This may be a long post.
Lots of you have been asking who the other guy in today’s comic strip is. Let me tell you about E3 buddies. Remember when you went on a field trip to the cheese factory in fifth grade and your teacher told you to stick with your buddy? This was in an effort to make sure you didn’t wander off on your own and fall into some kind of giant mechanical cheese grating machine. But it was also because seeing cool stuff is just more fun when your with a buddy. With that in mind we created the E3 buddy system. The last thing I need is for Tycho to wander off by himself and fall into some kind of cheese grating machine. However while Tycho and I are what you might call “best friends” that doesn’t mean that we have the same taste in games or that we like to see E3 in the same way. So at E3 we don’t hang out together. I only saw him once or twice all three days. My E3 buddy was actually Kiko and that’s the guy with me in today’s comic strip. We have very similar taste in games. People would stop me on the floor and ask me to sign a book or something and then ask why I wasn’t with Tycho and where he was. I told them look for the most boring game on the floor, he will be the guy standing next to it asking the developer questions like if their physics engine takes into account the surface of the table when calculating the rolling of a D20 or some shit.
Kiko and I were able to sneak into the show an hour early on the first day by turning our badges around and hiding in the middle of a group of exhibitors as they walked in. We took advantage of our head start to see the Halo 2 trailer and sign up for the Soul Calibur 2 tournament before any lines formed. The SC2 tourney was one of the highlights of the show for me this year. I play a pretty mean Talim and I was anxious to see how I stacked up against the competition there. I made it to the final four and returned the second day for the finals at the Namco booth. There was a huge crowed there and they were displaying the matches up on a giant screen. I felt really confident going into the finals. As it turns out though I was set to play the best Voldo player in the nation, a guy named Aris. I of course did not know this at the time though. I felt like I played a really good game. I won one round against him is all and it just wasn’t enough. He didn’t dominate me, which is something I was worried about. Afterwards people told me that our fight had been the best one to watch out of the entire tournament. We had some really cool deflections and some really flashy combos. At one point we deflected back and forth about five times and I could here the crowed behind me shouting, it was quite and experience. I know we have a good size SC2 community here in Seattle and I am planning on setting up a PA SC2 event for next month. I’ll post the details here once we get them hammered out. Congratulations to everyone in the tourney, especially Aris who went on to win the whole thing. I had a great time playing everyone.
I need to go get something to eat. I’ll be back in a few minutes to talk about the games I saw at the show. Before I go though I was hoping you could all go vote for us to win a Webby. We are losing again in the Humor and Games categories. I don’t think you guys will have any problem fixing that though.
-Gabe out
