MLG 2012 - Take Me Out To The GG

Major League Gaming, or MLG, is a professional gaming league where pro-gamers compete for cash and prestige. For the three-day event in Anaheim, CA, there were five games featured, but only one of them mattered to me. It was also THE most popular game there and probably the biggest game in eSports history: StarCraft II!

As usual, the best way for me to describe the experience is via pictures, so here we go. The following is where two of the most famous StarCraft II pro-gamers were signing autographs. Yeah, I also got their autographs:

Notice how many people were waiting in line.

Above is DongRaeGu (real name Park Soo Ho), one of the best Zerg players in the world.

This is MarineKingPrime (real name Lee Jung Hoon), perhaps the best Terran player in the world. He was also the favorite to win the entire tournament.

This is viOLet (real name Kim Dong Hwan). He is also one of the best Zerg players in the world, along with Leenock (real name Lee Dong Nyoung) below:

 

By the way, Leenock is 17 years old. That's less than half my age.

Below is a shot of the computers used in the tournaments. Those players you see in front of the computers are all competitors. (If you know who IdrA is, a.k.a. Greg Fields, he's the guy in the blue shirt and glasses behind the red shirt guy. No, not the Red Shirt Guy from BlizzCon 2010.)

Here is Grubby (Manuel Schenkhuizen), who used to play WarCraft III competitively before making the switch to SC2:

And here is Stephano (Ilyes Satouri), a.k.a. "From Paris With Creep," widely regarded as perhaps the best foreign SC2 player in the world. (And remember, in the SC2 universe, a "foreigner" means a non-Korean.)

Here are shots of the main stage where the feature matches are played. This is analogous to "center court" in major tennis tournaments like Wimbledon or the U.S. Open.

Pictured above are two of the casters of the tournament, Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski and Nick "Tasteless" Plott. These two casters also cast the most prestigious SC2 tournament, the GSL, which mostly takes place in Korea. (MLG is probably the 2nd most prestigious.)

Here is what the match looks like to the audience. You can notice Stephano in one of the two soundproof players' booths:

And here is Stephano being interviewed after a victory. Unfortunately, he didn't make it to the top three.

I won't spoil who won the overall tournament, but here's a hint: It's one of the pro-gamers in my photos above. You can go look it up yourself.

By the way, there were other things to see and do at the event. Here is Robert Clotworthy, the actor who portrays the voice of Jim Raynor, the protagonist in the StarCraft II story mode:

Yeah, this mild-mannered man looks nothing like the rough-around-the-edges space cowboy he plays:

Here's a picture of me with a guy named MaximusBlack (Jeff Johnston), who along with NovaWar casts a popular SC2 channel on YouTube called LAGTV.

 

There was also a huge demo of the upcoming StarCraft II expansion called Heart of the Swarm. My friends and I enjoyed playing the demo so much, we're considering getting back into StarCraft II. (Currently we're taking a break from the game in order to play Diablo III.) I'll save my thoughts on the gameplay for a future blog post.

Finally, I'm going to close this entry with the statue that greets everyone at the entrance to the event. It's Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, the main antagonist in SC2. Isn't she sexy?

There you go, three straight days of watching StarCraft II matches, playing the next expansion of the game, getting autographs, and generally hanging out with other gaming nerds. Truly this is Nerdvana.

E3 2012 Day 3 - Oops I Did It Again

Once again, I get to E3 a little late. This time, it was even worse because (a) I spent two hours in line for Metal Gear, and (b) the convention ended at 5:00 PM today instead of the usual 6:00 PM closing time. Hence I only had three hours.

So yeah, there were two exhibits that I deemed to be "must see":

• Metal Gear Rising
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Metal Gear Waiting

After arriving to the convention at 2:00 PM, I immediately got into line for Metal Gear Rising. And the line moved at the rate of 10 people every 10 minutes. Overall, it took me and my friends two hours to finally make it into the booth.

