The View From The 16th Floor

Last week, Capcom invited a pile of games press from around the world to Hawaii, where it held its annual Captivate event. Despite having a proper name, it's not that different from any other event designed to show off upcoming products. But that's sort of beside the point. The company showed off some newer versions of previously announced games and announced a couple of new products, as well.

The new products--Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Bionic Commando Rearmed 2--only appeared in trailer form, which, of course, you can view on the site. Dead Rising 2 also proved to be interesting, with a new closed-off demo showing a bit of story, as well as some interesting weapon combos. The DS was also represented with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and Okamiden.

I'll get into all of those games with separate articles for each. Most importantly, I just wanted to clearly state up front that, as always, the Giant Bomb travel policy is to accept travel and lodging from publishers for non-exclusive events. A few people like to make a lot of noise about event travel here and there. Actually, it only comes up when a publisher flies the press to someplace warm and slightly out of the way. For example, you probably won't hear anyone piping up about a trip to Nevada that a bunch of people (including our own Brad Shoemaker and Drew Scanlon) are going on later this week. That's because it still feels like everyone who writes about games is legally obligated (read: forced) to go to Vegas at least twice a year. Like any other city in the world, when you're going to Vegas for a publisher-run event, the city looks like a hotel room, a conference room full of game kiosks, and maybe a dinner event or two.

Actually, in Hawaii I set aside a bit of time to head down to the hotel lobby and buy a bottle of Pocari Sweat and a can of pizza-flavored Pringles. That is, as they say, how I roll.

For me, the travel aspect of this job has always been something of an annoyance, but it's part of the job. And, yes, it does present something of a moral dilemma. For us, the decision is usually pretty simple, because the choice is to either accept the travel and lodging or not go at all. Blowing our barely existent travel budget on overseas travel to see one company's lineup isn't really the best use of our resources. Since one of those choices deprives our audience of coverage, we accept the travel and move on with our lives, head held high.

To put it another way: does it make sense for us to suffer and miss out on potentially interesting coverage just because a publisher's event planning team wants to go somewhere with nice weather for a few days? I don't believe so. So that's why we do what do. I just felt that was worth explaining, since everyone tends to want to jump to the worst possible conclusion about things like this.