Battle for Middle Earth Community Day Writeup

Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth is a name that sparks the imagination; trolls crushing Gondor soldiers with trees, Fell Beasts swooping upon Rohan's Rohirrim, countless orcs flooding through the city of Osgiliath...who wouldn't want to play something like that? Well, I got a chance to take a look at the game when I was messaged by Aaron Kaufman - one of the many kind fellows who work at Electronic Arts LA - months back concerning a community day he (and a couple other EA guys) was planning for the month of June with all of the major LoTR and RTS fansite webmasters participating. All of the uninteresting preliminary stuff got sorted out in the following months, and I got on my plane to Los Angeles on the 16th. As one might expect, my plane landed on the same day later in the afternoon and I waited for the limosine that was supposed to pick me up. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, there were some problems with the limo driver and he ended up picking up most everyone quite a bit later than their arrival...and dropped some off at the wrong places. Granted, it was a bit troublesome, but just as hilarious; apparently, when he told the EA guys that they needed to call his office for whatever reason and they called his office, it turned out to be the same guy, the limo driver. That, coupled with his inability to pick up people and drop them off at the correct places made for quite a crazy day. Hilarious.

Introducing ourselves and eating dinner

Well, we all made it to the Ritz Carlton one way or another, and spent some time getting to know each other and talking to Mike Murphy, EA's community manager in the lobby area. In the lobby, I found that my long-time friend and fellow AoM fansite webmaster Brandon "Xiphoid" Falls came to the event as well and I got to meet him after all this time. As you might have expected, we talked for quite a while during our stay in LA about all things AoM-related...whoo boy! After a bit, Aaron Kaufman made it to the hotel and we got in the taxis to the Electronic Arts Los Angeles offices where we proceeded stuff our faces with pizza while Aaron gave us a run-down of everything that would go on the next day and we'd formally introduce ourselves. You could really tell who were the older folks in the group from their introductions, us younger people's first games would typically be from the NES or arcade...some others had atari or even text-based games. Heck, I don't even think I've played an artari or text-based game; I'm such a bad, bad gamer.

Anyway, we had that night to relax in the game room, meet eachother, and watch a movie in the movie room; guess which one it was. If you were thinking Full Metal Jacket you'd be wrong, sorry...it was actually LoTR: Return of the King; surprising, I know. It turned out that half of the group hung out in the game room and the other half watched the movie. The game room was a pretty happenin place to be, with an x-box, PC, gamecube, 3 arcade machines, a fooseball table, a pool table, and the center of many of our attention: two couple thousand dollar massage chairs. Pretty much every one of us had to try those bad boys out; I found them almost too intense to use, one setting pretty much had a couple things jabbing into my back, not exactly relaxing for me. The night finished at around 11:30, just enough time for us to get back to the hotels and get enough sleep for the big day.

Next: June 18th, 2004: BFME Community Day
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