Journey Through Press Conferences With Me

Have you ever wondered what attending a day of video game press conferences is like? Based on my email inbox, you probably have. Allow me to tell the story of my day today and just how very exciting the life of a game journalist can be.

After a day full of travel – ten hours in the air on a pair of airplanes and a ten-hour death march through Amsterdam that is a story for another time – the GI crew got a well-deservved long sleep in our Köln hotel. This morning saw a much-needed shower (seriously, death march) and Ben, Bryan and myself abandon Jeff to his Microsoftian fate and fill our bellies with schnitzel. Feeling human again, we made our way to the Schanzenstrasse (literally “the entrenched street” or “redoubt street” – will have to discover what the heck is up with that later) for the EA and Sony pre-GamesCom press events.

The line for EA wasn’t that bad. Twenty minutes cursing the insane international data rates on our phones ($20/MB indeed) and trying not to choke on the dozens of cigarettes burning around us (I swear Euros smoke twice as much as Americans, and being around it is way less pleasant than it was when I was a smoker myself), and we were in.

What followed was a ear-blastingly loud hour of EA hyping the next six months of its big-budget releases to us. Ever been to a punk rock concert? This was loud like that, except you have a seat (yay!) and a bunch of marketing spiels between bouts of onstage action (boo!). Compared to many of the dozens of press conferences I’ve attended, though, EA’s GamesCom event was a model of brevity. No graphs showing their market-leading blah blah blah, no poorly cloaked shots at the competition, no paper-thin attempts at being our friends. Just brief introductions to ten games that ranged from bleh (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) to meh (Crysis 2 multiplayer) to freakin’ sweet (Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Dead Space 2, Borderlands Bulletstorm).

A few things stood out amid the damage to our cochlea. In no particular order:

•    The actors who play the Weasley twins came onstage to demo Deathly Hallows’ Kinect capabilities for no good reason. There wasn’t even any amusing banter. They just came on, waggled on stage left for ten minutes while the game was broadcast on the big screen, then left. Presumably picking up their check and bailing out as soon as possible.
•    BioWare’s Dr. Ray Muzyka got excited whispers as he was announced, and big cheers as he stepped onstage to say that The Old Republic is awesome but not show it.
•    Dead Space 2 got huge cheers from the largely European audience. Also, the spacewalk in the demo was stunning.
•    Need for Speed didn’t get huge cheers when it was announced, but it sure did after the demo concluded. This is what Need for Speed should be. I can’t wait for it.
•    The Medal of Honor producer’s impressive, bushy beard elicited a hearty chuckle from the audience.
•    The melodramatic announcement of soccer star David Beckham’s involvement with EA Sports Active 2 was greeted with…crickets? Truly, the U.S. is where soccer careers go to die.
•    Bulletstorm producer Tanya Jessen and director Adrian Chmielarz got huge cheers. Tell you what, Europe: You keep demonstrating such discerning taste in games, and I’ll stop making fun of your pants.
•    I promise I paid full attention to Peter Moore drone on about motion sensing, not the pretty girl doing aerobics behind him on stage right.
•    How much does Microsoft pay for every time someone says “The magic of Kinect” at one of these things? At $10,000 a pop, EA just made twenty grand.

That was about it for EA, excepting some Eurocentric stuff I don’t care about like FIFA 11 (seriously, do they even sell that in the U.S.?). With Sony’s event literally across the street, this should be an easy day.

[Next up: The Sony conference – but first, an hour and a half in a parking lot!]

Or so I thought. That same crowd of smoky Euros surrounded me for an hour and a half standing in a parking lot as a chilly drizzle intermittently spattered down out of the grey sky. If you’ve never been stuck in a parking lot for an hour and a half, let me spare you the experience: It’s really boring. More so, when you can’t even go online with your phone because it costs all of the money to download the tiniest of poorly captioned cat photos. This was my view for that entire time:

Finally, Sony opened the doors. For five people at a time, every minute or so. I’m still incredulous about it. Probably a thousand of us were standing out there, wondering what fantastic software Sony could possibly show us to make this worth our while. And every minute, we move up a foot as what appeared to be the thug from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels counted five journos to let through the door. Unbelievable. The only thing that got me through was the heaven-sent Ghirardelli chocolate (mmm, caramel) that EA thoughtfully included with the press kits they had handed out an hour and a freaking half previous.

That ordeal behind us, we got the privilege of handing over our IDs to Sony’s tender mercies so that we could borrow the stylin’ 3D glasses we would need for the upcoming presentation.

As we were in roughly the middle of the crowd, we had another half-hour of chilling to do inside the venue. Of course, nothing was on display yet and international data rates hadn’t gotten any cheaper in the meantime, so we amused ourselves with jokes about the terrible 3D glasses and our mounting incredulity over the fact that there was still nowhere to sit and a few hundred media yet to get inside.

Finally, the press conference itself started. If you’re counting, this is two hours after we’d left EA, three and a half since we’d gotten to this side of the Rhein river, and about five since we’d eaten anything aside from (admittedly delicious) chocolate. Like the EA briefing we had sat through so long ago, this one was fairly short and on-message. Some decent moments (Resistance 3 live-action teaser), some lame ones (what the hell is this dude from Linkin Park doing on stage?), and not a lot of fluff.

Sony didn’t manage to stay 100% graph-free – there were a few bar graphs touting the PS3’s Slim-fueled hardware growth – but I’ll take it. Compared to listening to the company’s Japanese chief technical officer do his level best  to explain how the PS3 was going to bring about the Cyberworld (no, it didn’t make any more sense live) a few years ago, this was nothing.

Afterwards, we got to wander the hall and get our hands on the titles for a few minutes at a time (expect more extensive coverage on the software when we get to really dig into it for review; there was nothing terribly new to report on from this event).

Again, in no particular order, a few observations:

•    Oh yeah, the PSP Go! They made that, huh? I keep forgetting.
•    There’s “still a lot of life left” in the PS2. Uh, sure. If you make the shovelware they sell on Wal-Mart endcaps, maybe. Hasn’t the Wii finished taking that market over yet?
•    The limited edition of Medal of Honor on PS3 will include MoH: Frontlines. Yet more royalties the Respawn guys won’t be getting.
•    The Linkin Park guy isn’t any good at shooting dudes from an Apache. Judging by the crowd’s cheers for him, though, his musical career will inexplicably continue rolling on.
•    At least Sony had the good taste to put the Muhammed Ali of baseball in their 3D hype reel. Joe Mauer looks even dreamier in 3D.
•    I badly want the movie and TV services that Euro PS3 users will be enjoying soon, especially since I just had my second PS3 Netflix disc die on me.
•    Germans are really good at making sausage. The catered food after the presentation made me love this country.

And there you have it: a day in the life of a games journo. Well, I left out the part where I spent an hour on a hotel bed organizing notes, uploading photos, and typing this thing up. Come back for much more from Köln over the next three days as we prowl the convention center and report back on all the other things that waste our time.

I leave you with the t-shirt that Sony gave out with its press kits. I will not be wearing it.