E3 and LA

So I cut out a bit early from work on Wednesday hoping to beat some of the rushhour traffic, which I did for the most part. I got out of Oakland without any troubles but I did sit in some traffic on 580 after that. The drive was a bit longer than I expected, but I got through without a problem. I wasn't really happy about driving through the mountains in the dark though.

E3 stuff:
E3 was pretty damn sweet. Certainly bigger than I expected. I had no idea you could construct such huge and elaborate booths indoors just for a conference... Man they go all out. I saw previews of the Xbox-360 and PS3. They were mostly pre-rendered crap and very little gameplay, so that kinda sucked, but the pre-rendered stuff looked really good. I was disappointed to not see anything about the Nintendo revolution.

I got to play the godfather, which was pretty cool. Honestly it didn't seem all that original, more of a GTA clone with some new features and set to the mafia. Starcraft Ghost looked like it actually had potential as an FPS, though I didn't' get to play it. I'm looking forward to Civ IV, but all they had was a video and no demo. The video was really funny though. I screwed around for a couple hours at the Nintendo section, but there wasn't really much new there... Donkey konga 2, more Mario party. The only new thing I saw was the gameboy micro. I wasn't impressed. It was just too small. It looks like an old school NES controller, but significantly smaller, and the screen only takes up a very small part of the object. Yes, it'll be portable, and it'll play all the GBA games, but the screen is just too small for anything but holding it 6" from your face, and even then it sucks. I played a bunch of other games including a new Castlevania game which was a lot of fun, the new dragonball fighting game, a new ratchet &clank, new katamari damacy. There were tons of other ones I'm sure.. but really there weren't many PC games in the set which was kinda disappointing, as really the PC is my favorite gaming system.

Otherwise the show was a huge production and quite an experience. Lots of booth babes, I got a decent amount of pictures. I got to play, and beat Phil Laak(current world poker champion) at poker. Yahoo had set up a table where 10 people would play at a time, well 9 and Phil. I got in and lost in 4th place at the table, Phil went out early by going all in and I folded my 2,3 offsuit. So yeah, I technically didn't beat him, but I did place higher at the table :-) The top two people at every table he played(which was a lot) got to come back to play heads up against him later, I was hoping to make it to that, but no dice. The conference totally wore me out, I don't think I could have done 3 days, or they would have at least been short days for sure. 2 days was good though, I saw pretty much everything I could handle, and there's no way I saw enough in one day. I'd love to go back next year.

Matt, Joe, Vicki:
I got to hang out with these three crazy people on Thursday and Friday nights. We went out for dinner both nights which were both good... The pizza was excellent on Thursday. Thursday night we headed to see the new star wars movie. Definitely the best of the 3 prequles. There were parts that still sucked, the dialog between anikin and padme still made me want to gouge out my ears. I didn't like how quickly anikin subverted himself to the emperor when he decided to join him. But nothing nearly as bad as the first two.

Friday night we went out just to 'see the sights'. Tried to go look at the Hollywood sign, but it was dark and we were far away because somehow the people living in Hollywood have no idea how to actually get CLOSE to the sign. Then we went to the whole walk of fame and saw a bunch of peoples stars. I looked upon Ryan secrest's star with contempt and was going to spit on it, but a bunch of people were busy walking on it at the time. We saw the hand and footprints infront of the Chinese theater. That was awesome... Adam Sandler just had his made and it was still roped off. We went into the Kodak theater and saw all the Oscar winners on the wall, that was cool. Otherwise we just sat around and shot the shit as it were.

Everyone seemed to be doing find and I was extatic to see them all again. I did get into an argument with Joe about which Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles movie was better. I say the second one is better on the merrit of humor, he's very strongly opinionated about the first one being better. While I agree it's still a good movie, I'm more entertained every time I watch the second one.... I'd love to hear everyone's opinions of that in the comments :-) Personally I just think Joe is a ass ranger monkeyfuck to steal a phrase :-)

LA traffic:
LA traffic is a thing to behold. It doesn't behave like traffic anywhere else I've been, and it's not like I'm not traveled. The thing about it is that the cars never actually stop, they just slowly move along at 2 or 3 mph. Also, with the retarded confusing spiderwebs of freeways they have, often times you need to merge across 5 or more lanes of traffic in a matter of much less than a mile.. normally this would be a problem, but not in LA. Everyone just lets you though... its great. I think they know that the freeways suck and they're going to have to do it later too, things do just work out better when everyone is nice.

After E3:
Once I got back to work from E3 I've gotten a TON of work dumped on me, so I'm going to be quite busy for a while. Hopefully I'll update more on this later, but I think I've put out enough for one day.