Saturday August 22nd

Remember all the junk I told you about in the bag? Well today was the day to pour through a lot of that stuff. We started by doing the fishing quest which starts you at Brady Games and gives you a small burlap bag and a map. You’re instructed to go through the convention center to various other booths and get 5 lures and then to come back for a sort of raffle prize. It was crazy how many people ended up doing this, the lines were so freaking long. They were the longest lines I stood in all convention but they still went by fairly quickly, no longer than 30 minutes max and some we went through in under 5 minutes. We got all the lures, but only Ashley and Jon actually went to the raffle later. I saw the line for it and it had to be as long as all 4 halls combined. They went when Ozzie was on or before that when the line was super short. For me, all I got was 5 lures and a burlap sack.

Anyway, I kind of skipped ahead there, after we knocked out the 5 vendor booths we met up with a large gathering of WoW people and scoped out the Warcraft 3 finals. As I met people this year they all had fond dreams of meeting up in a large gathering so I finally got everyone together last second style. I missed this incredible move Grubby pulled off that everyone was talking about, then the next game he loses pretty easily. Kind of a let down, also mirror matches aren’t as interesting (orc vs orc) even though it’s a true test of ability. I caught some zerg vs zerg Starcraft tournament stuff earlier but it didn’t seem as exciting as years past. My pick this year didn’t end up winning (Savior) so I was less invested in the brackets.

After the War3 match a gaggle of us headed off to CPK again (this time with the foreknowledge that we could split the checks) and again, I had a great meal. We were split up into several tables and half of us were near each other and the other half was off on their own. It wasn’t ideal but it was better than nothing. At least everyone could stop complaining about meeting up.

Later on we watched the Starcraft 2 exhibitions 2v2 but it was a sad setup. My friend described it as 1 really good player teamed up with the weakest player vs 2 ok players. It was basically mass your army, then demolish and win. Nothing tricky or exciting happened. It was more like one guy rearing up to swing with his fist, connecting, and then the other guy falls flat. Afterwards they had a set of pro-gamers playing and it played out pretty similarly. We were talking about how Starcraft isn’t a great watchable sport. There’s so much dead time and there are very complex elements that are going on that require you to understand the game first to appreciate as opposed to say soccer where you don’t have to understand soccer to watch and understand what you’re seeing.

There’s a lot of UI things from the observer standpoint that make no sense. The middle center and bottom right have no place being there except for when you’re selecting a unit. You’d still need the minimap, but when someone else is controlling the camera it doesn’t feel as good as when you yourself are watching a replay and control the angles. They throw a lot of observation details across the top and bottom and I feel like it might be better to have a dedicated observer UI instead of placing the typical UI in it’s spot. My friend was also saying instead of the jarring nature of clicking on the map and instantly seeing that spot, as an observer, a fast zoom away and zoom in might feel better since you’ll still have a relative indication of where you were and where you are looking at all of a sudden. Hopefully this gets a few passes in beta.

We started watching the Starcraft 2 gameplay panel but for me it was rehashing all the news from earlier in the week when the NDA lifted. So we decided it was Diablo 3 time. In line we were able to watch the panel still and saw the 3rd person mode and the shoot-em up style maps. The 3rd person mode was actually pretty terrible. The game isn’t made to be viewed so close all the time and you could tell the textures don’t look nearly as good. The animation of Nova in that demo was simply awful, she sort of skipped along in a jerky fashion. The shoot-em up demo was awesome though. I look forward to a lot of galaga style games and maybe I’ll even try my hand at something. I was inspired. I’ll talk about Diablo 3 in a different post.

Somewhere in the day we stopped by the nVidia booth and they had the 3D vision setup. I always hear about how cool it is and how great it works, but you really don’t understand until you check it out. It is totally awesome. The demo was of people logging into their WoW accounts. Many hit up battlegrounds and so you could get a good sense of what’s going on. The UI is the foremost object and from there it’s got perfect depth of field. It’s like you’re looking into a shoebox of sorts, only it’s 52″ diagonal and has WoW going on inside it. I was impressed, but the downside is you need a 120hz monitor to be able to take advantage of it. So maybe if I ever upgrade a monitor.

We stopped by the Razor booth where a they had a shuffleboard setup going. There were regions at the back end where if you landed the puck you’d win various prizes. The easy area was a beanie, the second area was a shirt, the third was a mousepad and the tiny ultra hard area you got to draw a prize from a headset, mouse, or keyboard. You get two throws, and my first went off the back. My second landed me a mousepad. Had I centered I could have gotten a great prize, but ah well. I was thinking of replacing mine anyway so I picked up a Goliathus, and was pretty content with that.

The key was burning a hole in my pocket, but the line to open that chest was a mile long. Eventually late in the night I finally saw a super short line and decided to go over and try my luck. I get up to the chest and try to pop in my key. It wouldn’t fit. I tried re-angling it. Still no go. I think to myself, they wouldn’t give keys that didn’t fit at all, they just have different teeth. So I flipped it upside down and it slid in. At this point, seeing as many thousands of people failed, I didn’t see my chances being very good and expected the key to twist and break, it was pretty flimsy. But what happened was totally awesome. It turned and opened. The guy at the booth was shocked, I was shocked, and then I opened the lid to find… a steelseries mousepad. Seriously everyone is trying to open this box for like a 20 dollar mousepad?  Was it better than walking away empty handed? I don’t know. It’s very weird. I was expecting something grand and incredible. There were 2 chests, so maybe the other one had cool stuff. Alternately maybe they had many chests and lots of winners of various prizes and I just got there too late and got the junk. I’ll never know.

