After 12 years of increasingly noisy and flashy trade shows, E3 is rebooting as a smaller show, based on small groups in small rooms. Blizzard has previously done this sort of thing at the Tokyo Game Show and elsewhere, to good effect.
Honestly, I think this is a good idea. E3, the years I worked it, was ear-shattering, throat-destroying and wasn’t particularly kind to one’s feet, either. And it was all to get publicity that, frankly, Blizzard could get elsewhere, like at Blizzcon. (There apparently won’t be a Blizzcon this year, alas, but hopefully we’ll see one next year.) And Blizzard isn’t the only company doing its own conventions and press events.
For smaller companies that don’t have the capital or the cachet to draw in crowds to that sort of event, I honestly think few companies are doing a good job of using the Internet to generate hype. Companies need to do more than just set up e-mail interviews with a few gaming news sites and wait for the world to come calling. Game trailers should be distributed to video sharing sites, screenshots should be made available for the whole world via photo-sharing sites, podcasts should be set up where the lead producers talk about their vision for the game in bite-sized increments and more.
I have no idea if Blizzard will be participating in the new, smaller E3 shows. I imagine they will be, but such shows are almost incidental to their success now, in my opinion, although their absence from one might be so distracting and create so many confused impressions, they might have to go anyway.
I do know that the Blizzard PR crew, and the developers pulled out of Irvine to demo for the media, will come back to work without the ringing ears and hoarse voices that were a given in past years.
I shed no tears for the E3 that was.
You think LBY3.com is a bad URL? (It’s not, if you understand why I have it, I’d argue.)
Here’s a list of the top 10 unintentionally awful URLs. There are some real doozies on it:
A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name … wait for it … is www.whorepresents.com
Whoops!
There’s more free TV episodes to download via iTunes. (Watch them on your computer if you don’t have a video iPod. I have an old monochrome music-only one, myself.)
- A free episode of something called Tabloid Wars
- The pilot episode of Who Wants to Be a Superhero? (Oh, and for $1.99, you can get the Aquaman pilot now.)
- The season premiere of 30 Days
It’ll be a few more weeks before the print version will be available from Amazon.com (I’ll put a link in the left hand column at that time, no worries), but the Koboldnomicon is now available in PDF from everywhere that sells PDFs of D&D books.
The first (as far as I know) review is up, at RPGNow.
Fortunately, the actual rules and contents of the Koboldnomicon are pretty good. The Kobold Trapsmith prestige class is a logical addition, and I thought a number of the spells were clever. Every section contained more than a few things that I liked, and everything seemed balanced and well-written. Even the things I didn’t care for (such as the kobold sub-races) would probably work fine for someone else’s group and campaign.
(My contributions to the Koboldnomicon, besides the name, are the iconic kobold wizard Wikanby, the Tumble Down Kobolds tribe and a number of spells, including ones that don’t bear Wikanby’s name.)
It got four out of five stars from RPGNow.
The ’50s B-movie style invasion of black widows around our house has made me nostalgiac for parts of the country not beset by spiders that can send you to the hospital, especially Blacksburg, and this blog was pointed out to me when I was trying to remember the name of an Italian restaurant owned by a fraternity brother.
The restaurant appears to be gone now (and replaced by Mike’s Grill), but while a lot of Blacksburg has clearly changed, a lot of it is still the same as when I went to Virginia Tech and then later lived in town and worked for the News Messenger.
I remember mooching food money to eat the bargain-but-awesome homemade macaroni and cheese at Macado’s with my pledge brothers, hanging out with the artsy crowd at the Cellar, mumblemumblemumble in Radford, eating very generic Mexican food at El Rodeo, howling at the moon outside PK’s (and every other bar in town) with Kris, eating at Souvlaki’s regularly with Kathy and ordering Backstreets a million times over, from my first week in West Eggleston through right before I left town for my second newspaper job (I miss their strombolis something fierce). There’s also a lot of new restaurants there I don’t recognize, but which look good. (Most notably, Cajun food!)
And damn, Blacksburg now has even more places to play NTN! I can’t find any place like that around Hesperia.
And, notably, no black widow spiders in any of the pictures.
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