In Which I Promote Myself

Here’s my IndieCade post over on Indie Game Mag. There’s a longer version coming out in the print mag, including reactions to Maum, B.U.T.T.O.N. and my general thoughts on indie games at E3.

I also talked about playing Rock Band 3 over at DeviceMag.

And, in case you missed it, I talked about Civ 5 right here.

I’m still doing the real-journalist happy dance. I’ve written before about the awkwardness of calling myself a games journalist, and then needing to add qualifiers about reviewing small games for small publications, or having a day job, but covering E3 feels like leveling up.

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More Than A Feeling

I’m visiting my awesome sister in Boston now. We had a salon last night where she played me some songs she’s working on and I read her my latest story.

In a lot of ways, New England is home to me. I love the saltbox houses and the town greens, and absence has made the heart grow fonder of ubiquitous Red Sox caps. I even like riding the T.  (If you’ve just tuned into Simpson’s Paradox, I feel about driving the way most people feel about visiting the dentist. Oh, not the dread and anxiety part, I just mean that driving is better than all my teeth falling out.)

As Eric said: Welcome back to the homeworld.

[PS I reread several years of Pie2K comics to find this one to go with the title.]

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E3 Run-ins

At the airport — on the LAX side — I met Mike of GameDrinkCode. We hadn’t met before, although I’m a big fan of GameDrinkCode (I’m more of a GameDrinkWrite girl myself), and I’d been disappointed to miss his highspeed-development talk at the Triangle Game Conference. When he’s not posting on how to afford an indie game, he does iPhone games as Ludoko. (Yes, from the Latin.) Thought it was a good sign that the first person I met was an indie dev.

I ran into a guy in the elevator who asked who I was representing. I said I was freelance. He congratulated me on my successful BSing of the E3 media board.  That’s how I secretly feel, deep down,  about being a journalist, but sometimes I secretly feel like I’m gothly pale or a bit too pear-shaped, and I don’t think I want that pointed out by strangers, either.

I finally met my Twitter friend @CaptainCursor in person! His people over at Rifts went on Unattended Journalist Alert when I asked to see him, and then Nick came out and said hi and tossed me up in the air a couple times.

(Which was extra nice, because my friend who usually greets me by picking me up and swinging me around the room had the bad manners to move to Korea a few years ago.) The Rifts tour was pretty awesome too, thanks, Nick! And for a little while, I felt like one of the cool kids who already knew people at E3. Look, three full days of endless introductions can be pretty exhausting.

I ran into a guy in the elevator who asked if I was a booth babe. Aww! I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh hysterically or hug him.

I ran into another guy in the hotel coffeeshop, who saw my Triangle Games Conference bag, and asked if my husband was here for E3. I wanted to give him a one-finger salute,  but instead I gave him my card. And an icy glare!

I met up with the rest of the guys from DIYgamer at the IndieCade party for drinks and mutual admiration society. Guys, if I didn’t tell you clearly enough, I love your posts.

I was in a taxi on the way to the Scott Pilgrim kegger when some basketball team won something or other, and the whole city started cheering. Oh, yeah, and when I got to the party, the line went down the block and around the corner, but the  line was fantastic, tarted-up girls and posturing guys, all texting friends and comparing how drunk they got last night to how drunk they’re going to get tonight.  I thought it would be fun to post about how I couldn’t get into the Hollywood party, so I went to the front of the line, and said who I was, and asked if I was on the list. I wasn’t, of course, but here, go in anyway. This is either because A) I am famous or B) There weren’t enough girls inside. You decide!

The thing is, that once you’ve gotten inside, then you’re just a girl at a party who doesn’t know anyone, and that’s a bit annoying. Sometimes, as a journalist, you have to look at the line of kegs and ask yourself “What would Hemmingway do?”

