fter gleefully attending E3 three years in a row, pre-blog days, I was growing pretty sick of it in 2002. D2 was out, I wasn't following any other games, wasn't playing any other games, and LA is such a fucking hole that I hate to drive up there. Even for just one or two days.

I only went in 2002 since Elly and Paul, my two D2 site co-workers were flying in from Scotland, and we were going to hit Magic Mountain the day before the show.

Read on to see my pre-trip blog, the long and gory description of the trip, and my ultimate total disappointment and rapid exit from E3 itself.  There are rollercoasters, nausea, Mexican porn, and more!

May 23, 2002

Pretty much all you need to know about my trip and current personality/interests can be obtained from the following paragraph.

I woke up around 5am Wednesday morning, after crashing as soon as I got to my hotel, at 8pm Tuesday, after a long day at Magic Mountain. Lying in bed that morning, I read Great Expectations for about an hour, then got in the tub and read for another 2 hours.  I then had breakfast, shredded wheat and rice milk along with a bunch of trail mix and some grapes, all stuff I'd taken with me, and left.  With traffic I got to the LACC around 9:15, and sat around for 45 minutes, waiting for them to open up the exhibition hall, which they do at 10am.  I walked around circuitously, seeing nothing of any real interest, got to the Blizzard area and looked at war3 and WoW on the monitors.  No new cinematic, just showing last year's War3 and the WoW stuff from ECTS.  Talked to Matt Householder of Bliz North for 20 minutes, mostly about general issues, nothing of any real gaming interest. I then walked around for another 10 minutes, and by 10:45 I was bored to tears, and had a throbbing headache from the way-too-loud Xbox area, and the blasting EA Sports movie screen.  Went back to Bliz, said hi to Bill Roper and a couple other Bliz North guys I know, wandered around a bit more, and left around noon.  Hour and 45 minutes at E3, which was an hour more than I wanted to spend, and a two hour drive home.

The trip was worth it for hanging out with Elly and Paul, neither of whom I had ever spent any time with socially (ICQ chats don't count), and going to Magic Mountain, but I'd have been just fine driving back after the MM part Tuesday night, I think.  Poor night's sleep in a crappy hotel and brief stroll around E3 did nothing for me.

My utter indifference to any game being shown there, (including War3 and WoW) was sort of frightening.  I was so into gaming my whole childhood, before there were any decent computer or console games, (not that that stopped me from playing them for thousands of hours) and even as recently as 5 or 6 years ago I was trying out nearly every demo game I saw, though few were all that enjoyable.  I then got fixated on D2, partially due to working on the fansite so much, and now a few years later I'm not at all interested in any games.  Couldn't tell you the last time I installed and played any demo for anything. I've had D2X CD out of the CD-ROM drive for a week, haven't touched War3 beta for 2+ months, and not paying any attention to any upcoming titles.

I think it's mostly having zero money, feeling desperate about that and the lack of any paying jobs I actually want to work at, and being tired of doing fansite stuff after 4 years of it.  I fear getting interested in any upcoming game, since I don't think I'd be able to just play it some and enjoy it, and leave it.  I almost have to master a game if I start on it; that's one of the main reasons I quit on War3 so quickly.  I could see I didn't have the interest to play enough to get really good, and if I wasn't going to be really good, I didn't want to play at all.  The bad sign is that I have no interest in the SP aspect of the game either, at this point.  I did 2 months ago, and I've been telling people I do, and I know a lot of people who do (Matt Householder for one) and aren't real interested in playing it on the hyper-competitive cheese-fest that is Battle.net, but I no longer do myself.  I'd be just as happy watching the cinematics alone. I seem to be looking at everything in terms of the time it takes, and the productivity it results in.  Spending 40 or 60 or 100 hours playing the SP War3 missions would be enjoyable, but what would it give me that I don't have now?

The problem is that I don't do much of anything productive with the time I do have.  What good does spending 2 hours surfing for news and writing this update do me?  I could have written a short story, or studied ASP or CGI or Javascript programming, or cured fucking cancer!  Well, maybe not that last one.

Anyway, everything seems like a waste of time, I feel 10 years too old to be doing what I'm doing, I don't want to be doing it any longer, and it doesn't even pay well (at all).  Fortunately I have a lot of strong personal relationships to... oh wait, that's not true either.

