It’s been an interesting four day weekend. I went to Midway Gamers Day in Las Vegas, and also helped Louie yesterday with some furniture shopping. I’ll put most of what I did behind a cut, but for those who are interested and don’t want to read the full post, here’s an interview I did with Ed Boon about Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.
I arrived in Las Vegas on Thursday morning; all in all it was a decent flight, though I was extremely glad I had my iPod with me to make the trip bearable. (It’s a tradition for me to watch the Mortal Kombat movie when on a flight to an MK-related event.) The event was at the Red Rock Casino Resort, which none of us on the shuttle bus had even heard of. Small wonder, as it turned out to be a twenty minute drive from the airport to the place, and it almost seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. After I got checked in, I went upstairs and put my stuff in my room. The rooms at that hotel are DAMN nice; the beds were comfy, they had a walk-in shower, and even had a fully-stocked minibar (with outrageous prices, of course). The one thing that annoyed me was that as was usual for such places, the in-room internet access cost $13 a day. Fortunately, my boss was very nice and had let me borrow an unused cellular broadband card for this trip; I simply took the SIM card from my company laptop (which has cellular broadband built in) and put it in the PC card. It also helped that Sierra Wireless released drivers and software for the card to work in Mac OS X.
After I got settled in, I went back downstairs and explored the hotel some. After going through the casino and finding the most important part of it for me (namely, the poker room), I happened to run across Patrick McCarron from fellow MK site TRMK. We talked for a while, and eventually I went on to go get some lunch. After eating lunch, I went back to my room and relaxed for a bit.
By 4 PM it was time for the event, so I went down to the conference rooms where they were serving free drinks. I chatted some with McCarron and also with Ed Boon. After a while, the doors opened and we went inside, and the presentations started. They showed such games as the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament 3, TNA Impact, The Wheelman, NBA Ballers: Chosen One, and This is Vegas. Of course, though, the game that I had been sent to cover was also announced officially for the first time: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. You can see that presentation here:
After the presentations we all went downstairs to the Cherry Lounge, and got to have supper plus play several of the games. About the main game I played was Unreal Tournament 3; I couldn’t really get in to play the other games. I also had to find time to find a place to set up for the interview with Ed, and also pray I could get it done quickly; daylight was fading and I didn’t have a lamp. In addition, I was losing my voice. I had developed a cough and congestion earlier in the week, and going from a humid environment like Houston to a desert like Las Vegas aggravated the problem. Eventually I did get set up and got to interview Ed; the only problem I had was a buzzing noise in the audio, and that was due to something in the bar the laptop was sitting on (I was recording the audio on my PowerBook via Audacity); I should have realized it when I noticed the laptop was vibrating.
After that part of the event was over, I went back to my room, changed shirts, and also posted a news story from one of my sources about the game, causing a riot amongst the MK fans. After that, I went down to the Rocks Lounge to BS with McCarron for a few and have a couple of drinks. As is typical, though, I quickly grew bored at the club and wandered over to the poker room for some 2/4 limit hold em. I played for an hour and lost $37, which wasn’t too bad. After that, I went upstairs and went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, my first order of business was to hook up the camcorder to my PowerBook, and begin the process of importing, mastering, and encoding the videos. That took a while; by the time I was done it was time to check out, so I did so and spent a bit of time in the lobby writing up my news post for the site (which CCShadow would have to post in my stead as the news embargo from the event would lift while I was flying home) and uploading media to our server. Once I got to the airport I did a bit more checking on stuff, had some supper, and then got on my flight home. Once home I uploaded the interview videos to YouTube, talked some on the chat channels about what I did and saw, and eventually went to bed.
Saturday was more or less uneventful. When I got up, I went ahead and weighed myself… and to my surprise I was down 4 pounds for the week. I’m now down to 237 pounds. :-) After getting dressed et al, I got into my car and made my way over to Louie’s. He was going to buy a new bookcase, and needed help taking it home and then assembling it. We went to Eurway first, but they didn’t have anything he wanted. After stopping in Subway for lunch, we went over to IKEA, and he finally found a bookcase he wanted. We took it back to his apartment, assembled it, and then put it in place. After playing Guitar Hero for a bit, we went out to get some dinner and drinks. I eventually made my way home, and went to bed.
As for today… I really haven’t done much of note other than the MKvDC opinion post I referenced earlier. This will probably be a long week at work, though, what with all sorts of projects that need to be done and support tickets that I need to deal with that were assigned to me while I was gone. At some point tonight, too, I need to reassemble all of my equipment into my work laptop bag and make sure I have everything I need for work. Ah, well.
For now, though, I’m just going to go downstairs and maybe have a drink. I suppose it would be a good end to a good weekend. :-)
And somewhere this week find time to fit in keeping a promise made to his gf.