I added an extra day to my trip to see the Getty Villa, because one nerd-dom just isn’t enough for me. Seeing the Getty Villa has been a dream since I first read about the Villa of the Papyri and the reconstruction. It was an awesome day for me. Then I caught the bus back to downtown LA. The route runs along the Pacific Ocean, so there’s a bus full of tired commuters and dirty vagrants… and me, jumping up and down and staring at the Santa Monica Pier.

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Nerd Flu

Nerd flu – (n.) – The post-convention malaise caused by flying across the country, not sleeping properly and touching the same game controllers every one else is touching.

(Wish I had made this one up, but I actually heard it from a guy in the press room.)

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But After Midnight, I Was Stuck With This Pumpkin

I saw this on PostSecret a few weeks back, and it perfectly captures how I feel about traveling. Maybe I’m not completely enamored with the cattle call of boarding, or the choice between eating airport McD’s or airport Burger King, but I love the feeling of possibility. I love distant, exotic place names on the departures boards.

Besides the excitement of being a real journalist (and really, I can’t overstate the awesomeness of that), and seeing all the new games,  this was last week was my first trip to Los Angeles. I’ve really missed city life, the buses and taxis and crowds. I saw the Pacific for the first time, and that was awesome in a lot of ways.

And now I’m back. I wanted to say ‘back home’ but I don’t really feel like Raleigh is my home. I worked at the restaurant today, and while it didn’t go quite as badly as my last post-travel, post-conference return to work, it wasn’t a great day. Spent a while catching up on little things, and wondering if my contribution to the world will be that I wiped down the check folders or refilled the sugar packets.  I’m stagnating professionally, financially and even romantically, and it’s all been thrown into sharper focus by my amazing week.

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Catching On

One of my favorite things about teaching is watching my students catch on to something. These are honors kids in a digital time, so everyone has read the SparkNotes on Animal Farm and can recite on cue that it’s an allegory for communism published in 1945. But they realize on their own, in the midst of an entirely different inclass discussion that their friend is a bit like Horse.

The benefits and tenure of a full-time job in K12 would be quite nice, but I so love that I get to be part of the discussions connecting literature to their lives.

Just in case you ALSO like watching people catch on, here are some things I’ve recently discovered:

I should have arrived at E3 earlier. I didn’t realize just how much went on before the official show opened, and that I could actually go to a lot of those events because I’m press.

I should have planned a proper showfloor route, and it should have been on the location of demo booths and not my own favorite games. Because, oddly enough, the sprawling display booths were not arranged in order of how much I like the game, and it’s a long walk from Sims3 Ambitions over to Harvest Moon.

I need an iPhone. The people who were tweeting up and looking up directions as they walked around had a huge advantage over those of us who had to haul our laptops back to the free wifi in the pressroom. But hey, did I mention that I’m press and I can hang out in the pressroom?

I found an affordable place to stay at the Cecil Hotel, which is a mix of old Hollywood glamour and the Happiness Hotel from the Great Muppet Caper. The lobby has recessed statues and marble columns, but the dorm-room doors on the rooms have been painted and thickly repainted into heavy smoothness, and the guests who weren’t E3 attendees were long-term residents. It’s clean and close, which is what I was looking for, and the Roman decor is just an extra bonus.

Unfortunately, I made the assumption that a hotel offering wifi meant there would be wifi in the rooms. Not so. The wifi is actually available only in a marble-floored lobby.  Late at night, the tables and chairs, and corners, and even the curving marble stairs fill with games bloggers posting news and filing their stories. We exchange deadline nods or greetings and cards over our respective laptops and respective WordPress dashboards, and I think, for all my mistakes on this trip, I’ve found my people.

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Civ V at E3

I was already sold on Civ V before I went to the demo at E3. Civilization, in all it’s incarnations, is one of my favorite games, and I was really looking forward to seeing the newest version.

Civ V keeps the hex grids and city building we all loved in Civ IV, but adds gorgeous new graphics, new diplomatic options and city-states. One major change from previous Civ versions is the end of the unit stack. You’ll no longer be able to pile up every possible unit into a killer stack and then march over to fight your enemies. Instead, ranged weapons have been introduced to combat. You’ll still have diplomatic routes to make peace or to demand tribute. Once you’ve captured an enemy city, you’ll have the usual options to take it over or raze it, and a new option of installing a puppet leader to keep the citizens happy and also receive resources from your new friend.

