LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Community Day Writeup

Castle Building and Wenches

After Amir finished his presentation we headed over to a room that had some computers in it; we were going to build castles with the developers. Seven at a time we headed into the room, paired with a developer and opened up the game to experiment with the controls and built our own castle using the Men of the West (combination of Gondor and Rohan) faction. In addition we all got to take a screenshot of the finished product; mine pretty generally sucked, but some of the other guys said they ended up with some cool castles.

It was now time for a special presentation. We headed back to the press room to get a presentation on the new PSP game, Lord of the Rings: Tactics; a turn based RPG. Before it got started Neil Young dropped by again to ask about our opinions on BFME thus far. We had about 10 minutes during which people gave some feedback. Young thanked us and left for a meeting. The special presentation was going to begin; the game's producer asked if any of us had a PSP; nobody raised their hand. The producer said something along the lines of, well have you heard of it? Everybody raised their hand. The producer then said something along the lines of, well that's not so bad then, maybe Tactics will convince you to buy it. Somebody responded with something along the lines of, I doubt it, the fact that we all know what it is, but that nobody bought it proves that we all consciously chose not to buy it. My sentiments were similar. The game didn't look like anything special, but I guess that's what you get when you present a PSP game to a RTS crowd.

After the presentation was finished Aaron gave us a tour of the BFME2 development floor. There was a lot of concept art up there, but I'm really not allowed to say much else about the floor. Actually I didn't see anything all that special aside from the concept art anyway. We browsed through the offices and cubicles, and met many of the BFME2 team. The floor looked like a nice place to work, and it even had a kitchen. Aaron mentioned that everything that's done is very team oriented, and very rarely does somebody work on a project by themselves. After finishing up the tour we crowded into the elevators and headed back down to the general EA floor where everything up to this point had happened.

At this point my agenda says that there was a Community Leaders Program from 5:00 to 6:00. Unfortunately I don't remember a thing about it (my notes concur with my memory loss, but considering they're nearly illegible I could be missing something), so we'll all just pretend it never happened. I'd ask somebody, but as you may know I'm in the Bay Area, California, without internet access, at the current point in time.

After this so called "Community Leaders Program" we headed out to a bus that had been chartered to take us to Medieval Times. We piled on the bus and began to drive off, only to realize that we'd forgotten Aaaron who was running after us. We pulled over and let him board the bus amid much laughter.

Medieval Times is, as I later found out, a show and dinner (without those barbaric things called utensils). Basically 6 knights duke it out to become champion of the realm, you're assigned to a knight who you root for during the show. We got the blue knight, some dude who, according to the master of jousts (who later turned out to be the bad guy) had recently been knighted for his valor. Anyway, our knight won the tournament amid thunderous shouts from our section that sounded somewhat like "GO BLUE!!!" "GREEN YOU SUCK!!!" "YOU STINK YELLOW!!!" "I LOVE YOU LADY!!!" and "I WANT TO HAVE YOUR CHILDREN, PRINCESS!!!" Admitidly the last two shouts only came from a usually demure, and certainly demure looking Sergio.

The event was a lot of fun, and I too got into the shouting. We were the loudest section, followed closely by the red/yellow knight's section which apparently housed a birthday party for a 17 year old male, we later saw their extremely large group driving off in a SUV limo that excreted blue smoke and much noise in the form of loud music. Anyway, in addition to winning the tournament, the blue knight was later slightly injured, but luckily for him he had won the princesses' favor (much to Sergio's appreciation) so they went off together to do you know what (well that's what we assumed, there were quite a few young children present). Later the blue knight returned to save the day after all the other knights had been killed. His killing of the evil master of the jousts was met by tumultuous applause by our section. After the show was finished we headed back towards to bus to drive back to the Ritz. The drive was somewhere around 45 minute to an hour long during which time I mostly dosed off (this is around 10:00 or 11:00 at night).

Next: Day 3
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