Inside the booth was a room with TV screens. (No pictures, of course, since they prohibited photography.)They showed a 5 minute video clip setting the background and theme for the game.

I must say that after the long wait in line, this really felt like an amusement park attraction.

After the video clip, they opened the doors to the main room where there were Playstations and XBox stations set up with the game demo. I chose a PS3 station since I'm most familiar playing the Metal Gear series on Playstations. The game itself was a lot of fun, though it felt like a departure from the "Tactical Espionage Action" theme of traditional Metal Gear games and more like a slice-em-dice-em game reminiscent of Devil May Cry. I'll go into more gameplay details in a future blog post.

The funny thing is that my friends were ushered away from their demo stations 10 minutes after they arrived, but I got to stay longer. I'm not sure why, but it may be because while I was playing the demo, I was taking notes on my iPad. The exhibit attendees might have mistaken me for a member of the press. (Press members get priority in all exhibits at E3. They don't have to wait in line, and apparently they can stay at demo stations longer than other people.) If so, that would be flattering to me, since all I've got is this personal themed blog.

(The notetaking might also have given off the impression that I was a raving fanboy, which would be something given that I'm in an entire convention chocked full of nerds.)

XCOM: Enemy Rebooted

As my friends went off to see other exhibits, I went immediately to the XCOM: Enemy Unknown line. Fortunately for me, the wait was much shorter, and in about 10 minutes, I was ushered into a mini-theater. The presenters gave a demo of the game, complete with storyline, gameplay, and cool features.

Once again, I'll go into the details of the gameplay in a future post, but suffice to say that this XCOM game will be a reboot of the classic game of the same name from the early 90's. I was a huge fan of that game, but the problem is that the game is turn-based instead of real-time. The reboot will also be turn-based, which is kind of a risk in this day and age of first-person shooters, real-time strategy and role-playing, and fast-paced action games. But after watching the demo, I'm pretty sure that old will be new again.

I mean, hey, if Civilization can still be fresh and popular today, why not XCOM?

(Inside joke time: XCOM is all about the human civilization being attacked by aliens. At one part of the demo, they showed one of the good guys in the game and introduced him this way, "Who better to save civilization than the creator of Civilization himself, Sid Meier?" Sure enough, the character had Sid Meier's portrait.)

Indie Game Jones and the Temple of 'Cade

Next stop was IndieCade, which was an exhibit of independent game developers and the games they wrote. Some of the games looked halfway decent, and some looked like several low-resolution pixels chasing each other on a white field.

But I'm very interested in this, since I'm kind of an aspiring independent game developer. (On a related note, I saw an ad for Dos Equis on the way from the parking garage to the convention. It showed a portrait of the Dos Equis man, and it said, "He was never an 'aspiring' anything." Something I should take to heart.)

One odd thing was that IndieCade wasn't just about video games, but games in general. One such game was being played right there. It had something to do with pinning a clothes pin on the collar of someone else's trench coat:

Aargh, what do you mean "closed"?

Unfortunately, when I got to the West Hall to spend the rest of the convention at the Nintendo and Sony exhibits, that was when everything started to close down. Like I said before, it was 5:00 PM, but I thought I had a full hour left. Turns out closing time was not 6:00 PM as it was in the prior two days.

I was hoping to experience more Wii U games, especially Mario and Wii U Fit. I was also hoping to play some PS3 games. They even had Street Fighter X Tekken stations up, but at least that game is already released and I can just go buy a copy for myself.

 

But at least I did get to play Foosball on the Sony PS Vita:

Final thoughts and pictures

Overall, there was much more to do at E3 than I expected. If I go next time, I will definitely arrive early every day and not waste it sleeping in because I felt like hanging out with friends late during the night prior.

I would also try and find new and creative ways to pretend to be (or actually become) a member of the gaming press. That way, I don't have to wait in lines, and I'll get even more inside information on new and upcoming games and gaming technologies.

