Original Archive Date: April 2003
 (Old, Repost)E3: Green Onion Mote, WTF?
Posted Monday, April 7, 2003 by Mr. Poppinfresh
Originally posted Tuesday, May 28, 2002 by Mr. Poppinfresh.
With the remainder of Day 1 spent wandering around the West hall, meeting old friends and amassing impossibly large amounts of free swag, our noble Corp staff retired to Chateaux Staberinde for a well-deserved binge drinking festival.
The next day dawned bright and impossibly hot, which of course caused yours truly to cover up in six layers of black clothing and slither around large spots of open sunlight. Yes yes, I know you all have a variety of stupid vampire jokes to spew out at this point- I have pale skin, I hate the sun, yadda yadda. I'll have you know I don't own any capes, and the only makeup I have is a tube of red lipstick I use when I break into their houses and want to freak them out with a message on their bathroom mirror. Given that bars and nightclubs are generally open after dark, I think the reasons for my nocturnal nature are blatantly clear. In other words, shut up.
Day 2 of our E3 shinanigans started out in a most amusing fashion. Having been banned from the Mythic booth for no other reason than the folks inside appear to have gotten picked on at highschool and felt the need to take it out on someone with their newfound authority (hey, kids, call me when you sell more units than a bad PSX Russian-language bass fishing game, ok?), we began with a trip to Kentia Hall. Once there, Anarch, Lietgardis, Staberinde and I wandered around, collecting badly translated Korean press kits and demo CDs and mocking the German booth. "Ja, this show eez so plebian and boring. I find your videogame to be weethout value or merit." Most of those Korean 'demos' were in fact full versions of said games, but we'll get back to that in a moment.
Some of the material from these press kits makes me wonder how I can possibly compete as a purveyor of lukewarm humor. Take, for instance, the official media press kit for Gaia Entertainment, who proudly inform us on the cover in large, bold letters that they are "Where The Technology Meet Dream". I, for one, fear any technology that communicates in broken Tarzan grammar, but I'm sure that's just a quibble next to the fact that somewhere, some printing company got paid to produce this monstrosity. Inside, potential gamers and members of the media are informed, "Cartoon style, 3D characters emphaseize their characteristics." I don't know what having your characteristics emphaseized means, but it sounds painful. Obviously, the concept of proofreading is one of those uniquely western social artifacts that simply doesn't translate to their ancient, venerable Korean culture.
Next, we made a short stop to the well-hidden Artifact Entertainment booth, where we were squeezed in sans appointment for a brief sampling of Horizons. Yes, it does in fact exist, and I'm as shocked as you are. It actually looks like it could be pretty cool, if you don't mind the slightly more surrealist take on the character models they appear to be taking. As an aside, AC 2 appears to be going down the same road, which makes me wonder if cartoony surrealist graphics in MMOGs is a new trend. But I digress.
After collecting enough unintentionally-hilarious press kits to fuel my gleefully borderline racist jokes for the next year, we set off to a "MMOG Dork" party at a nearby hotel bar. As it turns out, 'bar' was a fairly generous appelation for what turned out to be a blind, deaf, mute, and retarded drinkmonkey, slinging unidentifiable alcoholic swill in a room the size of a Japanese love motel. With none of the attendant Japanese amenities or fanatical cleanliness, of course.
From there we set off to home, where we quickly installed the most 'promising' of our new Korean games: Priston Tale (or 'Prison Tail', according to Staberinde). It turned out to be more fun than Everquest, with better graphics than UO and a more interesting backstory than Anarchy Online. At least, the story seemed interesting; the entire game is written in Korean and unlocalized, making reading the manual or communicating with our fellow players a tad difficult. Still, we rolled up our sleeves and did exactly what every Korean gamer in an English MMOG has done since the beginning of time; killsteal and ninja-loot everything in sight, responding to any Korean-language protests with unintelligable English gibberish. The moment Staberinde invited a befuddled 12 year old girl with green hair to "join the First Church of Derek Smart!", somewhere a fairy lost its wings.
The following is an actual, unaltered conversation of our efforts to understand the game's manual.
Staberinde: "Let's run the manual through Babelfish and translate it."
Pop: "Good idea."
Staberinde: "It says 'khay lik It will sprout and it will be an item to indicate information of information green onion mote colleagues khay lik it will sprout and and it will show correspondence khay lik it will sprout HP it will be indicated and and and and and the condition of the field even in the colleague window and and and and and and in down and and and and a name and a level and and and the angle khay lik it will sprout it will be able to confirm.'. What the fuck does that mean?"
