For the past decade, the videogame community has gathered once a year to act like teenagers whose parents have gone out of town. Known as E3, the electronic entertainment expo, was a slam-bang brouhaha so glitzy and over the top that it eventually lost sight of the bottom.

Though its intention was to facilitate industry and media mingling to build buzz for impending games, the software was often overlooked by the pasty-faced gamer geeks getting snaps with the bikini-clad booth babes.

Then, just as the gaming industry went from next-gen to now-gen, it all came to crashing halt. In fact, on Saturday the snarky developers of Gamecock even held a mock funeral on a Santa Monica beach to facitiously lament the passing of the-once cacophonous event.

The coffin was buried on the last day of the “new” E3 Media & Business Summit, which downsized the 60,000 strong event into a 3,000 invite-only crowd with only a few dozen companies showing off their wares (Gamecock even organized a counter-conference for the uninvited indies called EIEIO, or Expo for Interactive Entertainment, Independent and Original).

But if the flashy displays had been de-flashed, a lot of gaming news was still dropped.

Nintendo crowed, and rightfully so, over the domination of its DS and the unexpected success of the Wii. They also announced a game which we first blogged about here waaay back in January--Wii Fit--an exercise based title which will increase Nintendo’s legion of non-gamer acolytes and make it way easier for kids to convince their mom to buy them one. Also, they’re making a "Wii Zapper" for those if nostalgic for Duck Hunt’s light gun and Super Mario Galaxy looks awesome!

Sony said they’d be price-slashing their 60GB model and adding a new 80 gig version--except it soon turned out they’ll also stop making the 60GB edition so once current supplies are bought up, the high price point will return. D’oh!

Luckily, they also had some pretty sweet games in the pipeline, most notably their graphically impressive shooter Killzone 2, the fourth Metal Gear Solid and newcomer Folklore, a dark fantasy developed by Resident Evil creator Yoshiki Okamoto and rooted in Euro fairy tales.