The Rarely Updated Blog of Nate Warner

I will see ya’ll back in the 406. 1,224 miles to go. Cheers.

This is a picture taken form I-10 on the way back to LA from Palm Springs. Both sides of the highway are covered with thousands of wind energy generators. It is a bit creepy to see all the props spinning different directions and at differernt speeds. The generators also range in size from huge to pretty damn big. The small and large versions are mixed haphazardly together with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

I just got back from Palm Springs, I was out playing golf with my buddy Ian. In 2 days we played Trilogy, PGA West Stadium Course, and PGA West Jack Nicholas Tournament Course. All of these courses were amazing, Stadium was amazingly hard, Jack’s was amazingly well designed, and Trilogy was in amazing condition. This picture is from the last hole of the day #18 on Jack’s course.

These guys rocked e3! The duo uses an old commodore computer and some other random old computers to rock out! There was huge group around these guys- I might just buy their CD. Check out the website!

Click the photo to check out a movie of 8 Bit Weapon (20MB)

The girls @ e3 were pretty ridiculous. Lets face it sex sells. The best booth babes had to be the Namco girls. Instead of hiring a bunch of strippers, Namco made their girls way more exclusive and less trashy. The crowd around the Namco stage was one of the biggest I saw all day- I guess their strategy worked.

Click here or the picture for a movie of the Namco girls. Large file (20MB)

I love to see old school companies refresh their image. Re-branding is one of the most difficult tasks for a Marketing person. The risk of possibly alienating your current users to gain other users is SCARY. Atari it seems has achieved success. Focusing on game development instead of console and platform business has proven a sound strategy. Releasing a title as huge as Matrix Path of Neo definitely puts them on the right path for the future.

This was the line to see the New Zelda game. The line to see the PS3 was about 2 hrs long. I can not believe how long some people will wait just to get a glimpse of a new platform or game. Unbelievable.

One of the cooler things, with no practical purpose is the eye toy, an adapter that interprets your body’s movements into game controls. This kid was with eye toy (obviously) if you look in the TV screen you will notice he is kicking the balls into targets to advance to the next level. Pretty cool idea, but not sure how about its future. Most gamers are lazy, and this adapter does not promote relaxation. Since it lacks any tactile feedback (you are kicking air) I don’t see this as a very sticky technology.

Movie:
I kick air and I still consider myself a bad ass.

Shigeru Miyamoto is the Tiger Woods of video game creators. His titles span more than two decades, from 1981’s”Donkey Kong” to 1985’s “Super Mario Bros.,” and 1986’s “The Legend of Zelda”.

Sweet.

Anything Red Bull rocks, especially this vehicle.

Another e3 update:

50 Cent’s new game True Crime looks ridiculous. I am positive this game will Destroy Grand Theft Auto in total revenue. Watching this on a 20 ft screen was a Holy #$@% moment for sure. Props to who ever produced this trailer.

Video of the trailer

This article is worth a read.

“Why is it so easy to protect the status quo, even when the status quo isn’t so great?”

More from e3!

The NEW Bat-Mobile is sick! Click to view the movie.

For some reason a girl with a sword is a bit too threatening for me…

I still have no idea what game they were promoting.

My apologies for not getting any more e3 content up. Our wireless went down (again) it took three tech guys stood around looking confused for more than an hour to get it back up. I guess paying $1300 for a dedicated cat5 into the booth might have been worth it after all…

In any event, this is the scene minutes before the doors opened on Wednesday. e3 really is an odd mix of fat and skinny (all gamers are either fat or really skinny for some reason) gamers, “booth babes”, cute marketing girls and executives that are way too old to be this into video games. Solid.

After much ado we finally have wireless coverage @ E3. I will be posting pictures and info all day, live from E3. I took these on tuesday, the last day of set up. I love the staircases as a media. iPod did the same thing in NYC last year- it was awesome.

More to come.