Nerd Mentality

Hollywood Blog: The E3 2005 Scrapbook

Posted June 12th 2005 by J Edison Thomas and Daisy Garcia.

Page 6

After thoroughly exhausting all the entertainment we could muster from the main hall the two previous days (worthwhile entertainment at least; I think I only played one Xbox 360 game [it sucked]), we decided to check the smaller companies on Friday. Not as flashy, but much more kooky.

Desiré: Wandering into a different part of the convention center had us ending up at Kentia Hall, a place where some of the smaller companies are set up. No music, no awesome displays, just products and industry people. Pretty lame, but at least there was this setup in which you controlled the game through these bands hooked up to your wrists and ankles.

Jared: Here I'm playing DOA: One of Them with these ankle and wrist straps. Each strap corresponded to a different button on the controller (A and B on my wrists, X and Y on my ankles) with a Dance Dance-esque pad on the ground tracking other inputs like movement and blocking and the like. It was rather hard to keep coordinated enough to move effectively and avoid getting my ass kicked, but to be fair I think the difficulty setting on the game was a bit high, because I don't know if I could have even beaten the computer with a standard controller. And after all that punching and kicking, I was feeling rather beaten.

Jared: Oh and it's crane kick time! Yeah, after I got my ass handed to me the first round I started loosening up and not caring about how goofy I looked, which ironically probably made me look a lot more like I knew what I was doing. I still didn't beat the computer, but I took down quite a few combatants in a 6-on-6 brawl, and I felt pretty tough doing it.

Desiré: Jared's so good at this game.

Jared: On the last day of E3, about an hour before everything shuts down, anything not tied down is given away to the attendees because it's less of a bother than packing it up and saving it for the next time a small plushie videogame character might come in handy. So we headed back to the Sega hall to see if we could grab anything cool for Steve DeSiena and while we were there I saw this statue, which looked very picture-worthy.

Jared: And then I realized the picture was meant to be taken like this. See? My photography skills are so good they even make a concept like a gun-wielding Shadow the Hedgehog look cool.

Desiré: Oh well, E3 has ended and as we're leaving to head out of the Convention Center, we stopped some guy with a pretty thick British accent to take our pictures (with about four different cameras nonetheless). He happily obliged us and we took various poses on this very hot cemented statue. Nick from Binary Culture had left for Japan earlier that morning, so we had Mr. Bean standing in for him.

Jared: Yeah, apparently it was a tradition for the Binary guys to get a picture of their whole group taken on the last day of E3 with L.A. as a backdrop. And since we had been assimilated into their tribe, we all joined together for this year's shot.

Point of interest: In this picture I am wearing a shirt made by Matthew Warren which was based off a comic I drew primarily for his enjoyment called "Watch Dog Do English". So there you go Matthew, I told you the shirt was worn at E3. To the delight of many a booth babe, might I add.

Desiré: After getting back to the hotel, going for a swim, and showering, we headed out into Hollywood with about five other people. As we waited to meet up with another former N-Philes staff member and good friend of mine, Micheal Quiroz, we took a few various typical touristy pics.

Jared: Correction: we took one typical touristy pic. Kevin had invited two rando E3 attendees to hang out with us that night, and one of them noticed my camera while we were walking around. He asked that I take a picture of Grauman's Chinese Theater, a building appearing in any number of L.A. postcards, and then "send it to him". Well here you go buddy, download at your leisure.

Desiré: Yet another one for Jared's twisted collection.

Jared: Yeah, everyone got kind of pissed off when I took this one, because the night required me to use flash right in this son of a bitch's face. He was drunk or dead enough to not wake up from it, but it still ruffled a few feathees in our group.

Jared: Several hours after E3 had ended, and well over ten miles from the convention center, these guys were riding around on Segways projecting the PS3 logo over the sidewalk, parked cars, that bum from earlier, everything. Weird enough to garner a snapshot as far as I'm concerned.

Desiré: These guys looked like belonged in like Devo or something...

Jared: This crazy mofo was sitting on the side of the road bobbing his head to the phattest beats, waiting for someone to come by so that he could bust out some old-school rhymes to their name, at which point they'd be impressed and give him a dollar or so. So when he asked for my name I told him it was "Balthazar". And the slippery bastard rhymed pretty damn impressively to it. Afterwards (around the time I didn't give him any money) he asked me how to spell it, likely to figure out if it was my real name or if I was just screwing with him. Well either I know how to spell "Balthazar" or he doesn't, because he seemed satisfied by my answer.

Desiré: I walked past this guy pretty fast so that he woudn't rap my name as well.

Desiré: Irish lad Kevin's all thugged out.

Jared: Yeah, well Steve had snuck into the last shot, so Kevin figued he might as well get in on the action. The hat he's wearing is actually mine, it's a straw newsie/golf hat, but it looked so much better on him than on me when he tried it on earlier that I let him keep it. I have an odd custom of giving hats to represent my friendships to people.

Desiré: I didn't even know Jared took this picture either, I think I was in Hooters using the restroom or something.

Jared: More like filling out an application! To Hooters!

Oh yeah this is a bulldog, and I like dogs so I took his picture. Commentary accomplished.

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