Essential Link:
Flickr galleries of SF and the Event.
San Francisco, the home of thousands of game companies, Raiders fans, and homosexuals. All three have some major overlap. I traveled far and wide to get there, to the promised land where
Sega presented Virtua Fighter 5 and Full Auto 2. But that's getting ahead of myself.
Tuesday afternoon, I hit the streets of San Francisco, in a small hotel surrounded by ghetto. I quickly traversed to Caltrain and south to somewhere around San Jose to make my first stop to a studio. It was a tiny studio, positioned above a day spa. There, I met a small man (in the Fry's picture), who introduced me to the PS3. Well, let me take that back a bit--a near-final, and he would only turn it on. I couldn't see anything, because this man is
dead serious about his job. Point in case, I noticed a shitty looking game on a television and laughed about it--he ran over and turned it off, even though I knew what it was. Anyway. He flips the switch on the PS3, and I was
blown away by the
AWESOME AMOUNTS OF FAN NOISE.This, of course, made for not only an awesome soundclip but a bit of hilarity the next day when I hit Nerdapalooza (AKA the Sega conference). Packing into a tiny room, a dozen and a half web journos sat and watched the Full Auto 2 trailer. Awesome stuff, if nothing else--and even better when it was playable on the final devkits. The finals, of course, are PSTwo quiet. Yes, seriously. Controllers felt unbelievably cheap, however--the same plastic, but hollow. Weightless.
Wrong. I did dig the triggers a little, but having convex instead of concave hurts it.
But hey.
Full Auto 2 was a bit more fun than the original, and playing multiplayer online in a room such as that was pretty damn cool. Too bad it was a very early build, but the basic concepts were above and beyond the original.
Then came Virtua Fighter 5. We played some practice rounds before the tournament...very, very nicely done game. It's like VF4e with the lower end opened a bit, the graphics and audio pumped up a couple of levels, and the fun quad-fucking-dupled. The tournament, though. First round had me versus Billy Berghammer.
So I decided to be a dick.
I announced myself.
He decided to film the match over my shoulder.
I beat him easily, then jumped up with a "whoo" and crotch-chopped him to the shocked looks of the crowd. Brian Inithar, of EGM said "It's only a game, man, haha."
One round later, he and I went up against each other. James Mielke shouted out "Hey Brian! If he beats you, he gets your job!" I turned around and said "Do you really think I want his job?" Sadly, I lost--close matches, though.
The tournament went on predictably--but then, the finals came. Mielke, the shittalker supreme...versus the quiet fury of Brian Dawson of GameDaily.
See that picture? That's the rematch of the finals. Note the looks on their faces--Mielke is getting his shit pushed in. Again.
All in all, an awesome trip that this post is serving as sort of a genesis of a more proper writeup...and sadly, I didn't get to ask any of your questions--the interviews available weren't conductive to it. Ah well.
