E For All Expo 2008 - Day 2 - SATURDAY RECAP

After yesterday’s series of debacles, I told myself when I got up this morning that if I could make it through the day without losing my car keys or slipping on a banana peel, today would count as a considerable personal victory.

I’m wiped out again. No blisters this time (but same doc martens, no sneakers) mostly because I took the time to sit down every so often. So today’s post is about the things I observed while wandering about and sometimes sitting and watching. I’ve realized this weekend that watching people play games is nearly as fun as playing them yourself. The latest batch of games really lend themselves to being viewed and appreciated by an audience, especially Guitar Hero, Halo, Soulcalibur, and pretty much anything you can put up on giant screens, if one or more are available to you (there are plenty at E For All). This show is pretty much a wall to wall spectator’s sport. I know that I suck at playing Guitar Hero or Team Fortress or FIFA or Virtua Fighter (I’m more of a solo player, as I sadly explained to the pretty girl at the Samsung booth), but watching complete strangers and professionals beat the snot out of each other to the roar of the crowd is a pretty cool experience. I’m fairly disconnected from this whole professional gaming circuit, but there are so many who live it passionately, so much so that many of the people who won their challenges this weekend will go on to represent the US in the World Cyber Games, a massive and lucrative olympics-like event for the digital set. I’m glad to have experienced it even as I rested my feet for a few minutes at a time throughout the day.

Another thing I loved seeing were the innovators of the gaming world and the continued inventiveness of so many people when it comes to pulling people further into their games in some ways and pushing the technology further in other ways.

Fusion-IO IOXTREME is a high-performance solid state hard drive that let’s users multi-task like they’ve never done before. It’s capable of running a high end Crysis level video game, copying gigabytes of data in just seconds, downloading massive files from the internet, and lots more all at the same time with nary a lag (and completely stable too!). I played a game on it and couldn’t tell the difference from a conventional hard drive. Certainly smoother than anything I currently have at home or work. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the Fusion-IO team had the most popular booth at the show this weekend, hosted by American Gladiator Wolf presiding over an endless parade of fans who got to ride a mechanical bull that wasn’t a bull at all, but rather an old-school optical hard drive. T-shirts were flying, little kids were howling, and those who conquered the bull…errr, hard drive… often received cold hard cash for their efforts.

TN Games made a big announcement this weekend that could lead to big changes for their company and their signature device, the 3rd Space Vest, which provides tactile feedback from hits and damage received when playing popular first person shooter games, like Bioshock, Call of Duty and more than 20 others. Their big announcement? The 3rd Space Vest now works with the immensely popular World of Warcraft online game. The founder and CEO of TN Games, Dr Mark Ombrellao, told me that even when you use life and strength-draining magic spells, you’ll be able to feel it all over your body, reflecting the physical toll some spells can take on a player’s character. I wore the vest while playing an FPS and it’s a little jarring at first, but it does make you more aware of how your character is feeling, where your enemy is, and when you really need to find cover. Depending on where your character takes a hit in the game, the air bladders within the vest are triggered in relation to where that hit was received. If you are shot in the gut, you feel it there. If you are shot in the back shoulder, you feel it there. It really does a great job of immersing yourself in the game (by the way, I was assured it is very flexible for players of all sizes and shapes).

Everywhere I went this weekend, there was Fatal1ty. Even when I was nowhere near his booth, he was usually standing right next to me or washing his hands in the men’s room (I’m NOT stalking him… he looks nothing like Anne Hathaway). I went to check out the Into the Pixel art gallery and there he was speaking to wannabe pro gamers. He is, of course, the most famous (and sponsored) gaming champ in the world. He had his usual booth, but this time it hosted a slew of wannabe Rock Stars in addition to his usual on stage “versus the common man” competitions. He had a ton of Fatal1ty peripherals to promote and give away (enough to build a computer piece-by-piece from scratch), but the centerpiece to his booth was the big obstacle course full of ball pits, balance beams, tire gauntlets, and giant tricycles placed between Wii Fit mini games at various points in the course. The people with the best times would win $300 Best Buy gift certificates (3 per day for 3 days - woo!). I didn’t even take a shot at it (again, I’m wearing doc martens and my socks would have been too slippery on that balance beam, as I witnessed when one shoeless guy lost took a nose dive at that point).

Toward the center of the room sat the King of Kong, Steve Wiebe, perched in front of an original Donkey Kong arcade machine as he attempted to break his own record of over 1,000,000 points, a feat that I witnessed takes a long damn time and isn’t easy, even for him. He got close a few times, but topped out at about 600,000 for the day. He actually sets point goals for himself at each level, which means that if he can’t get a certain amount of points by a certain point in the game, there is no reason to continue, as he will likely not be able to reach his ultimate goal once things get really hairy at the higher levels. He still has one more day…

Speaking of which, it’s getting really late. I need to hit the sack if I’m going to make it to the final day of the show. Expect more pictures and, coming later this week, video from the event (I have lots of it to compile!).

And in case you didn’t figure it out, here is the link to the nearly 100 new pictures up on our Flickr page…