Finally! A day goes by here in sunny LA without a major setback. That left us with an entire day to concentrate on nothing except the interesting and exciting new games on display at E3.

Fortunately, the problem in question cropped up almost immediately. We were supposed to have a private demo of Huxley; the PC-based MMO-shooter hybrid that has been in development for it seems like forever. While I was furiously tapping away on yesterday’s blog entry in the convention center media lounge, Turks made the trek to the booth where we were supposed to be seeing the game. As I was finishing up and getting ready to join him, he found me and said that our names were not on the list for entry into the demo room. This was very disturbing, especially since the Huxley appointment was one of the first ones we accepted when appointments started rolling in. If I had had the presence of mind to print out all of those confirmation emails, we wouldn’t have had this problem, but I’ll know better next year.

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A day filled with lots of great games and more personal disasters. It seems as if we’re cursed; practically everything short of the loss of life or limb has happened to Turks and I on this trip, but so far it’s been totally worth it.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. After Tuesday’s show, we headed back to our alternate hotel to pick up our baggage and return to our original digs. The room is much more spacious than the shoebox we lived in for one night on Monday, but there was one significant problem: the free wireless Internet connection that we were supposed to enjoy was overwhelmed with users, so neither of us could successfully connect (which is why our podcast episode didn’t get uploaded until this morning and also why I’m typing up this blog post in the Convention media center instead of last night in the room). Also, there was another bit of drama that turned out to be less trouble than I expected. There’s a complimentary shuttle service provided by the convention that transports show attendees to our hotels. To prove that we’re entitled to this service, the hotels are supposed to give us colored wrist bands that indicate which of the seven bus routes we’re supposed to use. Our alternate hotel was more than happy to provide us with the wrist bands (even though we weren’t originally supposed to be there), but the folks at our original hotel refused to give them to us (the hotels aren’t on the same bus routes) because we didn’t book our reservations through the official E3 travel site. However, she was happy to tell me that we could purchase a wrist band at the convention — for $75 apiece. Now, normally I’m all about truth and justice, law and order, etc., but so much has happened this week that I have had enough, so we got on the shuttle this morning anyway, and as I suspected, the driver made no attempt to check our wrists. In fact, he was even willing to take non-attendees along with us for free. Finally, a break…

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And so it has begun. Turks and I have finally arrived in Los Angeles for E3 2009. But so far it’s been more tragedy than triumph.

Our tribulations began early. My airport shuttle was supposed to arrive at 6 am, but didn’t finally materialize until 6:15. The driver decided to make up for lost time by averaging about 80 mph in a hotel van on one of the busiest interstate highways in my area; after leaving 15 minutes late, I arrived at the airport 15 minutes early.

One other thing that I have learned about air travel since 9/11: if you’ve got a common last name, the government assumes that you’re a terrorist. Because I am a member of the fine and ancient clan Smith, US Airways denied me the opportunity to check in on the Internet or use the airport kiosks to print my boarding pass. A very pleasant and helpful lady at the ticket counter had to enter my driver’s license number in her computer to prove that I am really me.

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As I type this, I’m less than one week away from leavin’ on a jet plane to Los Angeles for my first Electronic Entertainment Expo. Podcast host Turks and I will be arriving at LAX at almost exactly the same time (if all goes well; how’s that for good planning!) and checking into our hotel, which will be E3 Central for our coverage of the biggest show in gaming. I’ll be posting my impressions of the show every night here on Avault, but here’s a look at the hoops Turks and I had to jump through just to get invited.

Flashback to early April. Registration for E3 has finally begun. Because E3 is a trade show, only industry professionals and accredited members of the media are allowed to attend. This meant that Turks and I had to submit a series of documents that not only proved that we are who we say we are, but also that we are legitimate members of the gaming press. This meant photocopying this, scanning that, then attaching them all to an official application for credentials. The E3 registration site said that it would take about a week for our documents to be scrutinized and an official approval to be sent.

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What a long, strange trip it’s been…

In the spring of 2007, I was bored. Things were very slow at my daily office grind. I had a pile of games at home for which I didn’t have walkthroughs (yes, they’re a crutch, but I was gaming crippled at the time and needed them to get around), so I started scanning my favorite sites for the info that I needed.

