Wednesday and Thursday, I left my Oregon home for the (at times) wonderful city of San Francisco to attend Eidos’s Kane & Lynch Community Day. Getting there was no big deal, even counting the fact I completely read the plane ticket wrong and left an hour later than I should have. (It’s easy to make up lost time driving in Oregon when you grew up in L.A.)
Remember, this is far from the first time I’ve gone somewhere for a press event or meeting with a game publisher. This is the first time I’ve been part of a "community" event, though.
Why is that important? Because it’s so much better. In the past, most of these types of things I’ve gone to have been filled with antisocial people doing nothing to contradict the general gamer stereotypes a large portion of the populace holds. They’ll talk about a game or two, but for the most part keep to themselves. (Unless they’re with certain sites/magazines, in which case they’ll gladly tell you how awesome they are and how worthless you are.)
The interaction with other people (some of which I sorta kinda knew beforehand, some of which I had never even heard of before) was almost as worthwhile as the actual work-related stuff.
We chilled in a giant party bus limo sipping champagne and trying to figure out how to get the TV to work, lamented about the broken strobe light, and wondered just how an Oompa Loompa stripper would perform on the handrail, and whether or not it was an actual niche in the Internet’s expansive gallery of… Stuff.
The conversation at Espetus turned from Bioshock, to Portal, to reviews, to the weather, to the obvious differences between Oregon and Rhode Island geographically, to Bioshock, to Dave Chappelle, to Bioshock, and to Bioshock.
With this group, the party (and drinking) didn’t end with drinks at dinner and drinks/partying on the party bus, either. We brought it to the lounge, where Diego [Podtacular] met an extremely crazy woman who just happened to live in the same town in Brazil. After the laughter and joking, we had what may be the greatest single piece of conversation since Jesus freed the slaves. (That’s how good it was!) Unfortunately, no one recorded it. So you all miss out. Trust me when I say it would have melted your face like Raiders.
Overall, it was a fun first day — even if no one wanted to go swimming with me.
The second day was mostly spent playing Kane & Lynch and hanging out at Eidos’s relatively new pad, so look for those impressions and some write-ups on that in the next day or two. (I lied, there was one non-Eidos thing: the wonderful limo ride, which almost ended at the salt mines and resulted in Jay [UncleGamer] and I being the only ones finding the fact the driver had to do a 3-point turn to turn right funny, and where we learned that just because someone is performing construction on a building doesn’t mean they know where the entrance is.)
Right now, I need to get some sleep and get rid of this headache.
PS — visit these other sites sometime, too: Gamertag Radio, Gamervision, SarcasticGamer, Shacknews, Gamerscore Blog
