Jun 25, 8:00 am
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http://www.twitter.com/FDC_Midnight
Hello world! Megu aka Midnight checkin’ in. I have just lived through one of the craziest and most exciting weeks of my life. Being that it was my first conference working as a Frag Doll Cadette, I wanted to record it in yummy detail for anyone that didn’t make it to E3 this year, or anyone who is wondering “what’s it like to work as a Cadette”? Awesome doesn’t begin to describe it. Are you ready? Let’s nom right in.
6/13 SUNDAY
2:30pm: I land in LAX! I see clouds; what’s going on?! Are we really in California?
2:45pm: I see shiny happy beautiful people: Faith aka Phoenix and Anne-Marie aka Spectra have come to LAX to pick me up. Epic hugging follows.
3:00pm: We get to Anne-Marie’s place to hang out while we wait for Sarah to arrive. How do we kill time? Prince of Persia, duh.
3:45pm: Sarah aka Glitch arrives. More hugging!
4:30pm: We arrive at the hotel – the Westin downtown, relax, and head down and grab dinner with H20Rip and OneNightStan. Afterwards, I meet I meet my roomie for the week, Ellana! I can already tell we’ll get along well.
10:00pm: Kotaku party at Broadway bar!! Uh-oh, really long line around the block. Oh look, there’s Carlos (the voice actor for Dom in Gears of War and Leonardo in Assassin’s Creed 2.) He quietly sneaks us all in. The party is low-key fun with lots of networking and excited talk about E3. We chat with Stephen Totilo , Deputy Editor of Kotaku, for a bit before we head out.
6/14 MONDAY
8:30am: All (or rather, most) of the girls are up bright and early for a hearty breakfast before a day of training! Fellow Cadette Kaitlyn records a video of us, where we discuss what we’re most excited about for the day (training on the awesome upcoming Ubisoft games and the Cirque du Soleil Natal Party!).
9:30am: The ambitious ones trek from the hotel to the LA Convention Center, while the rest of us *raises hand* cabs it over.
9:45am: OMG. Is that an Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood banner covering an ENTIRE side of the Convention Center? The sidewalk experiences a major deluge of drool.
9:50am: The ambitious and unambitious have finally gathered; it’s a reunion for those of us who met at PAX East and introductions for the “new” faces. Hugs all around!
9:53am: We - the team de force d’estrogen - walk in, only to be asked by some people if we’re “the models.” Flattered, we giggle and say no.
10:00am: Training begins! Phoenix and I meet the Ghost Recon team and are thrown into an intensive training session of their baby! We are blown away by the graphics, the detail in the audio, and the fun gameplay. We repeat x 20.
11:30am: The girls regroup for a training session on the super secret game “Your Shape” for Kinect. The brand manager shows us how accurate the tracking is, and we are completely blown away! (Note to self, don’t play this game after eating a big din din if don’t want to say hi to your tum tum on your shiny 46” HDTV.)
12:30pm: Food time! And then more meetings and trainings. Some of the girls head over to the Driver and Skate booths to train.
4:00pm: Back at the hotel, very sleepy. The sun is shining! Which can only mean 1 thing, obvi. I head to the pool with Kristen aka Epidemic aka Epi for a quick nap and some rays.
6:00pm: We head over to the Cirque du Soleil Project Natal launch party at the Galen Center. The line is insane, but we (sort of) patiently wait in line. There are sounds of drums up ahead. (???) Right before we enter, we are all given these awesome Xbox 360 USB drive bracelets, which I quickly put on. Hey now, 2 gigs on anyone’s wrist is sexy.
6:30pm-9:30pm: We are given white smocks to wear over our clothes and are shuffled into a huge auditorium. The Cirque dancers are doing crazy acrobatics around us, with some audience participation (Brooke!!). After awhile, the screen turns on at the front of the room and the Cirque dancers move up. Meanwhile, a boy rides a fake – but very realistic! – elephant to the front of the stage. He climbs a big ball…which turns into the big Xbox 360 ball. At the same time, all of our gigantic shoulders turn green. Then blue. Then red. Then green. The rave music starts (just kidding). :D For the next hour or 2, a “family” of 4 and other characters demo a variety of Kinect games, including Joyride, Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventures, Kinectimals, Star Wars, and Dance Central. At the end of the show, we all pick up our schwag – small stuffed animals that can be scanned into the Kinectimals game.
10:00pm: Since we couldn’t get into the Activision party/Eminem concert (sadface), we decide to head back to the hotel to have a few. We hit 32 on the elevator and ohai, there’s a rotating restaurant overlooking LA! We quickly realize that the restaurant rotates verrrrrry sloooowly and start throwing Chex into each others’ mouths for entertainment.
6/15 Tuesday 
10:30am: Adria and I have roaming time until noon, so we take the time to check out all the booths before they’re open to the general public. Lots of cool stuff = lots of camera snapping. There’s hardly anyone around; it looks eerily like the zombies have killed all the humans, or something.
11:00am: Epi meets up with me and we head over to Harmonix for our appointment of a Rock Band 3 showing. (By the way, major props to Harmonix for having an organized appointment system, which meant that no one ever really had to wait in line.) This was one of the presentations that I was most looking forward to, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. The beautiful concert venue has velvet cushions on creaky wooden chairs, a real stage, and a heavy read curtain which opens up to reveal the Harmonix band. They play Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” with a 7 player band. Very sexy! The host goes on to explain the new keyboard, as well as the real 6 stringed guitar. Amazing! We shuffle out and I jump on the guitar for a bit, before running off to work.