I did look forward to get back to my computer and the Internet.  I missed news surfing, I missed writing this crap up, and I missed email.  Well, I think I'm lying about the last one here also.  Email check for the D2 site. 270 messages?!  Ugh.  I'll quote you the best ones:

Hello,This is a good tool
I wish you would like it.

This is a WinXP patch
I expect you would enjoy it. 

Hello,This is a special powful tool
I hope you would enjoy it.

This is a special funny game
This game is my first work.
You're the first player.
I wish you would like it. 

This is a excite game
This game is my first work.
You're the first player.
I wish you would enjoy it.

Hello,This is a special new game
This game is my first work.
You're the first player.
I expect you would enjoy it. 

Yes, the joy of Klez.  I don't count, but probably 75% of my emails to the d2 site are from this special new virus.  I hope I will enjoy them.  The wording of them is sort of hypnotic, almost haiku-esque, in the broken, yet melodic, English.  It's annoying, US kids can barely find American on the globe, they all speak in AOLese, spend 8 hours a day on their PS2, and here are these foreigners cranking out virus after virus that infect 10% of the PCs on earth, and they can barely speak English.  Every email virus infestation actually says a lot more about the level of security-incompetence of the average email user and the security holes in all MS products than it does the cleverness of the hackers, but it's easier to blame society as a whole, and especially foreigners.  So I shall.

Never doubt that foreigners are crafty and evil; after all, they've overrun the entire world, they infest every other nation on earth!  Foreigners! Everywhere!  Except for your country, that is.

I'll write some more about E3 and MM and such tomorrow, out of energy now.  Plus my forehead hurts; I got crispy in too much sun at MM.

May 27, 2002

I dragged myself out of bed at 5am last Tuesday morning, after going to sleep around 1am.  I tend to do that every trip; spend next to zero time packing in advance, and then do it all the night before I leave, generally getting about 3 hours of sleep, if that much.  Plane trips I can nap on the plane some, but as I was driving to LA this time, that wasn't a real viable option.

Driving from San Diego to LA in the morning is difficult.  Morning rush hits in SD from around 7-9, and LA from around 7-10.  Actually there's pretty much always the potential for bumper to bumper slow-and-go traffic in LA, usually going both ways on the same freeway, but it's guaranteed in the morning and evening rush.  So if you want to drive up there and not spend 2 hours sitting in a freeway parking lot as you cover the last 10 miles to your destination, you must get there early, or late.  Which is why I leave at 5:30am to get there by 8:30 or 9, when I could travel the same distance in 2 hours or less if I went in the middle of the day, or late at night.

I had planned for E3 this year to leave here in the mid-morning, and get there around noon, which would have avoided most all the traffic, but since I was going up the day before E3 to hit Magic Mountain, and had to pick up Elly and Paul and we were all going to the LACC to get our press passes before driving up to MM, that option was out.  The earlier the better became the guideline.

Drive was boring as usual.  Only real excitement was around Camp Pendleton, which is past Oceanside, maybe 2/5 of the way up there, the normal 85MPH traffic flow suddenly hit a big slow patch, going 68 or so.  I couldn't see what was up, there were probably 50 cars in the slow bunch, about 10 per lane, but I wove my way cunningly through them over about a 10 minute stretch, finally getting up to the front only to see... a Highway Patrol cruiser in the #3 lane.  And he was going 3MPH over the speed limit, and of course no one dared break out and pass him.  So we all putted along at the speed limit for about 10 miles until he mercifully exited, at which time everyone broke hell for leather and was back up to 90 in about a quarter mile; driving faster than we would have before, since we felt like we'd had an hour stolen from our lives, and by god we were going to get it back.  Plus the road was virtually empty for about 10 miles ahead of our pack, since everyone out of sight of the cop had kept on at 75+, while traffic gathered in a long chain behind him.

Media registration at E3 was a breeze.  They were searching bags on the entrance from the parking lot, but not searching people, and had no metal detectors.  Obviously they've not dealt with Palestinian-style terrorism much.  I didn't hear of any suicide bomber taking out The Sims: Dental Office Simulator booth though, so perhaps the terrorists were turned away.

