Getting to Los Angeles from San Francisco by plane was easy, getting to our hotel was a little trickier. Instead of using a rental car, we ended up getting a cab. It took us to one of the most extravagant hotels in LA, but because we had to get up early and were pretty tired, we didn’t spend much time admiring all its peculiar details.

There was only one appointment for which we had to leave the hotel the next morning. So after a crazy taxi ride, including a Burnout-like near miss experience, we arrived at the studios of G4. They have these cool ‘ON AIR’ signs, including spinning red lights. Unfortunately we were not going to be in their television or web show, so we moved on to the capture room to once again play a match against an Expert opponent for recording. It’s really cool that all the playthroughs we had, including this one, resulted in some very diverse matches with different outcomes. Replay value is one of Greed Corp’s greatest strengths and I think that really shows in all the videos that have appeared up until now. Brian from G4 could certainly see that as well.

With the last on-site meeting now out of the way, we had to prepare for the last presentations in our hotel room. We asked the cab driver to stop by a supermarket, to buy some drinks and snacks. While Marco and Chris, our PR contact, went inside to get those things, I kept an eye on all our equipment and experienced an awkward eternity of silence between me and the cab driver. With way too many soda cans and bags of crisps, we went back to our eccentric hotel to set everything up. Up until now, everything went pretty smooth technically, but the hotel’s philosophy of form over function caused the first obstacle that could ruin our clean run. The televisions in our room were placed inside a large glass container, looking like a large reflective box until you turn on the TV. There were some input connections on the side, which were routed back to the TV itself. Unfortunately, the cables were apparently broken, so all connectors were failing.

Getting closer to the time of our next meeting, we called upon the help of the hotel’s technical department to get our Xbox 360 test kit working on the TV in the living room. We also had one in the bedroom which was operating perfectly, but despite our previous experience with demoing in bedrooms we thought it would be more professional to not do it there. So in came two engineers and their manager, to remove the entire glass facing of the designer TV casing. We confirmed that the connectors of the television itself were working, but the casing without its cover was not a pretty sight, with all the wires and such. Some very smart man fortunately added a hole to the bottom of the casing for occasions such as this one, so we were able to hook up the Xbox 360 directly to the TV. We did have to call the same guys in again to remove the plate once more, so we could get our HDMI cable back.

The setup was done just in time and we welcomed GamingEvolution to our not so humble hotel room. Those two guys had some nice questions about the game and other things, which resulted in one of the longest articles to come out of this press tour. When they left, we went straight on to our last appointment of the day, with nFamous, Coin-Op TV Live and GameTrailers. It was a nice meeting with an informal feel to it and everyone responded very well to different aspects of the game, the world and its characters. It was one of the best meetings we had during the entire tour and we went on with GameTrailers to shoot a video walkthrough of a match and an interview with me. Because of the practice we had with earlier recordings, everything went pretty smooth and you can find the very informative videos now on the GameTrailers website.

And that was it. Three days of hard work and three days of less hard work, checking out San Francisco and Los Angeles. Just like the one in the UK last year, this press tour has been incredibly rewarding. We met some famous reporters and saw some of the biggest TV screens you can get. The rain we got during our stay must have been some kind of record, but it was a nice trip none the less. All the responses have been nothing but positive and we’re hoping that will translate into some nice reviews and sales numbers. As the game will be released tomorrow, we won’t have to wait too long to find out.