October 20, 2007

  • This past Friday, I visited the "E For All" expo's second day, and it looks like the attendance went up a little bit compared to Thursday. Even though I commented about how there weren't that many things to do, there were still things I haven't done. So I had three main goals for the day, the first was to get as many Nintendo Wii keychain / flashlights as possible, the second was to actually spend the time in line for Metal Gear Solid 4 and Super Smash Bros Brawl, finally the third was to play Rock Band on the MTV main stage again. Needless to say, I did all of the above.

    I returned to the Nintendo booth over and over again at different times, picking up those cool Wii-mote keychain / flashlights, as well as getting them from the many Nintendo booth babes (ended up with 15+). I spent nearly two hours in line for the chance to get hands on game time with Metal Gear Solid 4; which was pretty cool. While I was in line, Gametrailers.com and G4TV were doing interviews with attendees, and I made some humorous attempts in trying to be on video (we'll see when it gets broadcasted on Monday). I then spent time at the Super Smash Bros Brawl booth, where I got to play it and got easily defeated by my lack of actual game skillz (got me a free t-shirt though).

    I then went over to the Rock Band area and once again acted as a "musician for hire" waiting to join a group. A party of three needed a fourth, so I was once again in "another band." After some decent practice time together we experienced some actual rock band drama, when our drummer decided she didn't want to perform on the main stage. Our bass guitarist had to fill in for drums and we got another musician for hire to take over bass (I was still on lead guitar like the other day). Once we were on stage, we learned that we really had to sing one of the default songs for MTV, unfortunately the only song our singer knew from that list was Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" which isn't a bad song, but hardly the upbeat song we wanted. We didn't sound so great as a whole because our new bass guitarist frankly was not good at all, and we ended up screaming at the guy while on stage. I would be going "bass! bass!" when he for some reason forgot that he was suppose to be playing, and our singer was punching the guy's shoulder to "keep him awake." Yeah, not the best second performance I was hoping for, but I did get a new Rock Band hat to go along with the shirt I got the other day.

    Click below for the video of my Rock Band performance from Thursday
    mtv_rockband/highlights/viewvid.asp?v=1096378

    Click below for the video of my Rock Band performance from Friday
    mtv_rockband/highlights/viewvid.asp?v=1098149

    After half of the expo hall lost it's power (funny coincidence), I went to drop off some things in my car and headed for the Nokia Theatre for the "Video Games Live" concert. hhmm, as a quick aside, I just realized that I never did try playing "Super Mario Galaxy." Anyways, I was able to get a good view of the concert, and I took advantage of that by testing out how my new camera would fair in that long distance, with no use of flash (no flash photography or video taping there). The concert itself was incredibly enjoyable, with the orchestra and choir group doing wonderful renditions of music found in video games. A lot of game music was covered, like Donkey Kong, Tetris, Metal Gear Solid, Sonic the Hedgehog, Bioshock, Civilization, Tron, the Legend of Zelda, Conan, Kingdom Hearts, Warcraft, Starcraft II, Contra, Mario Bros, Halo, and ofcourse Final Fantasy (even though SquareEnix wouldn't allow them the use of their video footages). They even had cosplayers show up on stage once in awhile, to coincide with the game music being played. Special guest appearance from famous video game music composers also showed up, and even the "father of video games" Nolan Bushnell was there. At two occassions, they had an audience member go up on stage to play a game on the huge screen, while the orchestra would play the music in real time. It was a really cool experience, and the many gamers in the audience sure were audibly excited when a favorite game of theirs would show up. Video Games Live is something I definitely want to attend  to again in the future.