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Overall the trip back home to St. Louis has been productive. And by productive, I mean a good amount of playing video games, sleeping, watching TV, and reading. It’s been a lot of the same stuff I would be doing back in Indiana, except I don’t have to make or buy food, and I don’t really leave the house that much here. I should probably get on that this week, since there are a good number of people in town that I should hang out with.

My parents are pretty into video games, but only of the puzzle variety. When I got home, the Super Nintendo was brought up from the basement and sitting in the living room, all set up to play Kirby’s Avalanche, which is pretty much the same as Puyo Puyo, but with Kirby characters instead of the weird Japanese monsters. I’ve also been playing a good amount of Puzzle Fighter on Playstation with the fam, which is an awesome game except for the slight problem that I am a bit colorblind (or something), and can’t tell the difference between the green and yellow jewels that well. Either way, I am able to destroy my parents and I’m working more and more on regularly beating my younger brother Joe. Both my mom and dad only play as Sakura on Puzzle Fighter, since they say she’s cute. They of course don’t know any Japanese either, so all the things that the characters say when you’re playing get misinterpreted into something weird. They’re convinced that “Hadouken” is “Hello Garrett.” Haha.

Speaking of video games, I cracked this afternoon and decided to purchase a DS Lite. After the fact, I have to say that it is a beautiful system, and I’m glad I bought it. I didn’t have a regular DS, so it was about time to buy one. This of course is all part of how I am justifying dropping $130 on another toy. There’s also some kind of massive Pokemon game coming out in the future (Diamond?), which I would most likely want to play pretty bad, so I figure might as well buy one now, and enjoy it in the meantime. There are a good number of other games that I want to play, or would want to play later, so I guess this isn’t a complete waste of money. I also realized that for how much I play video games, I haven’t really purchased any games or systems for the past year and a half (thanks to modern technology, haha), so this isn’t so bad. Yes, I am over justifying this, but oh well. It’s a fine system and a lot of fun; I’d recommend it to anyone who likes sweet stuff.

Luckily, I was browsing online this morning before I went out to buy the DS Lite. Kotaku posted an article that had coupons to get a free copy of Brain Age along with the DS Lite, so that’s like a bonus $20 there since I was planning on buying Brain Age anyway. Oh, and if you’re going to buy a DS Lite, here are the coupons (Best Buy and Circuit City). I also went ahead and bought the New Super Mario Bros, and it is a great game. I went to Circuit City first, since they also had a deal in their weekly ad to get a free carrying case or something, but they were out of Brain Age so I went to Best Buy instead. There were a lot more DS Lites than I would have thought (there were at least 15 still on the shelves), so maybe the predictions of DS Lite being sold out on release day were pretty off.

I haven’t been completely (only mostly) unproductive this trip home. I interviewed with a company here in St. Louis last Thursday, for the prospect of getting a summer internship/job doing some market research and stuff. The company is looking to start distributing their products in Japan, so they need someone to start doing research and translating online, then possibly heading over there later this summer to do some first-hand research and looking for distributors, etc. Free trip to Japan, plus the possibility of getting paid? Hell yes. Sounds like I might actually have a “summer job” now, so get off my back about being so lazy. I’ll find out the details and everything for sure tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have it though, so I’ll likely do it.

Back to Bloomington probably Friday, give or take a day or two (yes I realize that is a very vague estimate).

I feel like I should give E3 a proper blog entry, before I start writing about summer up to now (where my life pretty much consists of sleeping, watching TV, and playing video games). I’ll also be putting up some photo galleries soon, but for now I’ll get artistic and add some pictures to this entry because otherwise it will be 20 pages of solid text. Note that this entry is waaaaay too long to be read, so I broke it up by day. I would recommend reading it one part at a time. I wish I would have written it in 3 separate parts.