And it was this which brought me to Avault.

I had been visiting the Adrenaline Vault for years for all kinds of gaming info, but mostly for the reviews. No other site that I frequented had the depth of information about games that Avault had. I hadn’t been back for awhile, so I was somewhat shocked to discover that the site had been dark. But I was equally delighted to discover that one of my all-time favorite gaming sites was looking for writers for the relaunch.

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The Millville Rescue Squad provides ambulance and other emergency services to its small, quiet New Jersey town, a virtual stone’s throw from the Jersey shore. But six days out of the year, the unit shares its digs with hundreds of gamers for a little slice of gaming heaven: the LAN party.

Once in the spring and once again near Halloween, gamers gather in Millville for three days and two nights of non-stop multiplayer mayhem. The events are organized by the GXL, one of a number of groups in the northeast that put on parties for as many as 500 people at a time. Imagine inviting 100 of your closest friends to bring their PCs to your house, connecting them all in one local-area network (LAN), then attaching all of that to a master server that can handle dozens of games, from arcade racers such as Trackmania Nations to shooter classics Call of Duty 4, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. Add a couple of Xbox 360s or Playstation 3s for the console crowd, toss in organized tournaments and prize giveaways, maybe even find some corporate sponsors (electronics retailer MicroCenter and networking hardware manufacturer D-link have made contributions to previous GXL LANs) and you have the makings of a great couple of days of gaming.

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Mostly, I spent my time dealing with the everyday problems of life — working, eating, sleeping, trying to play Far Cry 2 multiplayer without either being kicked by Punkbuster or being sent unceremoniously to the desktop by the game’s annoying memory leak, which has survived multiple patches.  It doesn’t help, of course, that I suck at multiplayer deathmatching, but it’s nice to be able to blame the game instead of my deficient skills.  So, if you see someone named Bad Santa getting his butt squashed out there, show him some pity, OK?  Thanks!

For better or worse, I seem to be Avault’s go-to guy for point-and-click PC adventure games.  And that’s fine; one of the things I love about this gig is that I get to play games that I probably wouldn’t buy for myself otherwise.  But a major factor in all of the Mist wannabes I’ve played in the last eight months is the need for a walkthrough to finish them.  This made me recall an ongoing argument to be found on a number of gaming forums concerning whether or not using a walkthrough while playing a game is cheating.
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According to scorehero.com, on June 3, 2008, a Guitar Hero III player using the screen name iamchris4life completed what is claimed to be the first documented FC of “Through the Fire and Flames” on Expert.  For those unfamiliar with GH3 lingo, this means that he successfully played all of the notes in the song and maintained an average score multiplier of 4x on the incredibly demanding song by the British metal band Dragonforce.  This is amazing news for GH players, to be sure, but I mention it because of the surprising amount of hate being slung his way by so-called “real musicians” on gaming website message boards.
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Damn you, James Perry Jr.  Damn you to the Eighth Circle of Hell.

Jim is the man who hooked me on Guitar Hero III.  In the space of two hours, he transformed me from a mild-mannered PC gamer into a hopeless rock-and-roll slave.  And all because of a few minutes pushing buttons on a toy guitar.

Until about a month ago, the only reason I owned an Xbox 360 was because I had some Best Buy gift cards burning a hole in my pockets last year.  In the 12 months that I have owned the console, I might have spent a grand total of eight hours using it, mostly playing Jewel Quest and the first few levels of Gears of War and Lost Planet before the controller tied my fingers in knots.

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Before I became a game addict, I was (and still am) a movieholic; by my own count, I have seen 4,266 different movies in theatres since January of 1983.  In that time, I’ve seen lots of quirky personalities in the movie business, but few have sparked the level of vitriol from fans than the gaming industry’s favorite punching bag, director Uwe Boll.  And Boll has fought back, literally; several years ago he challenged members of the gaming press to actual boxing matches.  Also, in a YouTube video response to the recent Internet petition circulating to stop him from making more movies, Boll takes shots at Michael Bay and George Clooney and declares himself to be “the only genius in the whole f***ing business.”
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