Andy Waxy.org Baio, who created now Yahoo!-owned events site Upcoming.org and is quite the gamegeek (and a GSW chum!), made the trek down to E3 earlier this month, and has posted his impressions of his 'E3 Underdogs 2006' at his personal site.

He does note, interestingly, that in finding the downtrodden: "This year was particularly hard. Partly because I spent most of the day waiting in line to see the Nintendo Wii, but also partly because the entire gaming industry is getting so weird."

He continues: "In catering to the casual gamer and trying to differentiate from the competition, every platform and publisher is spending serious money turning former underdogs into big-name titles... I was surprised to see games like Loco Roco and Viva Piñata with huge marketing efforts by Sony and Microsoft. (What hath Katamari wrought?)"

But some of the Baio-approved 'under rug swept' titles include our favorite Elite Beat Agents, Guitar Hero II, which Baio is parading around at work "(I won't be happy until I get Jerry Yang and David Filo to battle it out on "Bark at the Moon.")", and one title not really mentioned by GSW thus far, Elebits for Wii ("Part hide n' seek shooting game and part physics simulation, Elebits uses the Wii controller as a gravity gun to ransack ordinary household settings to find and capture cute little characters.") Neeto!