We arrived in LA on Tuesday, in the early evening. We stayed with Pat’s aunt and uncle, who lived in Orange County. The first thing we did after getting unpacked and playing his little cousin in Mario Kart was go out and try to find some kind of subsistence. Of course, there are many treasures available in Los Angeles that you can’t get in Bloomington, so I was determined to go to one of those. Enter Jack in the Box, home of the best $1 menu ever. We ordered a bunch of food through the drive through and ate in the parking lot, since the dining room was already closed and we were starving. We came back and tried figuring out how the heck we were going to get to the Los Angeles Convention Center, and ended up deciding on the train system. However, the train station was about 20 miles away, and Pat’s aunt would have to drive us there before going to work. This equated to a 5AM wake up call on Wednesday morning, to ensure we would get to E3 in time to pick up our press badges, and then get “early media access” to the show floor from 9-11AM, before they opened the doors to the general attendees. Note that while E3 is a trade show, there were all kinds of fanboys, nerds, and other riff-raff there anyway. While many of them probably do work in industry, I get the impression that a lot of people, like us, found a way to get in without really being part of the industry.

After riding the train for 40 minutes to Pico station and getting our media badges, we listened to a speech for press (actually pretty interesting), then picked up our free breakfasts in fancy white cardboard lunch boxes. Bagels, yogurt, assorted fruit, and some kind of pastry. Not bad. We ate and then went to the show floor. Although before actually entering the show, there were a lot of big booths and setups outside and in the corridors, the actual show floor was beyond belief. We started in West Hall, which was the smaller of the 2 main ones, and it was still massive. This hall had the PS3 booth and the Nintendo/Wii booth, which were obviously big draws. I played a Gundam game on PS3, which looked amazing but played kind of bad, which doesn’t surprise me for a Gundam game. I gave up hope on playing Wii, since the line had already wrapped all the way around the booth, and this was during early media access. According to newspapers and other articles throughout the week, Wii had the longest lines, sometimes making people wait 4 hours to get into the area to see and play the Wii. I’ll talk more about it later, since I actually did get to play it. Although the Wii area was way too crowded, I did get to play the DS Lite, which is really awesome and lot more compact than the original. Also awesome was the New Super Mario Bros for it, which was a lot like the original style Mario games on NES, only with superb graphics and also some new features. I opened a ? block, and a mushroom came out. Only it wasn’t a regular sized mushroom, it was GIANT (taller than Super Mario). So I touched it, and Mario gets super size! In this giant mode, you can pretty much just run through everything and crush it, and even knock over the pipes and other barriers. Pretty cool concept. That and Brain Age really make me want to buy a DS, although I know I shouldn’t.

After exploring West Hall for about an hour, we went over the South Hall, which was bigger I think. By this time, we were already starting to amass some schwag, such as Playstation neck lanyards, phone straps, free magazines and players guides, etc. Also started taking pictures with the booth girls, which is way nerdy but still fun. Brian wasn’t feeling so great (we suspect minor food poisoning from either Jack in the Box or from the BBQ lunch we had at E3 outside), but other than that things were going pretty well. In the first day of the show, we got to pretty much at least skim everything in West and South Halls (the two main ones), and it was everything you would imagine it to be. After the show was pretty much done for the day, we started looking for the free shuttle to the Intellivision party (it was free, what the heck), which turned into an adventure in itself. Spent at least 30 minutes looking for the actual shuttle, maybe another 30 waiting for it once we found the girls who were leading people to it (actually on our shuttle, it was just the 4 of us, 1 guy who worked for it, and the 3 booth/advertising girls). Once getting on the bus, it was about 45 minutes of riding on the bus and making small talk until we actually got to the party. Apparently it was farther away than we thought, plus the traffic didn’t help. But it was a free party, we were there for a few hours, played video games, ate and drank, and then took shuttle, train, and car back home. We were beat, being awake from approximately 5AM to 1AM. First day of E3 a success!

The second day was a lot more forgiving in the morning. We slept in until around like 10AM, then made our way to the Convention Center. On the way there, while riding the train, there was some idiot kid on a cell phone pretty much being a pain in the butt, and talking to the police department. Apparently he had gotten into a car accident and he didn’t like how it was handled, so he thought he would try to be a badass and complain. Yeah pal, good way to get the cops to pay attention and want to help you. Anyway, he’s the type of guy who talks on his cell phone and looks at people around him, trying to get some kind of sympathy or something to think “man this guy is right, I can’t believe he has to deal with all this trouble,” then goes ahead and tries to start conversation. I was smart enough to avoid this, and pulled an Ari by acting like I was asleep. This left Brian, Kyle, and Pat to try and talk to him, or at least humor him. Brian especially was doing it well, saying stuff like “oh man, you’re right.” Hahaha. Anyway, after that whole fiasco, the idiot got off the train at Pico with us, but luckily went the other direction. We started off in Kentia Hall, which was the last of the three halls with E3 show stuff. Pretty much, this is the oddball hall, with all kinds of smaller developers, foreign developers (that no one cares about), and PC stuff. The only thing in Kentia that was good was the RedOctane/Guitar Hero booth.

