Back home and back at work…

D'Arque Bishop

Ugh, I feel like shit.

The trip to Chicago was a great deal of fun. This weekend was much less so, but that was mainly due to the work I had to do with the videos I took at the Chicago event. As for now… I’m not really sick per se; I usually have allergy issues whenever I return to Houston from far out of town. Also, the fact that I vacuumed the upstairs (which hadn’t been done in a while) exacerbated the problem. So, I spent most of the night snuffling and sniffling and being absolutely miserable. I’m still achy and have a stuffed up nose, and it’s not likely it’ll clear up anytime soon. *sigh* Fun…

Anyway, Thursday morning I arrived in Chicago to find Scott Howell already at the gate waiting for me. We hopped a cab to the Chicago Peninsula hotel, only to find our rooms weren’t ready yet. So, we just waited around the lobby until the Midway presentations started. I got video of several presentations, including those for Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, L.A. Rush, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, and Blitz: The League. After the presentations (at which I got a nice sports windbreaker with the Midway logo on the left breast), we went and finally got our rooms. DAMN, those rooms were nice… everything was button controlled, the bathroom had separate shower and bath (which had its own TV), a minibar, a fax machine, a safe… we were quite content. :-)

From there we went to House of Blues for a few hours of gameplay. I’ll admit… as much as I wanted to try L.A. Rush and Blitz: The League, all of my gameplay time went to Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I also got to speak to a number of MK team members, including Ed Boon, Shaun Himmerick, Steve Beran, Tony Goskie, and Mike Taran. One of the highlights of the night was when Scott and I were playing ko-op mode on the X-Box version of MK:SM; suddenly, we noticed a commotion at the PS2 next to us. We turned, and saw a blind teen being led to sit down next to Ed. It turned that this was Brice Mellen, who had made national news recently with his ability to play fighting games. So, I quickly grabbed my camcorder, and had just enough tape left to film three matches, all of which Brice won. The final tally was Brice 4, Ed 1. :-)

After House of Blues, Scott and I returned to the hotel to drop off our equipment, and then wandered the city briefly trying to find the Sound Bar where Midway had a room set aside for drinks. We got there, and stayed for a half-hour… and realized it wasn’t our thing. So, we went back, and worked on videos, images, and updates.

The next morning we got up at about 9 AM, did some more work on the site, and then headed to the airport at about 11:30 AM. We had lunch at Chili’s in the airport, and then headed to our respective flights. I got back in Houston around 5 PM, and from there went to Denny’s for dinner. The weekend itself was slow, and I spent it getting the videos I took ripped, watermarked, and encoded, and also giving my impressions of MK:SM.

If you want to see the videos I took, well…

And now, well… I’m going to get back to work here. Fun fun… I might post back later with a couple of pics of goodies I got at Gamers Day.