Story and Photos by Joey Galvan, Reporter

Gaming fans, young and old, filled the Palmer Auditorium during the SXSW Gaming Expo sponsored by Nintendo from March 8 to 10. The event is free of charge.

The entire auditorium was lined with game related products, merchandise or gamers competing head to head on the main stage LANFest.

The Nintendo booth showcased soon-to-be-released games like “Most Wanted U,” “The Wonderful 101,” “Monster Hunter Ultimate 3” and Lugi’s Mansion. Currently available titles like “New Super Mario Bros. U” and “Nintendoland” were also on hand for eager fans to try. Notably absent were anticipated releases like the new “Legend of Zelda,” “Donkey Kong Country” and “Mario Kart.”

Xi3 showcased its new Piston Console, which is a tiny, cube-shaped PC with some serious horsepower. Any gamer who has hauled a computer to a LAN party will likely benefit from the Piston’s compact design. Its energy consumption is low; it functions as a PC based console, works with on demand video services like Hulu or Netflix and can output to three monitors at a resolution of 1080p.

 “The timing was good for us. We announced it at the Consumer Electronics Show in January but didn’t give many details on it,” Chief Operating Officer for Xi3 Aaron Roswell said. “Now we were ready to disclose a little bit [more] as to the new user interface we’re working on to help people seamlessly connect all their digital world on one piece of hardware.”

 Mobage is a mobile, social gaming platform that connects gamers all over the world with free games for tablets and phones.

Stephanie Lin, who works for DeNA, a company that has several products on the Mobage site, said, “We’re trying to make our games as accessible as possible.”

Notable titles DeNA on Mobage include “Transformers Legends,” an action based trading title, “The Drowning,” a console quality first-person shooter experience and “Apoc Wars,” a real-time post apocalyptic game. Free games can be downloaded at mobage.com.