I’m out here in Vegas now for the WSOP, and Bad Beats Crew member evang told us that he could get us passes to E3 if we flew out for the day.  Being big gamers, Jason and I jumped on this chance pretty quickly and along with another house resident, booked a flight and flew into LA at around 9 in the morning.
We took a cab over to the convention center and met up with evang, where he gave us our special passes that would get us into E3 without paying anything.  This was obviously pretty nice, as the tickets cost $500 each.  Having someone in the industry sure is nice!
E3 must have had some sort of haunting problem because we found this parked outside:

Anyway we got inside, proudly holding our affiliate passes, wondering what kind of awesome shit would be in store.  We gave our passes to the gruff-looking lady outside the doors, and she said “I need two forms of industry ID please.”  Apparently the passes evang gave us are only good if you are actually a member of the gaming industry!!  Thanks evang!

Not to be deterred, we decided to pay the $500 for tickets because it would make evang feel bad and that was enough for us.

$1500 later we got in and saw the EA area first, where they had the new NCAA and Madden and other games.  They looked great graphically, but I couldn’t tell much of a difference with NCAA as far as gameplay.  Didn’t get a chance to check out Madden.   They made a big deal about the line play being different in Madden this year but it seems the same in NCAA at least.

I didn’t take too many pictures of things, but one of the cooler things (for me anyway) was Steve Wiebe of The King of Kong fame attempting to set a world record in Donkey Kong.  Possibly the nerdiest thing I’ve ever heard of being done in public in front of a crowd but it was pretty cool.

Unfortunately Billy Mitchell would win the day as Steve reached the DK kill screen (the point at which the game will no longer let you continue) 70k points short of setting the new world record.   Hopefully he’ll try again, he seems like a good guy and I support anything that will ruin Billy Mitchell’s life.
We saw the demo of Uncharted 2 which is the game that Evang is working on, and it looked really fun.  We got to play multiplayer for awhile and JCarver ended up winning for his team.  I’m pretty sure he cheated but whatever.  The game seems really good and you should buy it if you like fun games and for some reason have a PS3.

The Square-Enix display was pretty cool too, the Final Fantasy 13 movie looked pretty interesting.  You can tell I don’t remember anything of substance about it because I’m saying things were “interesting”.  To be honest, it didn’t really strike me as anything unusual for a FF game.  The animation was extremely well-done and it looked good but you can’t really tell until you actually play it, obviously.

The Nintendo display was pretty cool also, they had the guy who does the voice of Mario there.  He is a friendly but sort of weird looking old white man, probably in his sixties.   We played the new Super Mario Bros Wii game and it was pretty fun.  You sort of play against and with each other with all 4 players on the screen at the same time, and you can like stomp people down pits and stuff.  It’s pretty cool, looking forward to playing it when it comes out.

We also played Lego Rock Band, which finally features “The Final Countdown” (it’s about time some RB game did), and briefly saw Beatles Rock Band, which is pretty cool.  It actually has like up to 3 vocal players so you could theoretically try to do all the super hard Beatles harmonies and shit but seriously who is going to be able to find 3 singers to play Rock Band with?  I don’t really see it happening with too many people but whatever.

While we were walking around, I met this random nerdy looking guy hanging around behind one of the displays and he seemed lonely and didn’t have a badge so I got him to take a picture with me to cheer him up:

Anyway that’s about all I remember, I’m positive JCarver will post a more thorough trip report though.  I do have an important announcement though, which I alluded to in my previous post.

BAD BEATS CREW WELCOMES ITS NEWEST MEMBER, ANDREW “WAY RON” HART!!!!

BBC Wayrin

Andrew happily donning his Bad Beats Crew E3 badge, gazing thoughtfully into the heavens.  We asked Andrew to join Bad Beats Crew and he instantly agreed, stating “I sure am glad to be finally able to get away from those faggots in the EAD crew.  This is a turning point in my life.”
We wish him all the best and are happy to have him.