I wasn't at all bothered by the audience reaction in the conference, Nintendo is the most diginified of the companies, so likely they didn't place people in the audience to cheer and laugh at preset times, and I wouldn't be surprised if the audience was asked to refrain from making too much noise during the presentation. In addition, the audience silence didn't detract from the fact that Nintendo clearly had the best presentation.

Lack of Zelda got people pissed off.

Why would anyone be excited when they show 2 good games and nothing else?
Don't get me even started about the new "sensor" things becouse that's laughtable.

If anything, I find that people cheering every announcement bugs me. I much prefer the conference to go along smoothly, without fanboy woops and such.

I do think the bigger announcements deserve some applause and cheering-and I did notice some for Galaxy 2 and Metroid. But fanboy tears of joy are reserved for Zelda =P

Of course... all the "whosss" and "OMFG" when they showed Hannah Montana clearly shows that...

Fanboys... don't worry ;) I liked the conference. Plain and simple.

Yeah, Hannah Montana got a larger cheer during the Sony conference

Remember it was in the morning as well, and i heard people cheering for Metroid, and i didnt hear the joke you mention.

Limited seating, mixed with lots of journalists doing the online liveblog thing probably had them buried in ther computers cheering digitally "OMG HOLY SH*T!!!1111!!"

Cheering crowds are for musicians, not game conferences. Its like going to a movie and people clapping at the end - people its a movie, they cant hear you. STFU!

Seriously, I don't think it shows anything but unprofessionalism when people can't control themselves in a corporate environment, like E3.

I think this could be one of the reasons. I mean, everyone was hoping/expecting to see the new Zelda Wii and in some way not getting to see any footage might be a bit dissapointing.

I think Nintendo and MS didn't feel the need to plant audience members this year.

Seriously, all 3 were equally good and we did get a reaction to those games, but it wasn't as massive as Sonys was, even if they were doing the dumbest things. That's why I really disliked Sony's conference, obviously there were planted audience members and it made the conference worse for it. I don't mind a massive reaction to FF14 or Kojima, that's good, applauding the awesome stuff (FF14 was awesome until that trailer ended), but if you're clapping for something really stupid then it just looks like you're taking the piss out of Sony (which is obviously not what Sony paid them for).

You can argue as much as you want whether you believe I'm wrong about the audience members, but put it this way, MS's previous conferences got a huge amount of "audience clapping" and they had audience members planted around for those.

I'm actually kind of glad Nintendo and MS were subdued in comparison, it just made the times they did clap more important (SMG2, Metroid: Other M, Halo Reach, MGS:R).