My flight to LA was completely uneventful. When I arrived, I took an uneventful taxi ride to the hotel, where I uneventfully checked in and got up to my room on the 9th floor of the hotel. We were instructed to call Predator on his cell phone when we arrived, but he wasn't answering.



I didn't know who to even look for, so I had to sit in the hotel, chatting on IRC, until finally HeXetic from PlanetCNC managed to find my room number and called. I went downstairs and hung out with some other community members, including Renardin, for an hour or so until dinner.

We took like 6 or 7 taxis to a Mexican restaurant for dinner, where I sat with Predator, HeXetic, some German guy I don't know, and DonCarlo from Strike Team/XWIS joined us a little late.



She was also my roommate. I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, so when we got back to the hotel, I took a shower and went to sleep. Besides, we had to get up and meet in the lobby at 8:30am. (ugh)

We took many taxis to EALA for our fun-filled first day! We were warned ahead of time that we wouldn't be back to the hotel until after midnight. Our first stop was the EATS cafeteria where we had breakfast burritos and pancakes, stressing the poor cooks out I'm sure.



Here's a rather blurry shot of Renardin picking up his burrito.



After breakfast, we gathered in a meeting room for several hours of informative presentations and demonstrations, most of which I can't tell you about for a few weeks. In this picture, you can see two CNC webmasters on the left. The rest of the standing members were various developers and managers on the team. You can also see the backs of our C&C3 Community Summit T-Shirts in GDI and Nod. The fronts just had the corresponding logo which I'm sure you'll see in another picture eventually.



Here's a shot of us eating sandwiches for lunch. From left to right, there's a guy from purepwnage.com, a guy from StrategyInformer, Banshee from PPM, and a guy from ModToaster. The half-visible bald guy on the far right is a guy who goes by the moniker of "Skull". He's a friend of Dragon Dronet from Renegade Effects (not a reference to C&C Renegade) who made most of the costumes and props you'll see in the game. In the pre-order video, Dragon specifically mentions "Skull".



When you enter the main entrance, there's a waiting area where you can play EA's games on several consoles.



This is a picture of the EA Experience store. Here, we got to buy PC games for $10 and console games for $20. I picked up a copy of TFD and Battlefield 2142 for Blazer for a grand total with tax of $21.56.



The employees also have an amazing break room which incites much jealousy in all who behold it.



Thus ends part 1 of my adventure. The next installment will feature all the hotness that is our presentation by Dragon Dronet and all the cool movie props he brought with him and more.

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Haha! Nice picture of me there .

Anyway, the burritos rocked! I didn't hear of them before... good stuff for breakfast, definitelly.

I've also bought two games on EA store. People could buy a pack with Generals, Zero Hour, BfME 1 and other 2 games for 10 dollars + taxes. There was also a Wii being sold there, but I couldn't buy it because it was exclusive to the employees .

Anyway, it was a pleasure to meet you and everyone else there. The group was great and we had a lot of fun.

[Updated on: Thu, 14 December 2006 18:51]

[Updated on: Fri, 15 December 2006 08:41]

Here's a picture of Crimsons new video card after I installed it for her. She is fortunate that her motherboard has a PCI-E slot as well as AGP (her old card was an AGP Ti4800SE). I also had to go out and buy her a new power supply, because the video card requires a dedicated 6pin power connection that her existing one didn't have. Not a bad deal at all for a $300 512MB PCI-Express card - thanks EA!

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