We moved back up to South Hall, and watched the Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer in it’s entirety. Absolutely amazing; I love Metal Gear. We visited the Bandai-Namco booth, which had PacMan and The Prince from Katamari Damacy there. I think PacMan was a midget, because he was really short. Regardless, the main point here was that Kyle was taking a picture with PacMan, and then got hit in the nuts! He thinks he was maybe leaning too hard on him or something, but he got punched in the balls by PacMan, then had The Prince come over and give him an “X” sign with his hands. We thought we’d have to throw down and beat up these 2 mascots to save Kyle. Luckily, it didn’t come down to that. Back in West Hall, Paris Hilton was apparently there to talk about some stupid game she has coming out. And by that, I mean they put her name on a rip-off of Bejeweled and tried to sell it. Not only did she create a huge fire hazard in the
hall because of all the people trying to see her, but apparently she didn’t even know the name of the game she was promoting (Pat’s aunt heard that on the news that night). Anyway, we didn’t get to see her, but Pat got a shot of the side of her head with a video camera. Speaking of celebrities, Adam West was there signing autographs at the Family Guy booth. They weren’t even photos of himself, they were black and white headshots of the animated Mayor from Family Guy, who Adam West does the voice for. Weird. Anyway, he is waaaaaay older than you would imagine, and really is as insane as the character on Family Guy. I guess he lost it all with age. But we were able to get him to do an IUSTV promo, so that was cool.

After that, we were bored and went to the G4TechTV area, where they were doing live broadcasts all week, covering E3. We saw Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb (who is really hot), and I think we might have been in the background for a few seconds when they were coming back from some commercial breaks. But that was not the best part at all. There was a heavyset guy in a blue T-shirt in the audience area that we were in that Kyle (I think) pointed out and said “Donkey Lips.” You know, from Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts back when we were kids? Pat scoped out his name badge, and it said Michael Bower. For some reason, I knew this bit of trivia, and knew it was really the guy who played Donkey Lips! I asked him if that was him, he said yes, I said awesome, and we talked for a bit. We interviewed him and got a promo for IUSTV even. He’s a pretty cool guy, no longer a celebrity really, but pretty down to earth. We even got his business cards, and cell phone number although we never called him.

After that, we went back into the show and played around for a bit more. Played some PS3, Pat played some new karaoke game called SingStar, which was actually kind of cool looking, and we headed back around 5 or 6PM. Ate tacos at some Mexican restaurant near Pat’s uncle’s, and it was delicious (some kind of green salsa that was really good). That was about it for the day. I would make this entry longer, but I am lazy and this post is already way too long. I still have another day to write about even!

Last day of E3! We got there around 11AM, and went straight for the Nintendo booth. Kyle and I were determined to see the Wii before we left. Unfortunately, the line to get in was not any shorter than before, and we didn’t want to kill 4 hours waiting in line. I did some talking to the PR guys, and told them that as press (haha), we needed to get in sooner. It took a few times of going up, talking, waiting a half hour for the guy to try to ask his boss, but finally we were able to get in. They only let 2 of us in, so Kyle and I went in while Brian and Pat went to check out the Lucas Arts art gallery. Before we go into detail about the Wii paradise, I also need to mention that I saw Shigeru Miyamoto in person at the Nintendo booth area when I was trying to schmooze the guy at the desk. He was talking to some crazy old Japanese guy in multicolored leopard print clothing, and I overheard one of the Nintendo guys saying that he was a high up on Pokemon or something. Weird. We also got to see Steven Spielberg (were within 3 feet of him), when he was going to and coming out of his meeting with Miyamoto. Who knows what they met about, but at least I can say I saw Miyamoto in person.