Note that this was the day before the E3 exhibitions opened up, so the terrorist targets were minimal.  The next day they had bag checks going at the main entrance off of the street, but nothing from the parking garage entrances.  So any terrorists who didn't have a rental car and $7 to pay to park (and couldn't figure to walk around the corner and enter through the parking garage) would have been stymied.  I was able to enter freely with my bag unmolested, and being as I had about 5lbs of trail mix in it, that's probably for the best.

Anyway, the previous day, after getting the media passes, we headed North to MM.  It's really out in the sticks, over a small mountain range, and into the desert.  Which is what all of LA and SD would look like, if not for sprinklers.  The way into the park is impressive, since you see 2 or 3 unbelievably large roller coasters looming over the fence.  They have nifty paint jobs, where the supports are all one bright color, while the actual metal tubes that make up the track are another color.  The biggest coaster you see coming in is Goliath, and it's hot pink supports with orange tracks, as I recall.  Looks fast and scary.  Unfortunately it was closed that day, so I didn't get to try it out.

We did go on most other coasters though, of which Deja Vu was the best.  Elly wouldn't go on it, but Paul and I got on, and enjoyed it.  It's one of the newer style coasters, where you sit in a chair sort of like those baby swings that have leg holes.  There is a big upside down U-shaped bar that comes down over your chest, and a seat belt from the thing you are straddling to the bottom of the U bar. You feel quite securely fastened in, and you definitely need to be.  Deja Vu is aptly-named, since you go one direction, and then come back the same way, backwards.  It's quite a short ride, just about 1:20 in length (we had ample opportunity to time things while waiting in line) but very intense.  You basically sit down, get strapped in, and go backwards, straight up a huge vertical drop.  So you are dangling straight down, looking directly at the ground (well, at the back of the chair in front of you, from row 11 where I sat) and are lifted up about 80 feet.  Once at the top of the lift, you get dropped instantly, and freefall for several seconds before zooming back through the loading area, up around a full loop, then up a hill with a barrel roll on top, and around a couple of more corners until you get to another steep drop, identical to the one at the start.  They crank you up that one, but this time you are facing the sky, with the drop straight down and backwards.  Same routine, they drop you, back through the same curves, around the loop backwards, and through the loading area, before you go up the first drop a bit, but are lowered down and to the loading area.  So it's about 40 seconds each way, but wow is it something.  The backwards drop I was really yelling, since I got just perfectly balanced between my front harness and the back of the seat, so I was floating with no part of my body but my legs on the edge of the seat.  Felt totally weightless.  I loved it, but coming off my legs were just barely working.  Watery, as they say. Would have gone on that one again, but it was by far the longest line of any ride that day, so we passed.

The rest of the rides were all pretty good, but nothing compared to that one.  There weren't really any big lines at all, Tuesday in mid-May is clearly a good time to go to beat the crowds.  Batman had literally zero line, you'd just walk in and go, unless you wanted to be in the front row, where they were lined up 4 or 5 coasters worth.  The other rows were half empty. We went on that one twice, and the second time I was clever and did the whole thing with my eyes closed and head rolling side to side, so as not to get the stiff neck you do if you try to hold steady around the G-force-intensive corners.  It felt fine at the time, but as we came to a halt I almost had to puke, and my head was just spinning the next half hour.  I was literally seeing spots.  The ride was nothing with eyes open, but with them closed my center of gravity was gone, and that did me for the day.  I should have just puked, probably would have passed the nausea and been fine for other rides, but I held off and felt shitty the whole rest of the day.

That was around 4:30pm anyway, and we were all pretty foot-sore and about ready to go, so after wandering around a bit more we left.  The drive back wasn't bad at all, no traffic really, and got Elly and Paul to their hotel around 5:30.  I was going to go find a hotel for myself, some cheap one somewhere as usual, and call them around 7:30, and we were going to go eat.

