The game industry's downsized E3 expo is not the ear-splitting, eye-melting, booth babe-slobbering bacchanal of yesteryear. Wired magazine dubbed the now invite-only event “a shadow of its former self,” exhibitors have plummeted from 400 to under 40 since 2006 and jaw-dropping reveals were in short supply.

But even sans spectacle, E3 delivers a heckuva lot of gaming news so let’s peep the big medium-size announcements.

Price Drops
- Both the PS3 and 360 are getting cheaper and/or delivering more memory for your money. Sony killed your wife's arguments against by dropping the high-end 80gig PS3 down to $399 but did so by killing backwards-compatibility. A shame since the original-recipe PS3 upscaled last-gen games.

Copycats
- Microsoft is introducing avatars, the 360 take on Nintendo’s Miis, with their upcoming dashboard redesign. While I’ll miss the blades, the new system promises to make content more manageable and amen to that.
- Guitar Hero: World Tour is adding drums…but don’t fret Rock Band fans, your drum kit will work on World Tour (or you could shell out for some fancier new drums with cymbols!)

Sequelitis
- Nintendo let slip new Mario, Zelda and Pikmin in the pipeline as well as the beach-themed Wii SportsResort (including the new “WiiMotion Plus” add-on to improve motion-detection) and Animal Crossing: City Folk, which is good news for my wife (who was addicted to the DS version) but seems stuck with GameCube-era graphics.
- Other follow-ups include: a stylishly cell-shaded (and Montreal-made) Prince of Persia 4; the cradle-to-grave RPG Fable 2 (which will hopefully fulfill the promise its predecessor failed to deliver on); follow-ups to Cliff Bleszinski’s smash third-person shooter Gears of War and Sony’s alternate-history FPS Resistance. Plus, a couple classic series are going now-gen: God of War 3 and Final Fantasy XIII.

More Cake
- Valve announced the sequel game geeks have been dying for: Portal: Still Alive, named after the original first-person puzzler's beloved game-ending song.

GTA DS
- Rockstar shrinks Liberty City down for GTA: Chinatown Wars, an original DS title (Rockstar’s first for the mega-popular handheld) revolving around the Triads.

Can't Hardly Wait
- We already knew about Sony's game-changing user-generated platformer LittleBigPlanet and Will Wright's Spore, an uber-Civilization which lets you evolve a single-celled organism into a spacefaring race. Doesn't mean we're any less stoked.

Newbie IPs
- If you loved Baldur’s Gate, get ready to squee over its "spiritual successor" Dragon Age: Origins from Edmonton RPG masters Bioware.

- Critics are already slagging Wii Music, not least because it’s not really a game. More like a toy. Or maybe art. Basically you mime playing one of 60 instruments and a cartoony dude onscreen acts it out. Um…whee?

- MAG is an acronym for Massive Action Game and that’s no foolin’. Up to 256 players (in 8 player squads) can shoot up the same battlefield in Sony’s potentially groundbreaking new co-op war game.

- Flower is a Sony downloadable from thatgamecompany, the folks behind flOw. Not much was revealed but it looks like an abstract, zen koan of a game involving brightly coloured flowers, endless green fields and controlling the wind to float petals through the air. You know those times when you wanna chill with a game but are way too stressed to deal with digital slaughter? This is for that.

- All I’m gonna say about the anime martial arts game Afro Samurai is this: Samuel L Jackson voices the hero and RZA makes the music. Also, it’s called Afro Samurai!