12:00pm-6:00pm: It’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier time! There are 5 stations inside the closed booth, and each station has 1 speaker and 1 player. Faith and I, being players, get matched up with speakers (mostly dev or producers of Future Soldier) and demo to thousands of drooling fans! (Okay, maybe less than a hundred, and they were mostly journalists or celebrities, not drooling fans.) Speaking of celebrities, I have the opportunity to demo for Mini Me! Soon afterwards, Hideo Kojima comes in with a crew of Japanese people. I bust out my Japanese and introduce myself, to which his translator asks why I’m not doing the speaking part of the demo? Doh. Kojima-san isn’t very talkative, but it’s still great seeing him up close and personal. Over on Faith’s side, she demoes for Napoleon Dynamite and Ashton Kutcher (and this of course happens while I take a teeny little break to run to the bathroom. Doh x2.) Later on in the afternoon, Steven Spielberg is supposed to come by, but unfortunately runs out of time and doesn’t make it. I get to see Michael Jackson’s son instead.
9:00pm: It’s the SFX 360 Gamers Gone Wild party, conveniently located in the lobby of our hotel! We doll up and head down, and get paparazzi’d on the red carpet. We smooch Carlos at the door and head in to get some drinks. On the way to the bar, I get forced into a dance-off (okay, maybe not forced) and have a new BFF for the rest of the night on the dance floor. At some point, a Master Chief helmet gets passed around which generates some pretty cool pictures. At another point in the night, I get involved in a reality show, but I can’t really talk about that. The night ends with most of us limping upstairs barefoot.
6/16 Wednesday
10:00am-6pm: It’s Ghost Recon time again! Since Phoenix and I got great feedback regarding our demoing on the first day, Morgan aka Rhoulette decides not to switch us out. We demo the game for a number of journalists and other publishers. Coincidentally, a friend of mine from New York who works in in-game advertising is sent to my station. After some jaw-dropping surprise, we hug it out. He introduces me to his team as “the girl that beat that other guy in Guitar Hero.” I get some fist bumps for that, then jump into the game. All in all, another great day of demoing. :D
12:00pm: I use 1 of my bathroom/food breaks to run over to the Harmonix booth to try to get on the keyboard. The host remembers me and scoots me right in. As I played piano for 16 years and plastic guitar on expert for 2 years, I am really excited about playing! It turns out to be just about as awesome as I expected, with real notes and chords to play. I am sad when the song ends, because I want to play more more more! Gabrielle (writer of Future Soldier) high-fives me as I come off the stage, and we have a conversation about how Rock Band 3 would be great for her kids to learn how to play real instruments.
8:00pm: Oh SNAP it’s Ubisoft party time! Make-up, spandex, high heels, Xbox 360 necklaces. Dancing poles, cabanas, covered pool, open bar. Boombastic beats, awesome Ubisoft people, Masi Oka. Nuff said.
6/17 Thursday
8:30am: We get up, unsure what planet we’re on. A muffin and coffee help bring me back to reality.
8:45am: A bunch of the girls take the shuttle to E3, where we pass the Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood sign again. We immediately jump into a discussion about whether or not Ezio’s goatee is hot. Soon after that, Melonie aka Whisper gives me her Xbox bracelet from the Kinect party to autograph (???). You’ll have to check out the fan page she created of me to learn more. >_>
9:00am: Women in Games photo shoot! It was great seeing how many women were attending E3; it was not so great looking up towards the sun without our sunglasses.
10:00am-5:00pm: More Ghost Recon! Phoenix and I are pros at this now, and there’s talk of 0wning the leaderboards when the game comes out. Future Storm dev guys versus Phoenix versus Midnight. Should be interesting.
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9:00pm: It’s the last night of E3 and we’re determined not to sleep through it! We head into scary BFE LA to go support Lanai aka Fidget and Anne-Marie aka Spectra at the Scott Pilgrim launch party. The place is a huge warehouse, designed to look like what Scott Pilgrim (23 year old dude)’s living room(s) would look like. There are lots of TVs and couches, fortunately for Miss Preggers. We are disappointed by the “Keg Buffet” only containing beer (like duh), but I get super excited about the plethora of pistachios. They are delish! Walking around, we discover a photo booth and a dance floor. After running into BFF and doing a quick salsa session (which is on video somewhere), I play the Scott Pilgrim game. It’s super cute 8-bitness: think Castle Crashers combined with TMNT for NES. Meanwhile, Whisper and Jessica aka Ruckus discover animated cutout characters, and busy themselves with creating cute 3D paper characters. :D
12:00am: We grab our schwag – T-shirts with Scott Pilgrim characters on them, and head back to the hotel.
1:00am: We have a quick photo shoot in our 8-bit T-shirts with the editor of GameInformer, then I head upstairs to go pass out. Right before that though, I make sure to hug everyone as I won’t be seeing them for the team breakfast. E3 is over and I don’t want it to start sinking in just yet.
Goodbye California! Until next time…
P.S. Photo Credits: Jessica, Melonie, Kristen, Kaitlyn, Faith, Morgan.