We got VIP (I guess) access to the Wii booth. At the very least, we didn’t have to wait in line, the guy took us straight in. Apparently everyone who was waiting for 4 hours in line didn’t do so in vain; the area inside was amazing. First, you walk in and there is a rotating stage with people playing Wii games, like Metroid and some orchestra conducting game. Around that stage, the walls were lined with flat panel TVs (I need to clarify: EVERY TV in the Nintendo booth was flat panel LCD) playing the trailer for Smash Brothers Brawl, which is going to be absolutely amazing. New characters include Wario, Zero Suit Samus, Metaknight, Kid Icarus, and even Solid Snake! Oh man. The area inside was packed, and there were lines inside to actually play the games. First though, there was a nice display case with the actual hardware. The system itself is a lot smaller than you would think; it’s nice and compact and just looks futuristic. The controllers, which everyone was freaked out about when they were first unveiled months ago, are actually a lot more versatile than you would think. There are a few different “configurations,” with a remote control, a device with a control stick, a more standard controller (like a SNES one with analog sticks), and even a thing to turn the remote control into a Zapper. Awesome.

I got to watch all sorts of games, including the Wii Sports tennis and baseball, Legend of Zelda (probably the best looking game at E3), Metroid, and some shitty ports of Dragonball Z and One Piece games. I played Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, and Super Mario Galaxy. Both were totally sweet, and I really want to buy a Wii now. Wario Ware was cool because it showed all the different ways you can use the Wii remote control (which is wireless). It’s super light, and it a lot more accurate than you would think. It puts the Eye Toy on PS2 to shame about a million times over. Mario Galaxy took a little bit of getting used to, because you’re using “Nunchaku Style,” which is the remote control connected to the control stick device, but the game was really fun and fairly easy to play. I really think Nintendo has a chance at becoming number 1 again in the video game industry. I thought before that maybe the Wii would just be a stupid gimmick, and that people wouldn’t want to have to move and stuff to play games. Just a few minutes playing with the system, and I have nothing but positive things to say about this little system. It’s fun to play. The games are fun, of course, but actually using the controller and stuff was fun too. Add that to the cheap pricetag – under $200 maybe – and when compared to PS3 and the X-Box 360 (which I don’t think has a chance in the long run, and especially in Japan), and Nintendo is probably feeling pretty good about themsevles.

OK I’m way too tired to write anymore. That was about it anyway. After playing the Wii, we headed back to run through South Hall again, then met up with Brian and Pat and headed out back home. We had some extra time that night, so we had In and Out Buger for dinner, then went to the beach/pier area of town. Met up with Mike Savitt of IUSTV Rate Your Plate fame, hung out with Pat’s Uncle Randy, and called it a night. Got a few hours of sleep, packed, and went back to Indiana. And now I leave you with a random collage of E3 pictures.

I have no idea where the last 2 weeks have gone. It seems like I’ve been doing all sorts of stuff, and even during the week I don’t know what day of the week it is or how long it’s been. Some IUSTV stuff has been stressful, but overall things have been going great. It just seems like time is going by mega fast. Maybe it’s just because the semester (and college) is pretty much over? I also keep meaning to play/beat Kingdom Hearts II, but haven’t gotten around to it. And I’ve had it before anyone else in the US, since I downloaded the Japanese version back in December. Ah well, at least I’ve been filling up my lazy time by watching Curb and Lost a lot.

I’m going to be out of town a lot during April. This coming weekend, from around Saturday to Monday, I’m going to Chicago with Brian and possibly Nick to interview with NOVA, another English school in Japan. Speaking of that, I haven’t heard from AEON yet, although I was supposed to have a response by last Friday. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. If I was to be rejected, I was supposed to get a letter in the postal mail. Haven’t gotten that yet, thank goodness. If I got in, I was supposed to hear via phone. Haven’t gotten that yet either. Ah well; I guess I’ll just wait and see. I really do hope I get in, right now that sounds like it would be my number 1 choice of what to do next year. After Chicago, I’m back in Bloomington for about 2 days, until Wednesday, when I leave with Pat for Las Vegas. We’re going to the National Association of Broadcasters Conference (NAB), which sounds like it’s going to be awesome (and also it’s in Vegas). I’m actually only going to be able to go for a few days, which is before the bulk of the conference starts. I’m excited though because I’ll at least get to go to 2 days of seminars, about how to use stuff like After Effects, Flash, and Maya. Wow I sound like a nerd. I will be in Las Vegas, and the Journalism school is paying for all of it, since it’s kind of related to the J499 Independent Study we’re doing. How do I find all these things for myself??

