While most of the RPGFan staff had to walk to the convention center and constantly accosted by pan handlers on every corner, I snagged a ride with ma boy Justin. At 9 AM, Sensei Phoenix, Tortolia, and myself had an interview with JoyCity, makers of RedMoon Online. We also got to meet the CEO of the Korean office of JoyCity...and it was a chick!

After the interview, we all met up in the media center and headed off to the show floor. Working Designs booth was one of the first stops...we've got a great picture of me, playing the soon to be delayed yet again Arc the Lad III, with Vic Ireland standing behind me in the background. Classic. :)

Nintendo's booth was huge, taking up a good 1/3 of the floor in West Hall. We all enjoyed crowd surfing through the masses, just to see Advance Wars and Smash Brothers Melee among others. The oddest thing was walking into Nintendo's merchandising section and hearing Phantasy Star Online music...we'll bring you more about this later. :)

In a press kit released by Nintendo, Raven Blade, a GameCube Action/RPG, was announced for release in the US. Raven Blade promises to give players an epic tale set in a massive land filled with creatures, incredible graphics, and awe-inspiring music. Raven Blade is to offer breathtaking fight sequences using RPG-style magic, frantic real-time battles, and sword fighting modeled after actual martial arts. Raven Blade is currently scheduled to be released in 2002.

One of the biggest disappointments of the show was Sega's closed booth. The only way to get in is by appointment only. Rudo quickly walked away, with tears streaming from his eyes.

Both Sony and Square screamed at us when we tried taking pictures of Final Fantasy X. Why show a game in public and not allow pictures, especially since there's tons of pictures online. Weirdos. Dark Cloud was also shown at Sony's booth, and should be released by the end of the month. It looks nice, though we haven't gotten a chance to play it yet.

The food at the show is outrageously expensive, and there is nowhere to sit ever. We finally wandered over to a walkway and found some place to sit, next to some chicks who would give you a free shirt if you took off yours and put theirs on. People were making special requests for me to do it...maybe I'll do it today. Gotta please the masses. :P

At 3 PM, we interviewed Gail Salamanca at Atlus. We spent most of the time making fun of a certain other company, talking about different games, which you'll learn more about when we put up the full transcript.

The rest of the day was spent roaming around the show floor, complaining about our feet. Myself, my cell phone kept going off about every 5 minutes, with people bugging to meet me. Finally about 6 PM we wandered back to the hotel and I showered and got dressed for the Ziff Davis party, while the rest of the staff ordered pizza and played some Dance Dance Revolution. I proceeded to get drunk with a bunch of magazine editors and company executives...I even managed to trip over a speaker and break a martini glass, proof of my boundless grace.

Rudo's comments: While Sumi was off making an ass of herself :), the rest of us stayed in the hotel room and looked at all of our free stuff while playing Soul Calibur, eating pizza and dancing like fools on the Dance Dance Revolution mats at 2:00am (all except me of course, since I'm too much of a man to do that stuff :P). Of course, we were also bugged by a certain nagging editor who called us on my cell phone and talked to every staff members for half an hour each :).

While some people were updating the site and others were playing Soul Calibur, Schala kept smacking Chrono around and Tortolia (RPGFan's official reverand) kept reading a book and was unaware of everything that happened around him. Citan also went mad when someone, while flipping the channels, stopped to watch a porn movie. While all this was going on, Sensei Phoenix was up in his room sleeping like a baby... the poor featherduster needs his beauty sleep!

Well, that's basically it for Day 1, we'll be back with another update about Day 2 tonight or tomorrow. See y'all latah!