Pop: "I think 'green onion mote colleagues' means to click the OK box, and 'khay lik It will sprout' means to select something. So in order to group, we have to khay lik It will sprout a backward tree tiger banana airplane and then green onion mote colleague it. Oh fuck, what did I just say? What did I just say?"
Staberinde: *head explodes*
Hopefully, I'll be able to so enrage some of Priston Tale's players that they'll fly to Vancouver and challange me to a gang-land throwdown. I've been a little bored, lately.
Oh, and on one final note, I'd like to thank Technogeek from Furry2Furry for prying himself away from his job as a candy-striper at the local zoo, and posting an IRC log version of my first E3 post to their forums, totally without credit or a link. It really warms my heart to know that he occasionally looks up from his basset hound's crotch and blindly jabs at his keyboard every now and then.
[Expect Part 3 and our Best of Show Roundup whenever we can pry Mr. Poppinfresh away from griefing Korean roleplayers long enough to get something coherent out of him]
Editor's Note: As of the current date of this reposting, we *still* can't get anything coherent out of him.
---
(Old, Repost)E3: French Wookies 2003 Redux
Posted Monday, April 7, 2003 by Mr. Poppinfresh
Originally Posted May 14th, 2002.
E3 is a Babylonian madhouse, and attending it on a press pass is a special degree of insanity that would take a science-defying expansion of the known periodic table to properly explain. Fortunately, this was hardly Corp's first time attending, and thanks to a mixture tailing around with some equally evil individuals in previous years, and a now-famous capacity for alcoholic beverages, we manage to float through the show in a non-authoritive, but thoroughly informend, manner. Some people recognize the Corp web link on our press passes, but few have ever actually read the site enough to know what a monumentally thorough mistake it is to let us into anything official. Between our unquantifiable-but-legitimate press passes, and Mr. Poppinfresh's ability to ninja-speak our way into VIP demos, we drift through E3 in a strange grey no-mans-land, where we see all and are required to produce nothing of quality in return.
We like our life.
The first day saw Lietgardis, Staberinde and Mr. Poppinfresh wander into the Star Wars: Galaxies demo area, totally without appointment or any official standing. Still, Pop spotted Raph Koster running demos for registered media in the corner, and having met him before (get used to name-dropping, kids, because this strange tale will involve a lot of it), he simply wandered over and tapped the venerable folk-crooning designer on the shoulder.
"Oh, hey Pop." At least he didn't call our noble editor Slim this year. Last time that happened, things got messy.
Raph began giving us the press demo that so much ink has already been spilled over, though Mr. Poppinfresh took a slightly different tact in his reporting.
Raph: This is the character creation screen. As you can see, there are many well-known races already...
Pop: MAKE A WOOKIE!
Raph (ignoring a yelling Mr. Poppinfresh): ...implemented in a game. You can also customize...
Pop: WOOKIE! DO IT FOR LUM! WOOOOOOOOOKIE!
Raph (later, shoulders hunched): ...because of the way we do dialog, it is very easy to localize the client for foreign markets.
Pop: Wait...so I can be a French Wookie?
Raph: A what?
Pop: You know, like a French Wookie named Pierre. Who goes 'le-RWARRR!' and eats cheese and stuff.
Raph (to Gamespot writer): This man is evil.
Pop: LE-RWARRR!
Raph: Anyway, there are many skills, including dancing, bounty-hunting and inventing. And instead of level numbers, we have titles you reach when you hit a certain proficiency at a skill.
Pop: Like 'Lord of the Dance'
Raph: Uuh, right. But because you can be adept at many skills at once, you can choose which title is displayed.
Pop: So, if you're a bounty hunter, you can pretend to be a dancer?
Raph: Right, exactly.
Pop: So let me get this straight...
Raph: Oh no...
Pop: ...you can be Pierre the French Wookie, who dances for money in a cantina by day, but when his secret bounty-hunter target walks in, he rips off his pasties and goes 'Le-RWARRR!' and kills them with his big French Wookie hands?
Raph: [mutters something]
Next on our list was Sony, which was running private EQ2 demos inside a heavily-fortified bunker. The two beefy security guards out front were monitoring everyone, and entrance to the mysterious contents within was limited to media badge holders with an appointment and a special bracelet. Mr. Poppinfresh, being terminally insane, walked right up and asked if the Corp contingent could get in. The PR woman at the desk told us it 'wasn't likely', but before Pop could even start cursing, John Smedley materialised like an Armani-wearing Count Dracula and asked us what website we wrote for. Pop really hates that question, so he began talking with a speed and bullshit quotient impossible to quantify without heavy thesaurus use.
"Well, I write for this gaming news website, though I used to write for Slow News Day (wince) which you may have read (wince)." in desperation, I finally threw out, "Oh, and this is Lietgardis, who wrote for Lum the Mad."
In thirty seconds, we had a special appointment under Smedley's auspices. Fear of journalists is a powerful weapon at E3.
The EQ 2 demo involved a lot of Mr. Poppinfresh asking pointed questions about content, and an equal amount of Associate producer Steve George politely saying nothing of import in the jovial E3 sort of way. Questions about classes, races, content, clients, and the continuing co-habitation of EQ 1 after it's sequel launches were all met with "Hey, check out the bump-mapping on this chainmail bikini!" When shown a 'full' set of Paladin platemail that looked like dental floss and a pair of commemorative silver dollars, Lietgardis made a noise roughly equivalent to a wilderbeast being forces through a trash compactor while Mr. Poppinfresh gave the demo technician a thumbs-up.
We'll be back in a few hours with the rest of our Day 1 story.
[Next update (later today): Corp sees Horizons, Pop makes Lum cry again, and Kentia hall is raided for amusing Korean Engrish press kits] ---
 (Old, Repost): Lobotomy Victims, Ourangutangs, And The Computer Game Industry
Posted Monday, April 7, 2003 by Mr. Poppinfresh
(Note: Originally Published May 10th or so)
Every year around late April, with a clockwork proficiency that belies the massive incompetence of the component PR flunkies involved, the computer game industry clamps up like a cheerleader in the back of a '57 Chevy and goes into the kind of Stealth Mode normally reserved for bombing hapless Iraqi tanks. This, of course, is caused by the fast-approaching tsunami of crapulence known as E3, a real doozie in the general pantheon of terrible events I attend out of a kind of pathological, Zen hatred of my own soul. Rather than release info about their business plans and new products when they've actually come to those decisions, the PR companies hold onto every atom of useless factuality they can, hoping to squeeze out a few more drops of media obsequiousness before the collected electronic and print media go back to sucking up and not caring, respectively.
Sure, those of my colleagues with a compulsive urge to actually update their sites (and yea, I have been there too, my friends) will find it frustrating that the only scrap of game-related news they can dig up for four months before E3 has to do with a Korean import game that is being exported from Korea precisely because nobody there plays it. True, too, that a great deal of the 'newsworthy items' the companies are hoarding like fat women at an end-of-winter Wal-Mart sale have to do with products so mind-bogglingly bad, they could only end up as remainders-bin victims or Playstation 2 titles. None of that matters, because as long as critical success mass in computer game reporting is facilitated by certain entities giving delightfully unselfconscious handjobs to unmitigated crap, the rest of us small-timers are left to bitterly endure the tide of noxious artificiality that spews forth from L.A. like a silicon Old Faithful. That, and drink free beer.
The real secret is that the only reason the gaming press treat E3 like a big deal is because it's the only three days of the year that the PR flunkies and game companies are forced to give them a collective wraparound. For those three days and nights, the benighted, Monty-Python-quoting 'gaming journalists' actually get to feel like a real-life junketing press corps instead of the group of introverted social reject suckups with questionable writing skills they really are. So they con the public into believing E3 is a major gaming event, instead of a glorified press release backlog and backscratching circus held in the world's largest déclassé strip club. I'm reasonably certain that if my life consisted of waiting for the three days a year my hobby stops treating me like chubby, awkward bitch, and waiting for the one night a year when George Lucas does treat me like a chubby, awkward bitch, razor blades in a warm bathtub wouldn't be far behind.
Fortunately, I long ago abandoned any sense of awe, respect, or even fundamental decency when it comes to the computer game industry. After all, it long ago became the geek's Hollywood, where creative indie projects get buried under the Jerry Bruckheimer-ness of EA and company. Innovative, fun computer games are the exception to the rule now, the fragmentary percentile among a mass of casual, contemptuous money-grubbing pieces of compact disc-shaped shit that wouldn't have passed muster ten years ago. The only thing I can do now is keep my sense of humor and call it as I see it, and hope than more than five people read this. So, if you like what you see here over the course of the next week, tell your friends.
If you don't, I have a great pyramid to sell you...
---
Return to Index
|
