Just a quick note here from my dad's old computer with the janky keyboard. I did go to Blizcon on Friday, but got bored (to no one's surprise) and decided one day was plenty. So I left there around 5, met my mom's old friend who I've known since I was 9 and had dinner with her in Santa Monica, and then I drove back here last night, greatly aided on mydrive by several long cell phone conversations with Malaya, my mom, and my dad. Aided in terms of keeping me awake, since I'd been up since 5 (after literally zero sleep Wednesday night) and was fading badly. It's funny but true; talking really does keep you awake.
I hardly made the 40 mile drive from Anaheim to Santa Monica, was wide awake for 3 hours of dinner and talk, and then after 30 minutes and 10 miles on the 405 south at 9pm, (LA traffic is all you've ever heard and worse) I was literally shaking myself to stay awake.
Blizcon was pretty good. Better than I had expected, though the 2+ hour line to get in, at 11am opening day, was kind of a disaster. Luckily, my pass was at the press window, which had 3 people working it and a 1 person line. No, I didn't feel guilty for that. Not even a little bit. The goodie bag was pretty cool too, with a Blizcon and a WoW t-shirt, a black Diablo rubber bracelet, a Bliz key chain, deck of cards with custom bliz artwork on the face cards and aces, and some other misc stuff. As for the games there; WoW X looked exactly like WoW, and if you'd told me SC Ghost was Halo, Iwouldn't have known any different. I played neither, even though there was never a line to get in on the 16 person SC Ghost deathmatches they had going. There were an astonishing amount of computers set up too, at least 1000 in total, probably more like 1500, with rows and rows and rows of them set up running the WoW expansion, more for regular WoW battlegrounds, hundreds more for SC Ghost, many more for the other gaming tournaments, etc. I'd hate to have been the tech support guy for that set up.
I took tons of photos and will write up something for the d2 site at some point, but I went to bed as soon as I got back to dad's house last night and slept for 11 hours, and now we're going out to run errands and do some other stuff here, so don't expect further word from me until tonight or Sunday. Not that any of you were eagerly awaiting me anyway. Look at worldofwar.net if you want some blizcon stuff, Rush was uploading cam corder movies he'd taken at the morning address, and there were a bunch of new cinematics and such. New to me, at least, with a long SC Ghost one that basically recreated the plot of Starship Troopers. The big SC Ghost innovation was that now you can play as a Zerg, too. AVP anyone?
The best thing about that title? The blonde booth babe they had roaming around with a huge plastic gun and skin tight outfit. She really looked the part too, though it was impossible to envision this dainty, 5 foot blonde in grey spandex as a dangerous assassin. Unfortunately her costume did not light up with cool glowing blue stripes, unlike the life size statue they had on display. And yes, I took photos of that too. Anyway, more later, when I'm typing on a decent keyboard and have time to think.
