Hello! I’m at E3. I’ve been doing this job for over a decade, and I’ve never been before this year, so I feel at once all wizened and experienced, and young and naive. I’m settling for a compromise of old and tired. Since I’m here, and trying to find moments in which to write up bits and pieces (see today’s Brink and The Old Republic pieces), I figured I’d also write a bit about the whole experience. Um, I should make this pretty clear: this won’t be productive.
I spent the weekend in Seattle, my newshound nose bringing you all the Left 4 Dead 2 news that was so warmly received. It really thrilled me, swelled my heart, the way our super-almost-world-exclusive (it would have been, if pesky IGN hadn’t seen it too) was met with such a response of kind-hearted interest and enthusiasm. A treat.
Then Monday I arrived in LA, all set to go to the EA opening presentation, to find out all their exciting revelations. Except my plane was late, and it turns out LAX is flipping miles from city, and there was a WAR! A war between aliens and robots that was really quite a bother, traffic backed up for miles. So I sat in my hotel in my pants, and then went out for Korean BBQ with a friend who lives in town. It’s this dedication that you read RPS for.
But Tuesday morning meant proper work. By morning I mean lunchtime. For some reason this year’s E3 didn’t start until 12pm on Tuesday, rather confusing everyone involved. This was made even more confusing by the rather officious decision to keep all non-exhibitors out of the hall before the 12pm opening, making reaching a 12 o’clock appointment something of a struggle. I have a media badge, damn it! MEDIA!
The badge thing is pretty interesting. I don’t know if you know about Jane Elliott’s blue eyes/brown eyes experiment, but the badges at E3 seems a pretty effective way of recreating it. The exhibitors have orange stripes on their badges, while media have black. This is accompanied by the splendid words “All Access”, which lets me hold my badge out from the strap around my neck and march past disappointed security guards with my nose high in the air. It means I can go up escalators out of bounds to the green stripe people. Ew, green stripers are just awful. Thousands of them, cluttering up the place with their non-all-access permissions, acting as if they deserve to be at the same games show as my people. I know they’re a simple, lesser sort, and I should give them my sympathy, but instead I barge my way past them on my way into the media ONLY hospitality area to drink my complimentary iced tea.
My first impression of the event was that it was simply too enormous. But as it turns out, it’s not that bad. The big companies have their ludicrously huge stages and booths in the middle, and then all the cuddly smaller developers area scattered around the outside. My first visit of the day was the splendid High Rez Studios to see Global Agenda, which I’ll tell you all about in the next couple of days. I liked that this was my first call, away from the insane noise of EA and Sega and the like, in a nice, gentle area. Of course, I didn’t have to play with the dreadful green stripers, but instead was welcomed through a black door into a tiny pretend room.
Then it was pretty non-stop all day, rushing from one appointment to the next, all day long, with only enough time to steal two grapes and a Sprite from Valve’s secret NO GREENS room.
Sadly the glamour of my delusional importance does not stretch outside of the Convention Center, and as I sit here on a freezing patio area thing, six metres away from my hotel room so I can at least get a whiff of internet access, my poor little legs are getting too cold. Which is better than too hot, which I was for the majority of the day. Apparently the weather is unseasonably mild for the time of year, according to the nine hundred and sixty weather bulletins on NBC this morning. If it had been one degree hotter I would have stood in the middle of the street screaming until I died.
What will Wednesday bring?!?!
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@P7uen
Jesus, you’re right!
when i reload the page and it just flashes briefly in the corner, it IS Bart mooning. Well spotted!
Isn’t Black the lowest rank?
Then red, then orange, etc, with the highest being Ultraviolet?
The gamma ray badge would win, clearly.
Another entertaining article, Mr. Walker, keep letting us know how you’re doing!
edit: oh, and don’t forget to pick us up some compo prizes while you’re there..
We’ve also had an unseasonable lot of earthquakes lately. Ought to be glad you missed those.
@John Walker
I don’t think too many folks want to shoot the messenger just because you brought some news from Valve that has met with less than universal enthusiasm. Though you’re right to refer to its warm reception, the Steam L4D2 forum is a virtual inferno.