I fly out of Vegas on Saturday morning to go up to Vancouver, where I’m working for my parents at the GaAs Mantech International Semiconductor Conference. How in the world did this happen, you ask? My mom runs the conference management, so I was able to get in and help work the registration table. I get paid, and they also pay for all my expenses to get up there. Works for me. I’ll be there until Friday the 28th, which is the end of dead week back at IU. So all in all, I’m going to be out of town about a total of 2 weeks this whole month. Awesome. I’m missing the last week and a half of classes (I’ve already taken care of that; I’m not really missing that much), and also Little 5. But still, free trips to Vegas and Vancouver (even though it IS in Canada), is a deal that I can’t pass up. Again, how do I find these things for myself??

The IUSTV Banquet is this Thursday, and I’m pumped (but not prepared) for it. This will pretty much be the end of the semester for IUSTV, so the banquet and the huge after party are going to be a lot of fun. It will honestly probably be the last time I ever see a lot of these people. I think I’m going to give a short speech at the banquet, which will be fun I guess. The new execs are training quite nicely; we had a retreat with them this past Saturday, and I’m excited to see IUSTV a year from now after they get to work and improve on stuff. I think they’re going to do an awesome job. They won’t have to deal with moving over to a new building, which in all honesty killed about 2 months of my work this year.

No clue what I’m doing this summer yet. I guess a lot of it depends on what job I end up getting and taking. Ideally, I will go to Japan sometime in July or August and start working there (AEON?). That would mean I have May through July to stay in Bloomington, get slowly packed up and ready to move on in life, and also possibly find a part time job while I’m here. I’ll still be doing some IUSTV work (like purchasing and tweaking the studio), but I’ll have so much free time regardless, I feel like I should have 1 last fun experience of working somewhere. I’m thinking a video rental place, the mall, or back to a restaurant. We’ll see.

Ah, spring break has finally arrived. What am I doing, you ask? Traveling to some exotic locale? Going on an exciting vacation to a foreign land? Battling a giant crab monster with an electric guitar? No, none of the above. I’m in GhostTown Bloomington, doing the same thing I do pretty much all the time. It’s not that bad; at least I have a week off from classes (which means only 2 days off, since I don’t actually have class that often anyway). Nonetheless, I think this week “off” will give me time to relax, get caught up on stuff, and just be even lazier than usual (if that is even possible).

Sunday through Tuesday, I will likely be waking up very late, and then working at the office for a few hours a day. Me and AP are going to rebuild the VT3 machine, straighten out some studio stuff, and just do general maintainence. I also have some more footwork to do for this supposedly upcoming “Real to Reel” film competition, which seems like it might be a bigger pain in the butt than I had ever imagined. However, if we pull it off, it will be awesome. And no, Red Bull’s marketing strategy still doesn’t make sense to me. But oh well. Sometime around Wednesday to Friday, I’ll be going up to Chicago for an interview with AEON, one of the English schools in Japan. The more I think about it, working in Japan is more and more tempting. We’ll see how that goes. Nova interview is in Indy at the beginning of April as well.

If I have time, I also wanted to go back home to St. Louis for a day or two. Don’t know if I’ll actually have time to do that actually, but we’ll see. Other than that, I don’t have many other goals to accomplish over spring break. I’m almost already done with News Radio season 3 (yes, I actually purchased ANOTHER real DVD box set, I can’t believe it myself). Considering how much I watched the first News Radio box set though, I figured it would be worth it. This show is amazing, one of the funniest ever. And season 3 has the Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor episode, which was a very very pleasant surprise. Gazizza, my dilznoofuses. I also plan on finally finishing Kingdom Hearts II, playing a bunch of SNES puzzle games, and if I miraculously have even more video game time than I expected, I want to play FF8 or Super Mario RPG again. I also borrowed the first season of Lost from Kyle, which everyone keeps telling me I will love and get addicted to. We shall see.

I’ll be posting a few times over break, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll try to think like Nick and write a really deep entry about something. Likely it will just be boring crap from my daily routine like this one. Either way, you will all read it when you get back from Florida, California, or wherever else you bastards went for spring break.

