My First Trip to LA

It's time for another fake-diary entry. This one comes was sent to the mailing list on Tue May 18, 1999 at 1:27pm.

Subject: I'm back Jim_Sangster@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxxx.xxx

Well, I'm back from L.A., which is like Alton Towers at dawn - all facade and no-one about. Really, for a busy city I was really thrown by the lack of pedestrians (they all drive about in cars - flash bastards).

I was at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) which saw PlayStation out in force sandwiched between Nintendo (who, as was evident by the presence of Darth Maul, has aligned itself with the Dark Side) and Sega. Nothing really impressive to write home about, with all the titles being either sequels or clones of other games - with one exception.

Sega Dreamcast has a microphone peripheral and software that allows you to talk to a computer-generated character. Now the implementation wasn't that good (the character looked like one of the fish from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life) but the idea was cool; if you use a selection of commands you can converse with a "sea-man" (snigger) who tells you all about what it's like to permenantly stink of fish (snigger 2).

PlayStation America threw a party and Beck played an hour-long set... which was nice.

Any fans of Abe's Oddysee or Abe's Exoddus will be pleased to hear a new Oddworld project, called Munch's Oddysee will appear on PlayStation 2 next year - you play a Glukkon who's playing with the DNA of people, getting them addicted
to milk (to improve sales), exploiting lesser species and basically being a capitalist opposite of cute likkle Abe. Sounds dead good.

Anyway, I'm off "No-Mail" now and have already received ten e-mails in the duration of writing this.

So, that wasn't my first trip to the States - that happened the year before when I went to Atlanta. But i thought it was fun how fascinated I was by a peripheral that allows you to talk to a computer interface. I'm currently typing this via my Mac, which you can talk to and it answers back. It can even tell you jokes. When windows pop up in other programs it tells you 'Safari needs your attention'. It's a bit spooky really. Now if only they could invent robots that do the washing up...

Oh, and Munch's Oddysee never came to PlayStation 2. Weep!