Have you ever wondered what attending a day of video game press conferences is like? Based on my email inbox, you probably have. Allow me to tell the story of my day today and just how very exciting the life of a game journalist can be.

After a day full of travel – ten hours in the air on a pair of airplanes and a ten-hour death march through Amsterdam that is a story for another time – the GI crew got a well-deservved long sleep in our Köln hotel. This morning saw a much-needed shower (seriously, death march) and Ben, Bryan and myself abandon Jeff to his Microsoftian fate and fill our bellies with schnitzel. Feeling human again, we made our way to the Schanzenstrasse (literally “the entrenched street” or “redoubt street” – will have to discover what the heck is up with that later) for the EA and Sony pre-GamesCom press events.

The line for EA wasn’t that bad. Twenty minutes cursing the insane international data rates on our phones ($20/MB indeed) and trying not to choke on the dozens of cigarettes burning around us (I swear Euros smoke twice as much as Americans, and being around it is way less pleasant than it was when I was a smoker myself), and we were in.

What followed was a ear-blastingly loud hour of EA hyping the next six months of its big-budget releases to us. Ever been to a punk rock concert? This was loud like that, except you have a seat (yay!) and a bunch of marketing spiels between bouts of onstage action (boo!). Compared to many of the dozens of press conferences I’ve attended, though, EA’s GamesCom event was a model of brevity. No graphs showing their market-leading blah blah blah, no poorly cloaked shots at the competition, no paper-thin attempts at being our friends. Just brief introductions to ten games that ranged from bleh (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) to meh (Crysis 2 multiplayer) to freakin’ sweet (Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Dead Space 2, Borderlands Bulletstorm).

A few things stood out amid the damage to our cochlea. In no particular order:

•    The actors who play the Weasley twins came onstage to demo Deathly Hallows’ Kinect capabilities for no good reason. There wasn’t even any amusing banter. They just came on, waggled on stage left for ten minutes while the game was broadcast on the big screen, then left. Presumably picking up their check and bailing out as soon as possible.
•    BioWare’s Dr. Ray Muzyka got excited whispers as he was announced, and big cheers as he stepped onstage to say that The Old Republic is awesome but not show it.
•    Dead Space 2 got huge cheers from the largely European audience. Also, the spacewalk in the demo was stunning.
•    Need for Speed didn’t get huge cheers when it was announced, but it sure did after the demo concluded. This is what Need for Speed should be. I can’t wait for it.
•    The Medal of Honor producer’s impressive, bushy beard elicited a hearty chuckle from the audience.
•    The melodramatic announcement of soccer star David Beckham’s involvement with EA Sports Active 2 was greeted with…crickets? Truly, the U.S. is where soccer careers go to die.
•    Bulletstorm producer Tanya Jessen and director Adrian Chmielarz got huge cheers. Tell you what, Europe: You keep demonstrating such discerning taste in games, and I’ll stop making fun of your pants.
•    I promise I paid full attention to Peter Moore drone on about motion sensing, not the pretty girl doing aerobics behind him on stage right.
•    How much does Microsoft pay for every time someone says “The magic of Kinect” at one of these things? At $10,000 a pop, EA just made twenty grand.

That was about it for EA, excepting some Eurocentric stuff I don’t care about like FIFA 11 (seriously, do they even sell that in the U.S.?). With Sony’s event literally across the street, this should be an easy day.

[Next up: The Sony conference – but first, an hour and a half in a parking lot!]