It was not the best time to be in San Francisco. Although we had some time in the weekend to explore the city without it raining all the time, we spent most of the time on the first day in between demos trying to get to the car without getting soaked. Fortunately the response to Greed Corp was way more positive than the weather. That vibe continued on the second day, the last one in San Francisco.
Because of that terrible weather, we left early so that we would be at our first appointment on time. That was not a problem on the first day, but now we would have to head south. The idea was to drive there first and get breakfast if there would be time left. Even though we spent quite some time stuck in traffic, we still managed to get coffee and a bite to eat in the building where IGN was located. They were not our first appointment though, so we went over to the building next to them for a meeting with Official Xbox Magazine and PC Gamer. Because the new way of demoing, like we did the previous day at Giant Bomb, was pretty successful, we decided to stick with it and just play against the AI while explaining what was going on. That created some interesting matches throughout the day, all resulting in very different scenarios. I actually lost most matches, much to the delight of Marco and the editor audience. In my defense though, it’s pretty hard to think about what you’re going to do and explain it at the same time. At least it demonstrated that our Expert level AI is not a pushover.
After the first appointment, we went back to the previous building to meet with IGN. They have a pretty cool office, with lots of funny posters, life-size statues of game characters and even a room just for Master Chief. We met with Daemon, who already contacted us about the game right after we first announced it, and he captured a Greed Corp match on video. That makes it even harder to play well, because you can’t really pause the game to talk. Due to the extreme weather conditions, some of the meetings we had were cancelled. It’s hard to demo a game when the power has gone out or the road to get there is flooded. So it seemed like it was going to be a short day of work, but our PR contacts managed to arrange a last minute meeting with GamePro. We drove back to downtown San Francisco, while the weather actually started to look better. That meant that our flight to Los Angeles in the evening would surely just go as planned.
Even though I’ve been to the United States a couple of times and have relatives there, I never tasted meatloaf before. So when I saw it on the menu at the place where we had lunch before the last presentation, I decided to try it. I’m glad I did, but it’s not really my thing. The meeting at GamePro was very cool and while we were sitting there, the first articles based on yesterday’s press visits were already showing up online. After some discussion about the latest games, which the GamePro editors were already able to play, we had quite some time on our hands before our flight to Los Angeles would leave. During our stay, we noticed a lot of big billboards for The Book of Eli, a new movie with Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. Reviews seemed very positive about it, so we decided to go and watch it at the Metreon. To keep it short, it was a little disappointing, but we did get to see a couple of cool trailers from upcoming movies. We left for the airport afterwards, got something to eat and flew to Los Angeles without a hitch. More on that final day in the Greed Corp US press tour soon!
