May 31st, 2009. It was a Sunday and I had spent the entire day on assorted aircraft. Sipping on my complimentary Dixie cup of lukewarm Coca-Cola, I stared out the window as the plane flew over the Grand Canyon. As I looked down at nature’s majesty, admiring the clear blue sky and bright sunshine that scintillated the Earth below, I took account of how lucky I was to be heading to the west coast for the largest event in the industry that I love so dear.

But then, the plane began to quiver and shake, dark, thick clouds began to gather all around us and I knew only too well that in mere moments, my flight would be touching down in modern day Babylon. Oh yes, I had arrived in Los Angeles, California – and I knew immediately that something was awry.

The Kawada Hotel, located at 200 South Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 may very well be the gateway into hell; a true nexus of evil which attracts all of the vile and filth of greater downtown Los Angeles, using these unsavory elements to create a type of repugnant bubble of maliciousness so powerful that it’s very presence is enough to consume an entire city block.

It is, indeed, Satan’s Anus.

The first sign that something was terribly wrong with this hotel occurred before we even stepped foot in our room. You see, in honor of E3 many hotels has special room keys made. Ours, as you can see to your left, were special Batman: Arkham Asylum edition keycards. They were most nifty and I insisted on having The Joker. The problem was that the people at the hotel coded them the wrong way, so in order to use them we had to put the card in the door upside down. No big deal once you got used to it, but all the same… it was a sign…

Room 410

Our room was roughly the size of a small van with absolutely no room to move around comfortably. This handicap did not stop the folks at the Kawada from somehow finding a way to fit two beds, a nightstand, a desk, an office chair and a kitchenette into the 8×10 space. But you know what? Who cares. So the room was a little small, it’s not like it really impeded on our ability to be productive. Besides, we were there for work, not for a vacation so the fact that the room was small means nothing.

Until you consider everything else wrong with the room.

Our television wasn’t a television, but a 21” computer monitor. If that isn’t enough, we only had about nine channels on said television: Two HBOs, three local stations and four Telemundo channels. So TV was more or less out of the picture. But again – we had laptops, so a lack of TV, while sucking, was certainly not something that would ruin the entire week.

Until you consider everything else wrong with the room.

Room 410 was a smoking room. We know this because we asked for a smoking room, and upon our arrival we were both relieved to see the ashtray and matchbook resting on the nightstand. Now, because we do not live in a world where cigarettes smell like strawberries, we had to open a window in order to smoke.

Unfortunately, this task proved to be quite impossible. Yes, in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles we were given a smoking room in which we couldn’t actually smoke because the window was sealed shut. That is to say that it could not be opened. When we tried to open it, we discovered that you could actually pull the fuckin’ seal off of the pane of glass, theoretically allowing us to take out the whole damn window. However, when we took into consideration that our glorious view of downtown Los Angeles consisted of a brick wall and a peek into the room fifteen feet across the alley from us, we elected to just keep the curtains shut. But hey, so what. We have to go downstairs for a smoke, it’s no big deal.

Until you consider everything else wrong with the room.

Our bathroom was roughly the size of a Porta-John, with a tiny ass shower, sink and toilet. The toilet was broken to the point where every time we flushed the damn thing would spend the next five hours filling back up, and the shower… well, I am convinced that the shower simply has a hatred for all mankind. First of all the knob was on upside down, meaning that if you wanted hot water you had to turn the handle towards the big “C”. Additionally, the water had a tendency to drastically change temperature at a moment’s notice – in fact, I (JW) still have a rather lovely burn blister on my back from where the water made the jump from 95-degrees to three degrees shy of LAVA.

Furthermore, the shower head was only about six feet off of the ground so anyone over 6′2” would have had to go all Lollipop Guild on the shower in order to get their hair clean.

But okay, so the shower was a little uncomfortable. Again, we weren’t out there for a vacation, we were out there for work. So it’s no big deal.

Until you consider everything else wrong with the room.

Internet

As you can imagine, when you’re operating a website having internet access is kind of important. While staying at the Kawada, we were practically without internet access – it was so bad that by Thursday we simply stopped trying.