I headed off 10 East to 5 South, going at random, and found a crappy looking generic hotel just off of 5.  Took probably 45 minutes to drive that far in the evening rush hour.  The thing with hotels near the LACC is that all are booked solid the week of E3, and raise their rates a ton if you don't book months in advance. So the Marriott across the street from USC they were staying in was $85 per when they booked well in advance, and probably $150 for walk up that day. I ended up driving an hour each way in traffic to the one I picked.  It was skeevy, had terrible satellite reception, no clock, no radio, no remote control, and cost me $55 anyway.  Me smart!

The hotel was amusing though, looked okay on the outside, despite being directly above the freeway on a steep hill, and having a huge vacant lot with train tracks on the other side.  Scenic!  My room had the TV bolted to the wall, like something in an airport lounge, and had carved Mexican gang letters all around the plastic base of it, like over the volume and channel buttons.  The mirror mounted to the wall was covered in black and blue magic marker graffiti, as was the bathroom mirror and light, oddly enough.  One side of the tub even had it, as did the inside of the chest of drawers, and the bottom of the table.  There were no chairs, so it was drag the table to the bed and sit on it time in the morning.

When I got to the room I turned on the TV first thing, as I was setting down my bags and taking off shoes, with head throbbing from the park rides and traffic and heat.  Instant sound bursts forth from the set, "Uuhh!  Ohhh!  Ooooh!" etc.  Same sound track in every porno, in my experience. So I flop down on the bed and look, and it's this nasty, ugly heroin-hooker looking porn, with skinny, massive-implant girls and gynecological camera angles as they do each other with giant purple ribbed dildos.  I'd call it "Lesbian" but there's no way any Lesbian would want to watch it.  Rubbery flesh and bored faces and harsh lighting.  About as sexy as a frog dissection movie.

I got up to change the channel to ESPN or CNN or something, and stopped as one of the women started muttering in Spanish. "Me quiero!" or something like that.  The scene they were in wasn't real dialogue-intensive.  I switched back later after my shower, and this time there was a Mexican-looking woman with a black guy, and he was speaking Spanish briefly.  So yes, it really was a Spanish-language porno channel.  The odd thing was that the first two women were very white.  I didn't watch long enough to see if their dialogue was dubbed in or not.  Or if they even had any more dialogue.  About half of the channels on the set were Spanish, as further investigation discovered.  That was the only porno channel, they didn't have an English-language one.  Not that it makes any difference to guys watching what language they're speaking.

So after my shower/soak in the tub, it was around 6:15, and I was due for dinner in little over an hour.  I laid down for a minute on the bed, and next thing I knew it was 8:30.  Oops.

Tried the room phone.  Didn't work, couldn't dial the office, figured it would cost me like $4 for a local call anyway.

Walked down from my third floor room, got a few dimes from my car, walked across the street to the pay phone.

Stuck in a dime, it gets stuck an inch into the phone.  The coin slot has been backed up, probably with cotton or putty or something, and local kids come and yank it out with string later on and get any money that was stuck. An old scam.

Walk back to the hotel, ask about the phone.  $5 deposit to activate it, local calls are $1, you get back any balance when you check out.  "Sure you do." I figure.  I'm in 310 area code there.  The Radisson I was calling was in the 314 area code, despite being about 15 miles away.  There are like 5 area codes in LA now, and yes, it's all due to pagers and cell phones.  Yet another reason to hate them.

Called anyway, line is busy, no doubt Elly's online uploading shots to one site or another. Left a message that I was too tired to go eat, had a fistful of trail mix, and went back to bed.

Woke up around 1am, noisy in the room from the freeway outside, not very dark, but I refused to get up, and just dozed until around 5, when I was too bored to stay in bed anymore.  So I got in the tub and read Great Expectations, which I'd been working on for better part of two months, and I got almost to the end by around 8am (checking the time by CNN on the TV) when I had a couple bowls of cereal, (I'd brought a bunch of food in a cooler) and headed out.  The phone call turned out to only cost me about $1.25, so less of a scalping than I'd expected, and I got $8.75 back when I checked out, $5 for the key deposit and the rest for the phone.  It felt almost like winning a small lottery, if I could just forget I'd paid them $60 12 hours earlier.

Then I had the fun 45 minute drive to cover 10 miles in morning traffic, back to the convention center.  Got there and parked and inside just after 9, which was when I thought the gates were opening.  Nope, not until 10, which I'd swear was an hour later than it was previous years.  So got a copy of Show Daily and picked a comfy spot on some stairs to read and people watch.  Which was very boring after 5 minutes, but got me in the mood for the actual show itself, which was very boring after about 20 minutes.

