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A WINNAR IS THEY!

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Between e3 and work, I’ve seriously not had much time to game or even answer emails lately. For everyone I’ve not gotten a chance to get back to, sorry.  This post might provide some context.

But now on to the winners of my contest! The idea was to come up with the best/worst fake video game title.  Here are the WINNARS:

Third place, winning the prize of being fired, is Jake (8Bitjoystick) for his entry:

Wilford Brimley’s Legend of the Oat Warrior: Shut up and JAM!

Second place, winning a set of steak knives, is Turtle502 for this entry:

Pi Hero: Digit expansion pack

As previously mentioned I had so many entries I had a three way tie for first place. 

For third first place, winning a copy of Wil Wheaton’s “Happiest Days of our Lives”, Chris! For his entry:

Fly Swatter: Broken Wings

For second first place, winning a copy of Wil Wheaton’s “Sunken Treasure”, Adam, for his entry:

50 Cent presents Mario vs. Tony Hawk Urban Snowboarding

And finally, for first place, winning a copy of Jonathan Coulton’s CD/DVD combo “Best. Concert. Ever.”, General Grey, for his entry:

The West Peoria Ornithological Society’s Woodlarks III : Revenge of the Dartford Warbler (Hellish Migration Edition)

Congratulations to all the WINNARS!  Your prizes will be mailed out on Tuesday, June 16th.  Thanks for playing!

Contest Info

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I’ll be sending out emails tonight notifying the contest winners of their…win—ening. Thanks to the generosity of one Wil Wheaton I have second and third first prizes to award! Second first prize gets a copy of Wil’s new book Sunken Treasure, and third first prize gets a copy of The Happiest Days of Our Lives. (Wil’s not sponsoring the contest to be clear nor does he know I am doing this, he gave me a new copy of Sunken Treasure at e3 and I have an extra of Happiest Days)

Second prize is still steak knives and third prize is you’re fired.

I look forward to posting the results, some seriously funny entries were submitted.

E3: Day 2

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Day 2 of E3 I completely and totally lost my shit.  But first, the keynotes!

I got up early to catch both the Nintendo and Sony keynotes.  Standouts from the Nintendo keynote, as I twittered live, were things like Golden Sun DS, Mario RPG, and Dead Space Extraction.  As a Wii owner and DSi owner I was really enthused by those titles. Four player Mario looked neat but I hated the stutter when a player died and the other three had to apparently wait for a half second.  Mario Galaxy 2 won’t be out until next year.  The only things left that excited me were the new Metroid game and the possibility that the Wii Vitality might give us the ultimate video game experience, a game powered by your heart rate, Wii Crank.

Sony started off a tad slow in my opinion, but when they recovered they really recovered.  God of War 3, The Last Guardian, MAG, and PSP Go I think were really really really strong announces.  Their overall briefing had a lot more energy than the Nintendo one and their exclusive line up really has me interested, even if I have to wait for 2010 for most of it.

CNET has a great wrap up of the three keynotes.  Not surprisingly, I tend to agree with the wrap up.  <g>

Keynotes watched, e and PMS Kitty and I went to have lunch to debate the presentations and talk about what has us excited as gamers. 

As a side note, I got weird flak during my live twittering our competitors’ keynotes because I work at Xbox and people expected me to somehow be loyal solely to that.  Look, I’m a gamer first.  I own all three platforms and a DSi.  Yes, I work at Xbox to make it the best possible platform, and I think it is clearly the best platform.  But this isn’t a zero sum game.  I love PAIN, Killzone 2, and Infamous on the PS3.  I love World of Goo, Boomblox, Metroid on the Wii.  And I’m on record that my DSi is by far my favorite hand held platform evar.  Fanboyism isn’t really my thing, because it’s really really limiting.

Then Steven Spielberg walked right by me and I temporarily lost the power of speech.

Wait I’m getting ahead of myself.

So after lunch we hit the crown jewel of the event for my first E3, the thing I was looking forward to the most, that deep fried twinkie/snickers bar combo of dense awesome gaming event goodness, the E3 expo.

Right outside the hall was a full size Ecto 1!!!

ecto

Sony did a great job branding the West hall.

sony

The expo is divided into two halls, the South Hall which was mostly our booth plus Harmonix, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Square Enix, etc etc, and the West hall which had Sony, Nintendo, Activision, Capcom, etc etc. 

For our first day, we hit the South Hall. Energy there was way up, with tons of title announcers and demos and lines to see the new hotness. We started off checking out all the titles in the Microsoft booth.  For a lot of them we’d of course seen them because, you know, we work there.  But pausing slightly at a demonstration of the Sky integration LIVE feature, I looked up from the demo to see, passing less than a foot beside me, Steven Spielberg and a couple of his body guards.  As my jaw hit the floor with an audible thud, e saw my reaction and took the opportunity to try and engage me in conversation, “Are you ok?”

“He—that—walked just now—things—movie I like—just now—right by us—he…” I stammered.

