintendo's Mario and Zelda teams are developing new projects.

BLANK SPACE: The Xbox 360 lineup for the rest of 2008 is much more varied, featuring previously announced titles like "Gears of War 2,""Fable II,""Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts" and "Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise." Microsoft's E3 event introduced two new party starters: the karaoke game "Lips" and the trivia challenge "Scene It? Box Office Smash!"

Microsoft wrapped up its show with the fairly surprising news that Square Enix's "Final Fantasy XIII" will be published on the 360 (rather than just the PlayStation 3, as everyone had assumed). But once the spotlight faded, buzz began to build around a product Microsoft didn't announce: a new "Halo" adventure from Bungie.

The day after the press conference, a message on the Bungie Web site revealed that the developer had planned to announce a new game during E3. "However, those plans were just changed by our publisher," Bungie president Harold Ryan wrote.

Why would Microsoft bury news about the Xbox's biggest franchise? "We had an embarrassment of riches," Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft's Xbox division, told The Los Angeles Times. (full story Link)

LOS ANGELES — Fevered fans pushed “The Dark Knight,” the sixth in Warner Brothers’ series of “Batman” movies, to record three-day ticket sales of $155.3 million over the weekend, shoring up what so far had been a wobbly year at the movie box office.

By Warner’s estimate, the film narrowly eclipsed opening-weekend ticket sales last year of $151.1 million for Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man 3,” the previous record holder.

Including a solid $27.6 million for the musical “Mamma Mia!” from Universal, the weekend’s top 12 films took in about $249.6 million, according to the box office consultant Media By Numbers. That lifted the domestic box office total for the year so far to $5.36 billion.

That is still down about 1 percent from last year, and the number of theatergoers is down 3.7 percent. But the weekend performance gave studios and theater owners alike reason to take heart, as it proved that even a familiar franchise like the “Batman” series can still bring surprises.

“It just took on a life of its own,” said Dan Fellman, Warner’s president for theatrical distribution. “You never expect anything like this.”

Unusual excitement began to build weeks ago around “The Dark Knight,” much of it fed by anticipation of a performance as the villainous Joker by Heath Ledger, the Australian actor who died in January.

Theaters began adding midnight and early morning screenings of the film, as fans scooped up advance tickets from the online ticket services Fandango.com and Movietickets.com. At sellout shows around the country, audiences — including more than a few viewers who came made up to resemble Mr. Ledger’s evil clown character — pushed Friday ticket sales to an estimated $66.4 million, including an extraordinary $18.5 million from the midnight showings.

That the film’s opening took on an event status that previous “Batman” movies never quite achieved apparently owed something to its strong presence in the outsized Imax format.

The film —directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale — was filmed partly using Imax cameras, and opened on nearly 100 Imax screens in the United States. That meant a boost at the box office because Imax tickets cost an average of $12.80, about 75 percent more than the overall average ticket price of $7.08, as estimated by Media By Numbers.

Imax screenings contributed $6.2 million to the “Dark Knight” box office, beating its previous record, for “Spider-Man 3,” by more than 30 percent, said Greg Foster, the president of filmed entertainment for Imax Corp.

To date, the summer box office had been solid, but not spectacular, with ticket for the season up slightly at $2.76 billion, thanks to price inflation, and attendance down about 2 percent. Films like “Iron Man” from Paramount Pictures and Marvel Studios, and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” from Paramount and LucasFilm, topped the $300 million mark.

But “Hancock,” an off-center superhero movie from Sony Pictures and the star Will Smith, came up short of last year’s “Transformers” over the July Fourth holiday, and several pictures, including “Meet Dave” from Eddie Murphy and 20th Century Fox fell flat. (full story Link)