We know you folks are all torqued up for next week's Worldwide Developers Conference, especially given Steve Jobs's long-awaited "fireside chat" slated for Monday morning. But outside of the Mac community, there's a whole lot more attention being paid to another little annual conference known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo-- or E3, as the hipsters like to call it. For the uninitiated, close your eyes and picture Macworld Expo. Okay, now replace all the Mac-specific stuff with video games. Then make all the booths bigger, louder, and flashier times a zillion. Top it all off with a generous dose of scantily-clad booth babes and you've pretty much got the picture.

Now, historically Apple has never wanted to have anything to do with E3, since the company actively discouraged Mac games development for fear of bolstering the view that the Mac is "just a toy." Starting a few years back, however, Steve finally changed long-standing Apple policy and welcomed games developers to the Mac fold-- at least, that was the official story. Whether or not Apple is/was serious about courting games for the Mac remains a topic of much debate, with the naysayers filing Steve's "we like games" statements solidly in the "lip service" category. Certainly it didn't look good when Apple pulled out of E3 last year, citing a packed social calendar.

This year, however, Apple appears to have thrown itself back into the thick of the seizure-inducing flashing lights and ear-shattering noise: according to a MacGamer report, the company did establish at least a token presence on the show floor, "to pretty much everyone's surprise." That presence consisted of "twelve 533 MP G4 towers" with nVIDIA GeForce3 graphics acceleration and running Mac OS X. The games being demoed included the so-close-you-can-taste-it Carbon versions of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and American McGee's Alice, as well as the omnipresent Quake 3 Arena. Performance was evidently darn impressive, and we're happy to hear that Apple used this opportunity to prove that Mac OS X should turn out to be a solid gaming platform after all.

So that was Apple at E3: not an earth-shattering presence, but at least there were Macs there mixing it up. Sure, odds are that hardly anyone noticed Apple amid the hoopla surrounding some new-fangled gadget called the "Xbox," but it was still a nice gesture. Thus winds to a close this week's Apple-attended conference. As for next week, the weirdest thing happened this morning: our Alpha-Bits spelled out "WWDC MAC OS X PRELOAD" when we poured them in the bowl. We're considering it strictly a cryptic coincidence, since if life has taught us anything, it's that cereals rarely know what they're talking about, and sometime they're outright deceitful. (We've been particularly skeptical ever since our Rice Krispies kept snap-crackle-popping about an Apple-branded Palm OS PDA last year. Chattery pack of lying puffed grains...)