I have a feeling if I graphed out what time of day I write my blog entries, I would have over 75% between 1 and 3AM. Ah well. So today started off just about as easy as my days get. My “early” (ie, 2:30PM) class was cancelled for the day, so I had nothing to do until 4PM, my second class. I woke up around 11 or so, made am amazing Sakai-grade omelet, and watched both Family Matters and Boy Meets World on TV. Who knew that these stupid TGIF shows would still be airing on cable. I actually noticed a few weeks ago that all the shows on Nick at Nite are ones that I remember from my lifetime, which pretty much makes me feel old. I mean, I remember when Nick at Nite first started and they showed stuff like Dick Van Dyke and Welcome Back Kotter. Now, Fresh Prince of Bel Air apparently counts as “classic TV.” Wait, I guess it is. Yeesh.

So anyways, life has been good. Not that anything in particularly good has happened, I guess I’m just basing this on the fact that nothing particularly bad has happened. My classes are going somewhat well, although I need to get my online class assignments in on time (surprisingly this is the class that’s the most pain in my butt). My M405 Consumer Psychology class is turning into one of the best classes I’ve ever taken here at IU. It’s material that I actually am interested in, which I suppose helps out a lot. It’s funny hearing about psychological problems, etc (we really haven’t dealt much with marketing or business applications, but I think he’s doing that on purpose), then being able to so easily relate them to people I know. Things really do make a lot of sense; I knew I should have taken Intro to Psychology at some point. Oh well, I think this class probably covers most of that too. For the first time in a long while, I never get bored in class and actually enjoy listening to what’s going on. Weird, huh?

So I was in a pretty good mood after my one and only class of the day, and went to the office. Some issues there, nothing to really talk about. I’m starting to see a lot of hope for the organization next year. I hate to think that my role this year has been that of a segway in the life of IUSTV (from “creation” to “maturity”), but in some ways I think that’s true. Not to say that we’ve done a bad job this year, but we haven’t been growing and expanding as much as I would have hoped; too much other stuff had to be done. Overall, things are excellent and better than last year, which is indeed something to be happy about.

I’ve been on sort of a Retro Kick lately. This has been due to the website RetroJunk.com, which has pretty much killed many hours of my time, and to the rediscovery of classing NES and SNES games. Pat had both emulators on his XBox, so we played a lot last weekend. About 5 times this week after that, I’ve played SNES on my PS2 emulator, and seriously, these games are the greatest things ever made. Especially puzzle games. I really missed the competition and taunting that goes along with playing an otherwise kiddy game like Puyo Puyo or Tetris. I think I was raised this way, since as far back as I can remember both my parents (and my brothers) really get into these puzzle games. Games like Kirby’s Avalanche (same as Puyo Puyo), Tetris, Puzzle Fighter, Bomberman, etc have kept my family up many a night as we played games on end trying to beat and rematch each other. Good family memories. Some families beat each other; my family played Nintendo.

Old TV (especially theme songs) have been stuck in my head all week as well. Ninja Turtles and Heathcliff in particular. I have both songs on my phone now also. I remember watching TV as a kid, it was a lot different than now. Well, in some ways. In many ways I am still like a kid watching TV (ahem, Kamen Rider), but back then was still something different. That reminds me. I was telling this to Pat the other day, but I think the 4 Ninja Turtles really represent personality types pretty well (for males), at least in general. You can maybe tell a lot about how a person is going to act by finding out the order in which he liked the Ninja Turtles. Everyone had a favorite. The turtles were so different, so distinct. You could even go so far as to label people as “Raphael-types,” “Leonardo-types,” etc.

Personally, I liked Donatello the most, followed by Leonardo, then Raphael, then Michelangelo. Everyone post their turtle rankings (as comments). I shall call this the Leong Scale of Ninja Turtle Personalities. The exact scientific meaning will be discovered at a later date, I’m just claiming stake on the name. I’ll bet I can guess though which turtle was everyone’s favorite. Also this might not work as well for females, but give it a shot (especially if you watched the Ninja Turtles, which pretty much everyone did).

Wow Nick Roberts really sucks at video games. Me, him, and Brian just played Narutimate Hero 2 for like an hour, and I don’t think Nick won any matches at all. This leads us to conclude that Nick can’t win at any video games at all.