BlizzCon 2008

Due to a lack of owning a digicam, I am sad that this BlizzCon blog would not have been as cool as all the other ones. So as a result, I’m going to sneak some pics from our BlizzCon camera man. Thanks in advance Plexa.

Day 0: Oct 16th
The BlizzCon trip started when I arrived at SFO (San Francisco International) at around 8 PM. Last Romantic was already at the airport for 30 minutes. Since he was busy finishing up an econ assignment, we just hung out around the luggage pick up area. Chill arrived from Calgary at around 9:30. intrigue was supposed to arrive at 10 but his gosu flight ended up delayed for an hour for god knows what reason. intrigue landed at 11 and the 4 of us got picked by thedeadhaji in his revving Lexus SUV. The five of us drove back to Los Altos to pick up SpiritoftheTuna from a dimly lit parking lot. Amusing thing was Tuna's parents weren't exactly happy with him skipping classes (high school student yo) for a gaming convention. I'm positive that his mom probably didn't think too highly of his son's (online) friends picking him up from some deserted parking lot at 11 PM.

With our group assembled, we headed to the best burgers in the west coast, the pride of Cali: In n' Out. intrigue, having visited haji before, enjoyed the great burgers at In n' Out before. We hyped up the food to our visiting Canadian. Luckily, Chill found the burgers were pretty good and fairly priced. Hype did not fail, win!

Our next stop was SafeWay for munchies for the road. Last stop of the night was haji's house. We ended up grabbing a few electronic equipment for the trip. Chill had GGPO installed on his laptop, which is essentially an emulator which he plays 3S on. haji made a stop at his house so we could pick up his arcade sticks, a PS2 controller and a gaming USB converter. With the proper equipment, we prepared for a glorious 5 hour drive down to Anahiem, with a stop at Six Flags for the afternoon.

Our seating arrangement was haji as driver, LR in shotgun navigating. Center row was Chill, me and intrigue. I held Chill's laptop on my lap while the three of us in the middle took turns playing 3S for what seemed like 3 hours straight. intrigue, a first-timer at 3s, just had to pick Chun. Fear the Fierce! So much priority. Oh and Tuna, poor guy had to take the bitch seat in the back with all the luggage. Alas, the pain of being picked up last.

We made a few pit stops during the night, once for gas, another time to stop by Denny's for a quick bite. We arrived at Six Flags Magic Mountain around 11 in the morning. The rides were fairly good but some of us were fatigued from the lack of sleep and probably slightly dehydrated as well. haji, LR, Tuna and I "bitched out" at 2 (how Chill put it lovingly on Liquid PodCast Ep. 2) and drove the last hour to Anaheim. What should have been a trip that lasted under an hour ended up being a 2+ hour drive. God damn LA traffic. I only found out later that semioldguy knew a "long cut" route that avoided all the traffic and took the other guys who stayed at Six Flags, to Anahiem in an hour.

We met up with a few other TL.netters later that night to pick up our goodie bags and entry passes for the next two days. zatic and Plexa have a wicked cool accents but that's probably because my ears are too used to American English.

I conclude Day 0 with 4 words: StarCraftII Beta Key, hi.

Day 1: Oct 17th
Anaheim Convention Center is a beastly building. Visiting for a second time does not take was from the feeling of how immense the convention center is. The center of the building (where all the action was at!) was divided into three areas. We entered at the right most area which was the WoW stage but also areas for StarCraft II and the Fan Tournament area. The center area was the RTS stage. Most of us ran between the right area and the center area, for SCII games and to watch the Korean progamers. The center area also has a section roped off for the progamers, a practice area. ToT)Cloud( sported a pretty nice ToT shirt while all the Koreans wore their team uniforms. All of the Koreans were rather short, save sAviOr and NaDa.

I started out Day 1 with 10-15 TL.netters standing in this long winding line that stretched a good 100 yards (or more, I'm bad at visually measuring distance). Some of us had a little bit of fun at the expense of the WoW players, in regard to their waistlines. In line was also where I overheard Day[9] talking to his mother which lead to the glorious thread of a progaming mom posting on TL.net.

Tuna playing a few of ZvT games immediately upon entering the convention center. 3-0'ed Tuna ez but the third game took too long as we missed out on IdrA v YellOw on stage. There was actually a lot of talk while we were waiting in line about IdrA's chances against YellOw. If IdrA could pull a win against the Koreans, a rusty YellOw would be his best bet. Chill lamented about the lack of results IdrA failed to yield while in Korea ("he played one of the best TvZ for a foreigner in game 1 in GOM but proceeded to play like a East newbie for games 2 and 3", I paraphrase ^^) and LR started to make bets on YellOw.

ForGG, my prediction for who would take it all this BlizzCon, choked utterly and failed to even show his face on stage. JangBi v NaDa was a killer match but JangBi was simply too in the zone for NaDa and NaDa was knocked down into the loser's bracket. Kudos LosingID8 for leading the TL section in the han-na dool set chants!

The rest of the day was just StarCraft II galore. I probably played about 40-50 games that day. The ironic thing was that in terms of line length, SCII multi-player was the shortest, single player was slight longer. Diablo II yielded a longer line than both SCII lines combined while WoW took the throne for longest line.

Our dinner plans was to meet up at the BJ's at Huntington Beach. haji's GPS was an instrument of epic fail and we ended up parking at some dead end street due to road construction and had to walk four or five extra blocks to the restaurant. The TL dinner had an impressive showing, much like last year's. Saw DJEtterStyle and omgbnetsux again, they were at BlizzCon last year too, always nice to see those two again. Quite a fucking pair of characters and I mean that in a great way.

Too bad they don't post as much anymore.
Despite not introducing himself formally at the dinner, Zileas, of SC:BW beta fame, and a friend of his from Blizzard did show up for the dinner as well. But sadly they left before we took pictures at the end of dinner. haji is a hilarious drunk but he'd be even better the next night.

Day 2: Oct 18th
The highlight of the final day (besides another 50 games of SCII) was the epic sAviOr v NaDa Finals. sAviOr came out of nowhere to claim the winner’s bracket as his. Since falling to JangBi the day before, NaDa clawed his way back up from the loser’s bracket. I’m sure everyone knows the results, Ma Jae Yoon took it home in a decisive 2-0 manner. Apparently before the Finals, NaDa was asking how much the prize difference between 1st and 2nd was. When he heard it was $15K, he was like “oh shit, I better go practice then!” Not verbatim, but something similar with a joking connotation. All the TL.netters and probably the entire RTS area (I couldn’t hear over our own cheer) erupted with MJY’s “Hi, I Will Destroy Everyone In 2009.” The remainder of the day was filled with SCII.

Chill brought home a sick Kerrigan v Zeratul SCII poster the day before, so pretty much everyone went to the Fan Tournament area to win their own SCII poster. In the Fan Tournament area, you waited in a partially longer line than the regular Multiplayer area. When it was your turn, you sat down to play up to three games. If you won a game, you continued playing. If you lost, you got up. Win three games in a row, you’d score a nice SCII poster or a WoW poster of Arthas the Lich King, each poster $15 at the Blizzard Store!

At around 8, we were all pretty exhausted. In Chill’s words he was “all SCII’ed out and it would be too soon if he saw SCII again in another two months.” The group of us left Anaheim Convention Center two hours before BlizzCon officially closed. We returned to our Motel 6 to recuperate for an hour then we went to a nice 24 hour Korean BBQ restaurant, on the recommendation of LID8 and Brian, semioldguy’s friend. After we all ate our fill, we took our final pictures together and dispersed.

To a fabulous weekend: BlizzCon 2008, you were great.

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Photos