We ended the night playing some Starcraft 2 and I’ll go into that later. But the line to the community area was outrageous and everyone was freaking playing DotA and WSG which was infuriating. This was the longest line we sat in and could have cruised into the actual SC2 area and finished playing a few games before we got to play. I regret not trying out the actual observer mode for myself though since it was possible, or looked possible, from those machines.

Starting a trend/tradition, for the second year in a row, one of the WoW guys holds a house party where we play Rock Band and Street Fighter until our eyes bleed. Some of the guys who were going to go bailed which sucked since I really wanted to play Rock Band with them, but ah well. It was getting late and just driving there I could feel the entire day weighing on me. You don’t get a sense of how huge the LA area is until you’re on the south end and have to drive to the north end. His house is totally awesome and I just like to visit just to see the house.

I had been doing really well wearing my contacts consistently lately but I’m really lazy with them. I basically sleep in them and wake up and drop some eyedrops in and call it a day. Doing this, there’s also a phenomenon that arises late at night when it’s time to sleep where they hurt like crazy, demanding to be taken out and cleaned. But instead of that I just sleep in them. Anyway, this time hit long before we left and I’m tearing up on one side and people probably think I’m crazy.

I feel like I totally redeemed myself, though, because I was playing Rock Band at a party in late July and failing miserably on the drums. I can play many tier 3-4 songs on drums at expert level, but when I was playing then I could only fail. The worst of it was when the people at that party suggested I not play on expert. Later on that night I find out the drum set is broken because the people who own it let their daughter beat the crap out of it. However playing after Blizzcon I was totally rockin both drums and guitar and my friend who saw me flailing about like an idiot at that party commented “Wow, you’re really good at this game aren’t you?”

Anyway, I didn’t do so hot on the Street Fighter front. I finally figured out why I’m so bad with arcade sticks vs gamepads. I find that my timing is off, where a quarter circle forward completes much faster on a dpad, on a stick it takes a little longer, and that extra length of time means that I press the punch or whatever too early and that’s why I can’t do anything. Basically I need to get used to the slower stick speeds, or alternately, get faster with the stick.

I usually try to raise my alcohol tolerance for Blizzcon, but it wasn’t until I was the designated driver that I realized I hadn’t had a sip of it. At the house we were partying at there was no beer, just hard liquor. So Jon, who only recently turned 21, was knocking them back like no tomorrow. We didn’t realize this until we get in the car and he’s going on about how great everyone is.

So on this long 50 mile drive back, my eyes are totally burning. I’m having to alternate blinking, but man it hurts. More often than I’m comfortable saying, I’m practically driving blind, but since it’s like 3am there’s little traffic to deal with. In the back of my mind I have to contend with driving smoothly enough so that Jon isn’t going to puke. Somehow I make it back to the Hilton (I felt like I got turned around somehow and couldn’t use my GPS or my phone) and RIGHT as I put it into park, Mt. Saint Jon blows in the back. Oh did I mention I wasn’t in my car? We were in a nice 2 door coupe vs my 4 door sedan. I felt bad since I didn’t want to take my car since I was low on gas, but now I felt worse since if we were in my car he could have at least opened his own door back there and hurled outside. Anyway, instead of valet parking, we had to clean up (and by we I meant the owner of the car and Ashley, probably, since my eyes were a mess, and the other one was crazy drunk) and it took like 30+ minutes to get back into the room where we cleaned Jon up and all passed out.

Sunday August 23rd

Blizzcon is practically over on Sunday. We have to check out at noon and we sort of slept in, or didn’t wake up until 10:30 or so which left little room for all of us to clean up and pack. Before saying goodbye to LA though, everyone else in the room wanted to try In n Out for the first time. I’m a fan too though so I see no reason to protest and we head down south to visit one of the guys who basically didn’t have time for Blizzcon this year. We had some fantastic burgers then went on a mini-tour of Irvine before all of us had to ship out.

The drive home was far less eventful than the drive up. I don’t think I drove a good share and ended up sleeping quite a bit. I think I drove through 3/4ths of Arizona and called it a day. No one got sick and we were all really weary from the vacation. I think primarily only the driver was awake except the beginning and end of the drive.

Tech

I used a lot of crazy toys to make it through this trip and I thought I’d highlight some of the ones that made the trip totally smooth. For the most part, this trip really wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for my GPS (TomTom). The LA area is very foreboding compared to the ease of driving around my hometown. Although for the most part it’s easy to find one of the major roads (5 or 405) I felt a lot more confident driving around with TomTom.

There were many times where I didn’t really need TomTom though and my upgrade to the Pre made life so great with the Google Maps app. It’s much more responsive and easier to zoom around than TomTom and if you get lost you don’t have to wait for recalculating routes, you can just look and see what you need to do to get back on track.

Additionally, it was really nice to keep up with Facebook/Twitter on the phone which I’m not sure how many people utilized myself as a resource for news, but it’s cool to know that it is possible.

The Monster FM transmitter I picked up for 20 bucks worked out totally awesome. Kept the iPods charged and only picked up some minor interference in big cities, but I was able to swap stations around and found the reception to still be adequate.

Picasa has some really cool metadata to add to photos that I’ve learned to use. My cell phone automatically tags pictures with geolocation stuff, but for regular cameras you kind of have to add that in. So I took some time out to tag people’s names to the pictures, though I think names only show up for me, and also to tag the locations so I’ll remember where some of this stuff is.

The Negative

Walking away from this Blizzcon I have too little to say negatively. I lost my cell phone slip case, and the drive was very rough on me. I wish I had played more Diablo 3 which is a 180 degree spin from last year when I wanted to play Diablo 2 after playing D3, and I wish I had completed the fishing quest thing. Also, my pictures tell such a small story of what I actually did, I don’t want to be the guy with the flash in your face all the time but I certainly need to break it out more often than I did. All things considered it was an incredibly successful trip and I had a ton of fun.