I have already mentioned (well, glossed over) the sponsor booths present at the WCG. This post’ll be to elaborate.
There were loads of tricked-out, pimped-up PC’s on show.
Check this one, for example. It was playing over 10 movies simultaneously from an external (possibly wireless) hard drive. I can’t remember what brand it was for, though. Oh well. Cool keyboard, too.
Kingston’s one was even prettier. Showing of its new DDR-2 RAM, it literally glowed. I make that game out to be Need for Speed: Most Wanted, by the way.
There was some World of Warcraft (WoW) promotion, and a few local online RPG’s made an appearance, too. Boring.
HP had some network servers/switches on display, with accompanying complex diagrams of how they work.
Interesting, but nothing compared to what Intel had in store.
Intel, most unholy of chip empires, had a fan-frickin’-tastic booth. They had lots of PC’s there - and anyone could just plonk themselves in front of one and play WoW. That includes toddlers. I swear I saw one 3-to-4 year old frantically button-mashing that great Everglide keyboard. In addition to the WoW rigs, Intel had a 1v1 Quake4 deathmatch tournament going on. I pushed Xian Yi to join in, and he soundly trashed his opponent, who supposedly had been waiting since last year to play Quake4 in the WCG. What a n00b, Xian Yi hasn’t even touched any Quake before, in his life, and he still whooped the guy 5-0 in 5 minutes.
With that win, he won a t-shirt and a cap. Gave the cap to me, of course, to recognize my uber-mastery.
Oh, Intel had a bunch of laptops on show, too, which they let gamers play on for their Doom3 tourney - I spotted quite a few Dell XPS’s, and -check this - and XPS was used as the game server for Doom3. Too bad I didn’t snap a picture of that, though.
Razer had a really cool booth dressed in black and dark green - they used it as a press launch platform of sorts, and the press (anyone wearing a ‘PRESS’ yellow tag, wish I had one) was invited to many activities, such as a Counter-Strike 1.6 1v1 challenge.
Robert “Razerguy” Krakoff, Chairman of Razer, made an appearance to announce the launch of the Krait, a new mouse engineered for RTS/MMORPG gamers and professional designers ‘at a reasonable price’. Sounds good, and looks good with that orange glow, too.
After the press release was over, I met Razerguy and complimented him on the marvel that is my Copperhead rodent, oh, and I told him I liked his blog, too. I asked him for a picture with me to post on this blog, and he obliged, so here it is (I know that shot is unflattering, for me, at least):
He told me the booth was selling the Razer shirts when I asked him where he got his from - and they were, at S$20. Quite a small collection, however.
I also saw the guys from Razerblueprints. I mean, it’s quite easy to spot a blonde guy wearing a way-cool shirt with DARKPEANUT printed proudly on it. It’s too bad I didn’t strike up a conversation with them, though.
Well, there were quite a lot of activities for visitors to this event, at least to fill up 3 hours of my time. However, it seemed a little short of ‘Biggest Gaming Event in the World’ calibre.
