Thursday 13th August

Holy heck. Finally QuakeCon is on and its nuts!

Got up this morning at 8am, showered and readied to leave. Wandered down to where they were all either lining up or just about in there for the BYOC (LAN) part. People were milling around and we weren't sure what was going on. Regardless, we needed breakfast.

I don't know if I told you this place is a resort. And I'm not sure if you've ever been to one - but let me just say its like a little city in here! It is inSANE. There are rooms and rooms and rooms - and then theres bars and cafe's and restaurants all over. Theres a 'riverwalk' which is this long walk around their man made stream thing. The area its in is one massive atrium and I do mean massive. HUGE.

So after a bit of a wander we hit up some cafe for an expensive breakfast consisting for me of an apple, a bit of cake and a chocolate milk.

After we left there we headed back to the convention area. Started lining up to register. Thankfully we were pre-registered (like the smart cookies we are), but there were still about 15-20 people in front of us. JT made the comment that we should have just waited til after 12 as it would probably be quieter then. When we came back around then the line had....well there had to be over 100 people. We were very lucky that we'd got there early.

When we got in there was hardly anyone in there. Not as big as we expected but definitely awesome none-the-less.

To the left there were booths with QuakeLive & Doom 2 playable with XBox 360 controllers. Also in that section was a playable demo of the upcoming game "Wet" which was fantastic to play, though hopefully it'll be on PC as the controller was pretty crap to try and use.

JT immediately latched on to one of the Wet stations so I wandered off. First booth I hit, Coolermaster, a guy handed me a lanyard as soon as I got there. Got a ticket for their booth and checked out their stuff before I moved along.

I won't go into too great detail but soon I'd bought a great new shirt with retro gaming controllers on it for $20, which came with a free shirt branded with the manufacturer's logo (Glitch Gaming Apparel).

Also got a "Brink" shirt from the id software dudes (Doom & Quake creators) as well as a poster for "Wet" which is epic.

Got heaps of flyers and crap for products, a lanyard for coolermaster, gigabyte and wolfenstein, a Kingston light-up bouncy ball, a patriot memory bottle opener & pen, as well as some badges.

One is an intel badge you get on entry, if the intel team see you as they walk around they give you a card and you can go to their booth for a prize. The next is an nVidia one, which has a number on it. If someone else walking around has one with the same number, you both go to the nVidia booth, spin the wheel and you both get a prize. The last badge is just for the game "Global Agenda"

Some people have SO MANY nVidia and Intel badges. I mean - theres people with them all over their hats, so theres no telling what colour the hat is. Some people have them spotted on their clothes everywhere and there was even this dude with them on the front half of his shorts covering every patch of clothing. He was a big dude too so there were tonnes. I tried looking for my number but he didn't have it. I had 4420 and he had 4421 & 4422! Bugger :P

There are people on the BYOC chat telling each other what they have so you can search for someone with it haha

The raffles held at the booths are neat. You go to their booth and either fill out a form or a survey for a ticket, or they just give them out. They then tell you to come back at whatever time it's on, where a crowd forms around. The booth team throws out promo stuff like shirts and hats and pens and junk, which is fun to try catching. In between they'll call out ticket numbers. Those are prizes ranging from ram to notepad coolers to power supplies to network cards - good gear. Some of the higher end prizes - like the Antec case - were awesome. Unfortunately I just read the Quakecon forums and already the guy that won that is trying to flog it off. -_-;

So I caught a shirt at the coolermaster booth, but it was an XL and the brand was their sister company which I've never heard of. So I swapped some dude at the kingston memory stand for his two raffle tickets. Didn't win but oh well :) There is always tomorrow!

We ran into Matt and Missingo and they started following us around for a bit. We lost them here and there but the area is pretty small so you can't get away for long hahaha :P

Around noonish the Mustang was unveiled for all to gawk at. It's a damn nice car, bummer only US citizens can win it.

After this we went and had lunch at the "Texan Station" a short walk away, probably in the middle between our hotel room and the convention centre. I had a Pulled Pork Sandwich (its on a burger bun! call it a burger damn you! lol...nothing on a bun is called not a burger here unless its a regular meat "burger" pattie). It was absolutely the greatest pork I've ever had. Not necessarily on the flavour factor, Dad still kicks their ass on that because they smothered it in sauce so I couldn't taste it very well. Plus Dad's pork is win. Anyway this was ridiculously good because of how damn tender it was. You've heard of melt in your mouth - this is as close to that as I think I've ever had. Anywho enough raving.

Not too much longer after lunch was the "What will you do for..." fun 'comp' which had competitors doing crazy things for prizes. They tossed out heaps of QuakeCon shirts amongst these too but I still haven't got one! I really want one :(

The first comp was two guys on stage in an eating competition. Spam, covered in chocolate and 'hotcake' sauce. No utensils, face only. I don't even know what the hell they won.

I left to explore some more after this, and came back later to see 4 guys on stage with pegs attached to their noses, eyebrows, lips, ears, nipples, stomachs, etc...as they were told that to win they had to shake all the pegs off as fast as they could. Ouch! D:

Theres a booth here called GameSkulls. They have army style helmets with gaming headsets inside them. So you put on the helmet and you've got your headphones and microphone right there in the helmet. It's fantastic. JT has a pic of me wearing one which I'll get from him to post up. I'm thinking about buying one, they're pretty comfy and cost only about US$90 - which is really quite good for a gaming headset.

I got to try BAWLS! Haha! Energy drink I've been hearing a lot about. Very interesting taste.

So I tried a can of that, and I tried the frozen version as well (Snow BAWLS). I even got a packet of the mints - which actually bubble a bit in your mouth.

At 3:30 JT went off to the John Carmack keynote speech. I didn't really want to sit around for a few hours to listen to him speak - only because he speaks about what he is currently up to and its currently all management stuff. Not my cup of tea. JT said it was inspirational but so many people got up and left during because he wasn't talking so much about games development any more. In the end he had to leave as he got another nose bleed (got one during the night last night). He's on blood pressure meds...and diabetic meds...and he wears contacts. Yikes...makes me 1000 times more thankful I'm a healthy person (99% anyway :D ) - not that I wasn't already thankful. I'm a lucky bugger.

Whilst he was off I wandered around and ended up picking up a controller next to a guy playing Doom 2 co-op play. So we played through the levels available and I found out he's from Colorado. I can't remember his name though! I gave him my email so we'll see if he contacts me or not. He was a cool dude.

So...I think thats it lol. I've got another video to send to you as well as the one that didn't work the first time around. I have to make it smaller...it was 17mb the first time I tried to send it.

Tomorrow I'm hoping I'll be able to take a small walk-through vid of Quake Con and the BYOC, as well as the massive atrium thing here at the hotel. We'll see how that goes :)

Oh and I just heard that Matt got dared by some guy to eat a whole tin of BAWLS mints in one go, for a "Brink" t-shirt...which he found out later he could have got easily near the front of the con....he ended up with tears rolling down his face from the intensity of the mints.