The coolest thing I saw there was at the LotR game display.  Well, one of them, there seem to be several companies doing games based on the books or the movie.  They had a huge round rock thing with fake grass on it; their version of a Hobbit Hole, though you couldn't go inside. The game was showing on monitors in fake stone walls, next to a Harry Potter game set up that was nearly identical.  The cool thing wasn't the game, which looked like every other game, but the display.  They had various props from the movie, including a life size Uruk-Hai.  Maybe more than life size, since he looked to be about 8 feet tall, inside a huge glass case.  Scary-realistic, if he'd opened his eyes and smashed the glass to leap free, I wouldn't have been all that shocked. Well, I would have, but you know what I mean. They also had various helms and shields and such in other glass cases, most of them well-smeared with grubby fanboy finger prints, and the hall had only been open for about 30 minutes at that point.  I added a thumb print and licked the glass for good measure.

Not really.

The other display I remember clearly was the X-box stand, which was of course enormous, though I remember it for how annoying things were, with the huge movie screen up on a wall showing videos of the games, cinematics, etc, and the blinding, pivoting, search lights on all sides of the movie screen, that made watching it for more than 30 seconds impossible.  

If you'd like to recreate the fun at home, it's easy.  Get your TV, mount it up on the ceiling, put a few spinning police lights next to it, turn it and your stereo up as loud as possible, make sure they are playing totally discordant music, and then have some guys bump into you every few seconds as you try to watch it.  There, wasn't that fun?  Oh, and if you want a bottle of water and a cold sandwich, it'll be $12.50 please.

To enjoy E3, you have to really like games.  The crowds are sort of annoying, but not really a factor, since there's zero human interaction with anyone else, other than maybe some guys running demos at various game booths. Alone in a crowd is a very accurate description of things.  You see tons of games, but everything tends to look alike, and if you don't know about the game already, know enough to have some idea what it's doing, what makes it special, etc, it's like watching one minute of a movie you've never seen before, from somewhere in the middle.  You just see things happening, but have no idea who is who or what's happening, and it's hard to be interested since you're not going to spend enough time on it there to get involved or catch on.

If you have a great interest and hunger to know more, than you'll snap up every morsel of info.  I remember E3 like 3 years ago, I'd been doing the D2 site for over a year, but had never seen any of the game in person. No one had, other than people at ECTS the year before.  We had gameplay movies and screenshots, but those are poor substitutes.  I was at the Bliz booth, playing or watching others play, for like 8 straight hours, and only left when they kicked everyone out for the evening.  I did the same thing the next day, and loved every minute.  Loved talking to the programmers and designers, loved learning more about the game, loved everything.  I almost passed out at the end of the day from eating and drinking nothing, after a tiny, quick breakfast.  But it was so worth it, at the time.

This year I looked at WoW and War3, and they are very pretty, but I saw no reason to stand there and stare.  I've had War3 beta for months, and not played it since February.  WoW looks pretty, but I'm not following it, and don't plan on doing so at any point, so why devote time to it now?  Anyway, the point in the game is the MMO aspect, and you can't get any real sense of that playing a few small areas solo at E3.  What makes the game fly long term or not will be how interpersonal relations are handled, mostly in terms of how they keep assholes from ruining the game for everyone else.  UO didn't do that at all well, which is why everyone got sick of it after about 6 months.  And that was my last MMORPG experience, bored with the non-random world I'd so completely-explored, and annoyed that every trip to town was an attempted pick-pocket, beggar-infested, spammer-laden, shit fest.  My mistake was not staying around until every realm was totally packed with people, and any existing possessions became a gold mine to sell on Ebay.  I quit and gave stuff away or let it decay, and saw months later people selling accounts with half of what I had for $1000+.  Doh.

As for E3, my utter disinterest in anything at E3 is clearly mine alone.  Compare the reactions of the the reactions of the PA guys, which (their reactions) range from dazed to awestruck.  Would that I'd been at E3 when I was 20...  Not that they had E3 then, but you know what I mean.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.