Though perhaps next time you get 40 odd minutes chat time with a guy from Valve you might like to save the demonstration of how much swearing you’re allowed to do until after you’ve run out of pertinent questions. Such as why anyone with functioning brain cells above double figures should go out and buy a copy of L4D1 for anything more than a few pennies when a bigger, better game will be along soon and, it appears, no discount if you’ve already shelled out for the first one.
dammit I wish I was there! Even as a dirty Green Striper!
We need this band system for the commenters, everyone who starts out is assigned a coloured brown. The more meaningful the comments the higher rating you get, being given certain privileges. Those who spam assigned ‘worse’ colours.
Eventually, once we have a picture of who are dissenters we working on a list of where people live based off their IPs, eventually we can detain them, of course judging by the L4D2 thread the camps will soon start filling up and we’ll have to start ‘disposing’ of people.
Yes, it all makes sense now. We must do this to maintain purity in our comments.
Keep it up John, don’t mind our reactions.
I hope you’re bringing some detailed news about SupCom 2, with you being such a big RTS fan (oh wait… :) ).
The second you work in the industry, the second you can totally see why, and back the idea of, making a new game instead of an expansion.
I was actually quite thrilled with L4D2 – Frying Pans! I haven’t FPS’d with those since PO’d.
A 30 degree day in London is pretty damn hot. I say this as a Perthite who knows a thing or two about damn hot. It’s the humidity, and the whole city kind of throbbed with heat well into the next day (and it’s not a small place). So plenty of Poms would have occassional experience of mean temperatures. This doesn’t mean they should lose the hilarious overreaction to heat we fans demand, though.
And can I bring up L4D2, just a little bit? Go on. It’s a journalism question.
When this came up wasn’t there anything but delight in your surprise? No doubt, no slight confusion?
I mean, when I saw the headline I said to myself “Already? This’ll cause consternation” and I’m not exactly someone you’d describe as having his finger on the pulse of gaming. I’m sure someone foresaw a, let’s say, mixed reaction.
Feel free to tell me to bugger off and listen to the podcast.
Anyway, huge temperature shifts are all part of The Procedure, as it is known. Soon you’ll be shoving around the greens at the behest of the oranges like a true believer. The new dawn approaches.
As day 2 carries on, you’ve probably not been outside to notice, but it’s gotten quite cool and rainy all of a sudden… I’d hate to think you’d wished this upon us.
As an aside (or more on topic, I guess), I’m probably not plugged into the proper circles, but I hadn’t noticed much furious excitement over HL2EP3. But I personally would be pretty interested to hear a word or two…
Unlike a lot of folks, I was actually quite enjoying the single-player stuff, particularly if you started from the beginning of HL2 and went straight through to the end of ep2. Carries a bit of momentum that way (something about not waiting a year and a half to see consecutive moments connect); and although a lot of the storytelling is pretty thin in the new series, I found myself pretty interested by the end, what with the cagey hinting at so-and-so and the sudden demise of such-and-such…
OK, does anyone actually NOT know what happens at the end yet? And did anyone get the “put garden gnome into orbit-bound rocket” achievement?
I don’t think it’s just the temperature. RPS are used to living in northern climes, where the sun isn’t nearly as high in the sky. Heck, I live in Canada and I’m still five degrees south of London.
The part about “If it had been one degree hotter I would have stood in the middle of the street screaming until I died.
” part made me laugh out loud. There is just something about people being in LA that don’t belong that makes me giggle, like Conan O’Brian moving there for his new show. I’m surprised he hasn’t got a constant sun burn.
“And did anyone get the “put garden gnome into orbit-bound rocket” achievement?”
I did. You can check the global stats for that online. I’d link you but I am at work.
I thought I’d be clever about that… I wanted to listen to the dev commentary anyway, so decided to combine the two, bringing the damn gnome with me while listening to commentary… About three quarters through the game a friend asks me “You do know you don’t get achievements in dev commentary mode, right?”
So no, I don’t have it… :D
E3 was all over the local (australian) news last night.
Somehow fancy graphics and interacting with games using a camera have just been invented.
Well, the coverage wasn’t any worse than that one show we have about games :/
Maybe it’s the nature of modern PR that our collective activities here in the comments can get John “green striped’ from the uber reveals. Would that affect the way we comment? If we had thumbs on comments would it affect that too?