As some of you may know this was my first E3. I met a lot of people who I knew from online and other places. I really was underwhelmed by what was on the floor for the most part, but I fell in love with giving interviews. Seriously. Also everyone I met was great and it was a true pleasure to be there. I am pretty sad that it is all over.

I took a ton of photos, and I shrunk all these to 600 pixels width. They are not exactly in order, but I will try to break them into categories. I have almost 1.5gigs of images/videos from the week, so this is just a taste, I dont’ think I will ever have all of them up. Also, many ended up blurry or something

I have arrived!

The TGQ dinner was on Wed night at a Ramen restraunt, and was really great. Other than ThatBox, everyone there was associated with TGQ either through editing or directly writing for the magazine:

Next up is TGQ Game Of The Year for 2012. Not GOOD, not GREAT: Awesome.

Next is the best damn thing on the floor. Not JUST Kung-Fu, but Kung-Fu in space!

So Namco was one of the few people who held out and had booth babes, but most of them were not too attractive. Anyways, all of a sudden I hear over the loud speaker: “And now for a special guest that EVERYONE knows!!!!! Pac-MAN!” And then he was harased by the booth babes:

Yakuza was one of the better games on the floor. It was subtitled in english, but I guess that the rumor is still that it will have dubbing only as an option, which will probably ruin it:

Wes and I got in line fully intending to get SMT: Nocturne signed by Kazuma Kaneko for Persona and also get a lithograph signed by him. He flat out refused to do it. Later from Atlus I was informed that Kaneko wanted to sign things other than the lithograph, but there was about 3X the turnout that was expected, so the Atlus staff made him not.

E3 solidified my absolute idiocy for my love of Sonic. Here is me (looking really bad for some unknown reason) with the Hedgehog himself:

Thatbox, Toups, Aderack, and Heather standing infront of Ulitmate Ghosts’n Goblins. THe game was excellent, and will for sure be a nice attidion to the PSP.

On our way to Kentia Hall (which I had to be shown how to find) I ran ahead and took a picture, I just noticed that PERSONA was jumping! Anyways, not the greatest photo, but it does have Persona mid-jump.

Aparently Dave Hellman is awesome (like we didn’t already know this). Tycho of Penny Arcade was about the largest fan of A Lesson is Learned that you could find. Anyways, while waiting in line for the Wii we ran into him and gave out a media kit. I took a photo with Tycho, but it turned out like shit. Hellman on the otherhand:

So, I guess we move on to the personal photos. This was taken at the Game Tap party on Thursday night. I spent quite a bit of it talking to Brandon. Toups cock blocks me on my own photo :sadface:

Meet Faithless of The Gamer’s Quarter interweb fame! I really liked this photo, but I’ll be damned if I don’t hate my camera for being so terrible now:

One night (well, technically two nights) we ended up in an arcade in Little Tokyo where they had a Guitar Freaks/Drummania Session mode hook up. Toups on drum, Aaron and John on Guitar = rawk:

Later that night we ended up at Aaron’s house tiny appartment. I was explained why Vice is hilarious… I never got it though.

After a small mix up I realised that I needed a ride to the airport on Saturday. So I begged Persona and Kinuko (who I never managed to pronounce her name right… either of them) into taking me. We went for Shabu Shabu for lunch and it was damn good.

After that I was dropped off at the airport. This was the last photo I took in LA and it turned out really, really well. I am sad it is over now:

So, now to dump some nice Photos that I took while attemting to locate Matt Kumar:

So, overall impressions were good. Some games to look out for: Dead Rising, Rule of Rose, SMT: Devil Summoner, Lost Planet, Pokemon Red/Blue Rescue Team, Super Mario Galaxy, SD Gundam Wii (?! I know!), and finally, even though that it was just a video I was pretty floored by it, Odin Sphere. I managed to break Sonic The Hedgehog for both the 360 and PS3… so caution there.

So in about 10 hours I leave for E3 and will be their until saturday night. I don’t have any idea how much I will be online, but probably not much at all.

So here is my cellphone number: 504-237-0881

If you are going to be around for E3, call me for fucks sake, I would like to meet up with you.

Hope to see some of you soon!

For the first time since Thursday I have a computer at work now! Yay.

Those Krystal burgers are scraping at the lining of my stomach right now. They are also trying to evacuate at the same time. Well, at least they were really good while I was eating them. I think I overslept because of this.

Also, while working on some press material for TGQ last night, I played way too much OutRun 2006. I think it is pretty damn impressive still. It is addicting. Sickly so. And the graphics are pretty much PS1 quality. I think the only thing that this is doing better than the PS1 is the amount of polygons on screen.

I just ate a 12 sack of Krystals. There is a small pile of little cardboard boxes at my feet. I feel like curling up and going to bed after all that. Ughh.

Anyways, I have been busy as hell lately at night, and unable to get on a computer at all during the day. Last night I finished my column on Darius Twin, which is really the first column that I feel good about. I don’t want to whine about things, so I will just say that I have not really been too confident.

Anyways, lets get to the meat here. I know none of you really care how much my stomach hurts from all these tiny little hamburgers, so lets talk about OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast (the title could have used two things, one is a shorter title, and two is spelling 2 right, this, is probably the worst offense of the PSP game). My biggest worry about the game was that the loading times would be terrible, so let me just say first off that the loading times are very bearable. I believe that the loading times may even be improved over OutRun 2 for the Xbox (but I haven’t played that in a while).

So what is OutRun 2006 basically? It is OutRun 2 Remixed Plus. OutRun 2 is on this game pretty much in its entirety, even the old heart missions. There is also a new course with all the same options as OutRun 2 and all missions for it. Then there is OutRun 2006 mode which is the heart missions minus the irritation of the old way: you do them while you are playing the whole game through. Funny enough I probably never would have known this if not for the “Just Race” feature (which selects a car, music, course and mode for you). I’m not really saying anything am I?

Ok, well, I only have the PSP version so I will just comment on it as a stand alone game, not what it is lacking from the home versions. I don’t really have any blurring problems, which I do have for most other PSP games. There is occasionally frame loss, but it does not get bad or interfere with the game (although once the UMD was loading really loud while I was racing and for a brief period of time the frame rate dropped to like 3fps for about 2 seconds… I blame the PSP for this one as I have not reproduced it). The music is great with a pair of headphones, seemingly no quality loss. The online mode (when you can find someone to play against) is really good, there is no hopping or skipping cars as there is even in Mario Kart DS.

Unfortunately the sound of the squealing tires while power sliding is almost inaudible. It is really sad. Also the amount of OutRun Miles you need to unlock some of the items is really ridiculous.

Though I must say that I love it. I ended up playing it for 4 hours on Sunday night when I knew I had some other things to work on. I am probably going to play it again right now while I let my food digest some (ughh, still really full). Then later I may try to finish The Penultimate Truth by PK Dick.

(Strangely enough I had a small argument about the word penultimate on Saturday night while highly inebriated. A friend of John’s–who I have now claimed as a friend of mine!–said something like: “that means the truth before the ultimate one.” I was like: “No It meAns the MosT UlTimate of ULtimate truths.” Well I argued to the point of bringing out a dictionary and while looking for the word I was like: “Oh, wait, I was thinking quintessential truth would mean that. Man I am dumb.” I kept looking it up anyways, and of course, I was wrong.)