Game demonstrators used the nuke on Montezuma, because everyone agrees that he really is a jerk.

Other political leaders are shown in gorgeous cutscenes, subtitled from their native languages. Or ignore the animations and just declare war. I couldn’t get a list of national leaders who’ll be featured in Civ V, but I was promised that they range from the famous to the obscure across world cultures.

Civ V will also include city-states, a new form of NPCs somewhere between the barbarian states found in Civ IV and the other AI or player-controlled nations. Players will be able to make trade alliances with city-states, try to gain their votes in the UN for a diplomatic victory, or just fight them and take their stuff. Political relationships will become more complicated with the addition of city-states, since your relationships with city-states will affect your standing with nations. I wonder if I’ll be able to use my Civ superpower of making every other nation my ally.

Since I don’t like combat unless I’m forced to it (Why conquer cities when I can just let them revolt and join my glorious empire on their own?), I was pleased to see new options for diplomatic, science and culture victories. For a science-track victory, spaceship parts are physical entities that need to be moved and assembled in one place. Civ V includes a new stat of Piety, which will work in conjunction with religion founding to affect political and religious relations, and therefore, the cultural victory conditions. No word on whether that will make Isabella any easier to deal with.

The game will be available on the PC in September, 2010.

Oh, and the promo swag was a Civ Addicts Anonymous button. No more turns!

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When Booth Babes Go Bad

As a girl reporter, I know I’m not supposed to like booth babes, but I actually found them to be part of the sensory overload of music and lights and scenery and action that gives the E3 show floor such a Roman games feel.

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Zombie promo girl throttles random passerby.

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Impromptu execution on the show floor.

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Yeah, she’s having a bad day.

“What’s a booth babe?” my dad asked on the phone the other night.

I told him.

“Oh! You mean a demo dolly!”

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In Transit

Packing (verb) — Throwing the absolute minimum amount of wash-in-the-sink-and-hang-dry t-shirts in a bag, so I can leave maximum space for hair products and books.

Once again, I forgot to take my shampoo and conditioner and lotion and mouthwash and antiseptic out of my carryon and put them in a little plastic bag, and put the plastic bag on the belt separately, and once again, I went straight through security.

I’ve thought airline security was a bit ridiculous since I was caught with an oversize lotion (I forgot! Again! Because it’s stupid!) and I was allowed to take it on plane after explaining to the TSA agent that it was my very favorite lotion. Homeland Security can be totally thwarted by asking the security agent “Smell this lotion! Isn’t it nice? Wouldn’t you be sad to have to throw it away?” (This does not make the entire shoe-removal and baggage x-ray into a farce! No terrorists would ever think of saying please!)

But I hit a new low yesterday on the flight to Los Angeles, when the flight attendant made an announcement that she’d misplaced the corkscrew for first class, and did anyone happen to have one?

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RPGs With Chinese Characteristics

I can’t always combine my love for China and games, but right now, I’m playing two different new Chinese releases. The first is RainBlood, an indie PC RPG from developer Soulframe. It’s technically not new, but the English translation is.  It’s a blend of mythic storytelling in fictionalized China, and hack-and-slash combat. I can’t tell yet if it’s a bit combat-heavy for my taste, or if the story is so intriguing that fighting bad guys is just a distraction.  RainBlood is beautiful, with hand-drawn greyscale backgrounds of curving Chinese village streets.

The second is Princess Fury, a classic combat RPG for the iPhone from Chinese developers Mo-Star. So far, this tends towards button-mashing, not my favorite gamestyle (I see button-mashers as the checkers of videogames — there’s nothing wrong with it, but wouldn’t you rather play something else?), but I’m really enjoying my adorable purple-haired princess with her giant sword and her male harem, er, adventuring party.

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