This rant has its beginnings in the Internet center sponsored by Intel. It's two-thirty, and in a wild imprvement from yesterday, I have had a decent meal at this point of the day, consisting of a ham sandwich and a brownie, as well as a Pepsi. Thank you Safety Monkey for bringing me that. I'm sorry I stole BatJewess' affection from you. But I'm sure we'll make up for it with heavy drinking.
Saw World of Warcraft and Starcraft: Ghost this morning, and thankfully made it on time for that meeting due to an early start and an avoidance of the highways.
After that I was free to roam the show floor for a bit and used that time to see Capcom's booth and look up Devil May Cry 3, which looks pretty good so far, but just didn't zing like the first one did. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I'm jaded and didn't get to hear Dante's trademark cheesy dialogue.
After that I saw the Square Enix theater, which spun around like crazy and was kinda cool, even though the only games of the lot I'm truly interested in are Final Fantasy XII (and only a mild interest at that) and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. And, even though I hate Final Fantasy VII, I have to admit that Advent Children looks pretty good. I'll just watch it with the mute button on because I've always believed that Final Fantasy VII had the worst plot of almost any FF due to the fact that the plot just kind of stops around disc 2. I will also be willing to watch someone else play Kingdom Hearts 2 just for the sight of Mickey Mouse laying down the mightiest of mighty beatings.
After watching the hallucinogenic circle that was the Square Enix theater (it's hard to explain but involves a whole lot of spinning in Aeron chairs) I wandered over to THQ's booth, where they were showing off the Punisher game. Well, to be honest the Punisher game was sort of shoved off to the side and for very good reason. It is perhaps the most vicious and bloodthirsty game on the show floor this year, because it seems to be based on Garth Ennis' twisted vision of Big Pun. You get to put people in woodchippers, you stuff grenades down their throats and throw them in pirahna infested waters. And people wonder why E3 is an 18 and over show. (Well. Punisher and Leisure Suit Larry's sperm-based mini-game).
Alright, after THQ was Sammy, where I got to play on a Double Faust Team during my test run with Guilty Gear Isuka, and realized that GG Isuka is one of the perfect games to play while drunk. Because you don't really know who's won until the end. Not because there's a lot of comeback potential, but because people don't remember who they're playing until the very end. So I imagine a lot of late nights of a few boozed-up friends and someone mumbling "who was playing as Faust again?"
My session with Sammy will also be remembered for a PR rep using the words "crack whore" in a pitch not once, not twice, but thrice. I promised him I'd quote him, and there it is.
They also showed me The Shield, which made me think of The Punisher, and Darkwatch, which made me think of Van Helsing. And then there was Spy Fiction, which I don't think I'll end up buying because I don't like stealth games, but I will probably buy an artbook for because I like Range Murata.
After that, it was back to Square Enix for my appointment with Final Fantasy XII (which I don't really like the system for because it's not really hands-on enough. You can just hit "all attack" and walk away for a minute, and when you get back the battle will be over and you'll have won). Star Ocean: Till the End of Time pretty much looked the same as when I saw it last year, except with English instead of Japanese. Which I suppose matters to people who don't speak Japanese. That group of people only mildly includes me, so I met that one with a shrug as well.
What I didn't meet with a shrug was City of Villains, but unfortunately, besides the cool barbed-wire-and-wrought-iron setup they had on the show floor, they weren't showing anything real about CoV. They had PvP running, yes, but the rep promised that when CoV comes out early next year, they'll have entirely different power sets and costume options for the villains. But the show floor simply had heroes dressed up in dark colors with slightly more ominous names, so I won't be able to judge CoV until it's out. However, I have wrangled out a promise from Greg Dean that he will join City of Villains when it comes out and create El Chupacabra, hopefully making his logo a goat and a straw. But anyway...
After that--miracle of miracles!--I didn't have any appointments for a while. So I ran into the media hospitality room, sat down on a couch and realized that I was sitting on BatJewess, who promptly declared me her new favorite (besides BatJew, of course) and invited me to the BatWedding in Vegas because I said I wanted to wander around E3 in a Char costume. Why? Why not, I suppose. At least, unlike Fred, they will be married in the presence of an Elvis Impersonator.
After a blessed, blessed hour of sitting down and shooting the breeze with those two about how the ethnic food in the San Francisco Bay Area is better than the ethnic food in Seattle, we ran off to Koei, where I got to kill a whole lot of Japanese and Chinese soldiers. It was a very cleansing and violent experience. I want to be a ninja. Still.
As a random note, Batjew and I ran into an Evil Genius staffer on the way to Kentia Hall and asked a question that had been on our minds for a day: How the hell do you use a training ground for gentleman spies as a torture/interrogation device? His response? "I don't know, there are way too many ways to torture people in that game." I am so buying Evil Genius come September.
After that? We took a picture of a guy with a chainsaw standing behind a little boy (on a poster, remember that little boys not named Dominic Nguyen are not allowed into E3). And then I wandered off to Namco to finish off the day, where I saw Xenosaga II, Taiko no Tatsujin and Tales of Symphonia. I saw a hell of a lot more there, but I'm tired, need steak and am going to try and eat it raw. Before I go, and remember that I'm updating this rant tomorrow night as well, I would like to note that Xenosaga Episode II: (whatever is German for Beyond Good and Evil, it probably involves umlauts and a lot of phlegm) brings back the only thing I liked about Xenogears before I used those CDs to prop up an uneven chair. Yes, it has a good dose of the cheese. They have Sakura Taisen-style combine attacks in that game, which include Shion picking up a sword and carving kanji into the enemy just to match her brother, and also Momo sitting in a field of flowers and sparkling up at Shion. The cheese must flow.
He who controls the cheese controls the universe.
It is by caffeine alone that I set my thoughts in motion. It is by the juice of the bean that the lips acquire stain, the stain becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone that I set my thoughts in motion.
Schnoogins.