Did I diss on fanboyism just a minute ago?  I lost, my shit. Steven *fucking* Spielberg walked mere inches from me on the way to our private briefing area to show off Natal.  In retrospect, there was thankfully no opportunity for me to engage him in conversation because I would forever made him hate me by saying “THANK YOU FOR CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/JAWS/SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, btw what the hell were you thinking re: Jurassic Park: The Lost World?”  Of course in my temporary stroke victim status losing my speech center it would have come out “THANK—CLOSE—JAWS—PRIVATE RYAN—HELL—LOST WORLD?”

My mind totally screwed, we proceeded to check titles out.  Standouts are Assassin’s Creed 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Blur, and Shadow Complex for XBLA.  AC2 looks incredible on any platform.  Splinter Cell Conviction is one hell of an incredible exclusive for the 360. Blur looks to have the same type of longevity as Burnout Paradise. And Shadow Complex is the best looking, most fun XBLA title I have seen to date.  It’s like playing a side scroller version of Gears of War 2, it looks that good.

The final night we rocked the Bethesda party in Hollywood.  I’ll just say there was drinking and karaoke, and I dedicated Pearl Jam’s Alive to The Lone Wanderer. Our execs showed up too and to say a fun time was had by all is a bit of an understatement

E3 2009 was already probably the coolest thing ever.  Day 3 report coming up! (and don’t worry contest folk, you day is coming with special new prizes. I added a first, second and third prize set!)

E3: Day 1

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There’s a certain feeling you get when you enter California.  It’s a feeling that’s very difficult to describe, things just seem to go a bit more slowly, you’re able to look around and appreciate things more.  There’s a distinct enforced lethargy, not altogether unpleasant, as you find yourself going from 70 to 45 to 20. Then, finally, you stop completely and a goateed man with enough piercings to fashion a nice chainmail shirt from his various rings and loops asks you if you have any fruit.

Yup, at the entrance to California on Interstate 5, there’s a full stop checkpoint to ask you one simple question: “Got any plants or fruit?”

“ASK HIM IF HE HAS THE SAME PROBLEM MICHAEL PALIN DID IN TIME BANDITS” my brain fairly screamed to me as my mouth simply said “Nope.” I counted five lanes of traffic stopped in such a way, each manned, as it were, by a fruit checker.  Just a thought to budget broke California, how many times do people say “yes”, and of those times, how often do the plants or fruit have whatever contagion or infestation you are looking for?  I’m just sayin’ you might be trying to solve for the 001% case.

Anyways I arrived in LA yesterday.  It’s certainly an interesting city and I can’t help but drive around it thinking of Steve Martin’s wonderful LA Story.  On 101 heading towards downtown I swear I saw several of the unique houses from that movie perched along some hillsides. 

But the big highlight was this morning.  I watched with glee as we finally got to spill the details on some really kick ass stuff that it’s been really hard not to scream with about how cool it all is.

I was brought into project Natal several months ago, as with any camera based system there’s always the potential for abuse.  My feeling when it was first described to me was a lot along the way of motion games that currently use the vision camera.  But once I saw it in action I was astounded. Using controller-less…controls in games isn’t going to be for everyone.  But the learning curve to use and enjoy a high end console just got a whole lot lower. 

Facebook and Twitter integration are both really well done. And to keep it just a bit removed from your gaming so as to not be too intrusive it’s implementation respects that you might be focused on other things on your console.

We had such a wealth of things to announce today that we actually had too much and had to cut a bunch of stuff.  Stuff you might have missed are the new Xbox 360 Games on Demand and a number of performance enhancements to the guide and friends lists that people have given us feedback on.

So far between everyone working to get ready for the briefing and the crush of announcements and press I’ve not had a lot of time to catch up with various folks on their impressions of our announcements.  But today was a great kick off.

Tomorrow I’ll be hitting the expo and hopefully blogging from the floor.

Oh and I have not forgotten about those who entered my contest!  While the contest entry is now closed, I’ll have some cool stuff to announce about some addition prizes, I got so many good entries.

Operation Poetry: Striation

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A principle focus of any college student is, at some point, alcohol. Hence: Striation

Palmers is the bar.
Jason holds court
traversing burgundy to whiskey
Rick samples the menu
If you’ve never smoked it’s hard to hold a cigarette

Sweat’s a tell tale
a bar?  A real bar?
My thoughts race to beer, easy
But they’re 21 and I’m 18 and
order a grasshopper, thinking suave, it’s a drink right

Enjoy your toothpaste, Jason says.

You tend to meet your biggest influences in college.  For me it was my friends Jason and Rick, and later my friends Steve and Mark. But my first trip to a real bar where I was going to actually fake enough sophistication to order a drink was Palmers.  Jason and Rick, having been there many times and being of legal age, ordered with what I saw as flair. I was still trying to pick up smoking and my illegal drinking was confined to beer, which was easy to get and understand.  Now the world’s menu of drinks was at my fingertips.

I did indeed, order a grasshopper. Jason indeed, bid me enjoy my toothpaste.