I hope to get back in the grove with more updates soon. I really want to share though a little bit about my trip to Chicago last Thursday. I’m just going to let D’Arque Bishop say it himself, as he already beat me to it:
Anyway, Thursday morning I arrived in Chicago to find Scott Howell already at the gate waiting for me. We hopped a cab to the Chicago Peninsula hotel, only to find our rooms weren’t ready yet. So, we just waited around the lobby until the Midway presentations started. I got video of several presentations, including those for Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, L.A. Rush, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, and Blitz: The League. After the presentations (at which I got a nice sports windbreaker with the Midway logo on the left breast), we went and finally got our rooms. DAMN, those rooms were nice… everything was button controlled, the bathroom had separate shower and bath (which had its own TV), a minibar, a fax machine, a safe… we were quite content. 🙂
From there we went to House of Blues for a few hours of gameplay. I’ll admit… as much as I wanted to try L.A. Rush and Blitz: The League, all of my gameplay time went to Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I also got to speak to a number of MK team members, including Ed Boon, Shaun Himmerick, Steve Beran, Tony Goskie, and Mike Taran. One of the highlights of the night was when Scott and I were playing ko-op mode on the X-Box version of MK:SM; suddenly, we noticed a commotion at the PS2 next to us. We turned, and saw a blind teen being led to sit down next to Ed. It turned that this was Brice Mellen, who had made national news recently with his ability to play fighting games. So, I quickly grabbed my camcorder, and had just enough tape left to film three matches, all of which Brice won. The final tally was Brice 4, Ed 1. 🙂
After House of Blues, Scott and I returned to the hotel to drop off our equipment, and then wandered the city briefly trying to find the Sound Bar where Midway had a room set aside for drinks. We got there, and stayed for a half-hour… and realized it wasn’t our thing. So, we went back, and worked on videos, images, and updates.
The next morning we got up at about 9 AM, did some more work on the site, and then headed to the airport at about 11:30 AM. We had lunch at Chili’s in the airport, and then headed to our respective flights. I got back in Houston around 5 PM, and from there went to Denny’s for dinner. The weekend itself was slow, and I spent it getting the videos I took ripped, watermarked, and encoded, and also giving my impressions of MK:SM
So that was fun. Lately I’ve just been on the jump hunt. It’s not going as good as I would have hoped at this point. I’ve applied for a million jobs and even after badgering people I still haven’t hooked up with an interview. It turns out all of my friends seem to be in this boat. I’m really trying to score a Marketing Job. Please keep your fingers crossed for me, as the home sitution with my parents gets worse and worse as each day goes by I haven’t had an interview. It’s fustrating but I’m hoping it will work itself out eventually. Earlier in the week I hung out with Nic, Emily, and Laura and watched Hitch, so that was a good time. A nice highlight of the week was running into Lindsey Oxley a few days ago at Harvest Moon. We caught up for almost two hours on stuff. It was fun. Tonight was spent with Josh, we went up to Sam Ash and hung out at his place. That’s about it… Hopefully you’ll hear more from me soon.