In the end, though, this was quite an experience for me. Sooooooo many games, and no way can I play them all, so I'll just focus on a few genres that I like. They might not be the games that garner the most attention, such as Call of Duty, Resident Evil, or Halo, but they will be the games that most easily ignite my passion to play and win.

In closing, I'll just share a few more miscellaneous photos, starting with me and Sonic the Hedgehog:

Booth babes striking a pose:

Finally, a model representing a game in the Starship Trooper franchise:

E3 2012 Day 2 - Wii Love Celebrities and Dancing

Day 2 was kind of short for me since I got a late start, but it was still filled with notable experiences.

First up, the celebrities. Adam West of Batman fame was there. He was promoting Family Guy Online. I didn't know this, but he plays himself on that cartoon series as the mayor:

I also got to see James Mardsen. He is probably best known for playing Cyclops on the X-Men movie trilogy. He was also in the movie Enchanted playing Prince Edward:

(Of course, I had to point out that even in E3, sometimes they can't spell ... I mean, come on, "Singning"?)

Next up, Nintendo, which has an awesome exhibit with lots of stations where you can play Wii and Wii U games:

Just a word about the Wii U. It's Nintendo's next generation game console. The most striking feature is their controller, which is actually a tablet with a full display. They have a lot of ideas that they will implement using the new controller, but I'll highlight one idea that is less related to gaming and more related to making people go "gee whiz":

Wii U Panorama View

In a nutshell, you can use the tablet controller to aim a camera in any direction you want: left, right, behind, up, down. It's hard to describe with words or even with pictures, but there should be videos up on the web. But since all I have are words and photos, here I go.

The demo they had was of a moving tour through one of four different locations. I chose Kyoto because I once visited that beautiful city, but the demo will have me go through the city when the cherry blossom trees are blooming. Once the demo started, I found my virtual presence on a cart being pulled by a man down a street in Kyoto. Next to me on the cart was a geisha, whom I can see by rotating my body and holding the controller to the right of me. To the left of me were houses, to the right was a canal, and all around me were cherry blossoms. Hopefully these pictures convey the general idea:

Now I can see how Nintendo could use this idea in some of their game franchises. For example, you could be a gunner in some tank game where you rotate the turret you're in using the controller. Or you could recreate the scene from Star Wars Episode IV where Luke and Han are blasting away at Tie Fighters in the Millenium Falcon:

But really, I think just the full panoramic tour through different tourist attractions is enough to make house guests go "Oooooooh ... Ahhhhhh ..."

Like I said, it was a short day, so I couldn't visit much more, but just a few words on the Microsoft XBox exhibit, where their biggest draw of course was Halo:

I didn't have time to go into the Halo demo booth, of course, but I did have some time to try out the upcoming Kinect game Dance Central 3. No photos yet, but my friend did take a video of me playing the game. I'll post that as soon as it's online.

OK I have to run off to Day 3. Stay tuned!

E3 2012 - Photos of Day 1

At long last, I can now post photos of my first day at E3.

Here was the exterior of the LA Convention Center:

Some of you may be familiar with the smartphone/tablet game Cut The Rope. (If not, just know that it's almost as good as Angry Birds.) This wall was covered with Post-It notes:

EA exhibit, including SimCity:

4-player Pac-Man:

Square-Enix, the publishers of Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy:

Square-Enix is also developing the upcoming Hong Kong gangster game, Sleeping Dogs. (By the way, I think the protagonist in the game, who is in the 2nd picture, kind of looks like me, but not as good-looking.) ;-)

Tekken Tag Tournament 2, along with some booth babes for the game:

Where's My Water, a fun game from Disney Interactive for smartphones and tablets:

Metal Gear Rising by Konami and XCOM by Firaxis, two games I'm looking forward to:

The Gree exhibit along with one of their games, Wacky Motors, which is a Mario Kart clone for the iPad. I got to play against the booth babe, and unfortunately, she beat me by a mere cart length:

And finally the dancing artists painting a scene from the upcoming Disney game Epic Mickey 2. I've also uploaded a video I took of the performance: