From the Vault — originally published June 1, 2009. Some links, videos or prices may be out of date.
Wassup people…it’s ya boy SpaceBarZ. I’m out here in L.A. with Brooklyn covering the E3 Convention. I’m going to be doing a blog that recaps the day’s festivities to keep you all up to speed on what Game Informer refers to as “the seedy underworld of the gaming industry.” I’ll keep things as real as possible and let you all know what’s really going on.
I landed at LAX around lunchtime yesterday. The city was cloudy as f*ck and it was cold as b@llz. I was like what the hell is going on? According to Tony Toni Tone “it NEVER rains in Southern California.” I guess they were right because about an hour later all the clouds vanished and the sun came out. It was time to hit the streets.
Brook and I are staying at the hotel closest to the E3 convention center so most of your well-known journalists and podcasters can be seen walking the halls. I won’t say names but a certain somebody from a certain site who made a racially insensitive comment about “fish sandwiches” on his podcast walked passed me and Brook in the hotel lobby. Before it registered in my mind who this person was he was already looking me in my eyes giving me a “hey how’ya doing” smile. I returned his kind gesture with a stone-faced Brooklyn ice-grill that I hadn’t used since my days of riding the train at night. It was classic. I have some choice words for this person but I’m waiting for the right time to approach dude. Anyways…
So Brook and I hit the streets of L.A. to attend a Sony sponsored event that was getting all the buzz on the PSN blog. Sony was giving away passes to their invite only press conference this Tuesday for the first 100 people on line. The event was scheduled to start at 6pm and took place in a local Mexican eatery called Mama’s Hot Tamales. Brook iPhoned the location (there’s an app for that) and we decided to hop in a cab and cash in on this Sony promise. We pulled up in front of the restaurant (about an hour early) and discovered that Mama’s Hot Tamales was about the size of a corner store and the line to get in was already down the block! I’d never seen that many Playstation Bluetooth devices in use at the same time in my life. It was an undeniable Sony fanboy reunion. We estimated there were about 75 people in front of us in line (exactly three were women…lol) so we were good to get the press conference invites. By around 5:45pm the line was literally wrapped around the corner. Carloads of E3 hopefuls who didn’t have the foresight to arrive early drove pass in utter disbelief (sucks to be you guys). Brook and I got inside and scored our Sony invites to the press conference so it’s all good. We also received some exclusive Uncharted 2 t-shirts (and for the right price they can be yours…lol).
Overall impressions of the event on a scale of weak to dope (weak being the lesser value) the shit was WEAK!!! The venue was too small, the line was long as hell, the location was out of the way, and once you got inside there wasn’t sh*t to do but smell each others arm pits play SOCOM Fire Team Bravo on the PSP. Budgets must have been pretty tight on this event. Not a good look Sony. On the plus side, they did give away free tamales!
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