Rather than having some kind of wireless internet access that would have allowed us to hook up both the laptops to keep updated coverage, we were given a single router that was bolted to the wall and only had one ethernet hookup. So, down one laptop Perry and I figured we could push forward with the other. The problem with that idea was that the internet connection was so painfully slow that it took nearly four hours to upload eight minutes of video onto YouTube.

That was when the internet was actually working, mind you.

Sadly, the majority of the time we were actually at the hotel, the internet was down for one reason or another. On Monday the ‘net was down the entire day, thus preventing us from properly covering any of the day’s press conferences (although we did do some awesome Ubisoft Twittering). After the internet was repaired on Monday night, it was down again on Tuesday morning and again when we returned from the Convention Center on Tuesday Evening, although it was back up by Tuesday night. It stayed up for most of Wednesday but was slow as hell, and come Thursday it was down again. We aren’t sure how the internet was on Friday morning because we were scrambling to get the hell out of there.

So, let’s recap:

• Tiny Room
• Smoking Room Without a Working Window
• Shitty, Voyeur-Enabled View of Los Angeles
• No Cable
• Tiny Bathroom
• Broken Toilet
• Satan’s Shower
• Little-to-No Internet

…and then there was the drunkard.

”PHOTOGRAPH!”

Tuesday night, just as Perry and I were unwinding after a long night of walking around E3 (and drinking afterwards), we began to hear some guy screaming out of his window. Who he was screaming at remains a mystery to this day, but I distinctly remember him hanging out of his window and screaming at something. So, bored out of our wits and pissed off over the lack of working internet, we decide to have a little fun with this guy.

Taking the memory stick out of the camera, Perry positioned himself just out of view of the window, holding the camera up to the window and taking two or three snapshots with the flash turned on. While on one hand we thought it was hilarious, if we knew what we were in for we probably wouldn’t have done it.

For the next hour, our bored snickering turned to exasperated sighs of annoyance as this drunk bastard kept screaming “PHOTOGRAPH!” into the night sky. At first I thought he was screaming at us, but the longer he kept screaming the more I started to think that he was actually making a song request. Regardless, this guy kept us up for most of the night.

”There Was Smoke, Man”

After a long Wednesday in which we were deprived sleep, we returned to the hotel room in an attempt to get some work done. While we did get some work done, we were still far behind and by 2am we decided that it was time to just do another episode of The Vender (video Bender, get it?!) and turn in for the night. We finished recording at about 2:20am and we were ready to turn in by 3am.

When the fire alarm went off.

At first, we didn’t give a damn. We figured “well, everything else about this place has fucked up so this is probably an error too”. Either way I opened the door to peer into the hallway to see if anyone had flipped a fire alarm or something. As I looked down the hall I saw a couple of other bloggers, an elderly gentleman who had looked like he was woken up by the alarm, and cute college-age couple that had obviously been interrupted “consummating” their affection for each other. After finding nothing, I came back into the room and closed the door.

About a minute had passed before the alarm went off a second time, this time for a shorter burst. Needing a cigarette, I began to slide my shoes on to head downstairs when, for a third time, the fire alarm rang. Physically and mentally exhausted from the hotel’s constant mental flogging, both Perry and I grabbed our smokes, our wallets, our E3 passes and headed to the elevator.

Yes, the elevator. Because we didn’t care if we lived or died.

We were among the first people outside once we got downstairs. Again, because we took the elevator into the jaws of damnation. We looked around trying to find the fire. All we did wind up finding was a bunch of cute girls wearing pink pajama pants and clutching their pillows. Or maybe it was a teddy bear – I don’t know, it was 3am (6am). The point was we stood out there for about ten minutes, smoking, waiting for the fire engines to arrive.

And arrive they did!

For all the shit that the LAPD gets for, you know, beating people, the LAFD deserves as much praise. They arrived at the Kawada Hotel with about a dozen fire engines, ready and able to kick the imaginary fire straight in the strawberries. In fact, the only thing more awesome than the LAFD’s show of force in regards to the fire was the look of pure, unfiltered, fuming rage that painted each and every one of their faces as they walked out of the Kawada without satisfying their lust for squelching raging flames, nor their new desire to punch the manager in the forehead.

Now while the firemen were inside, assumingly dancing a jig, Perry and I met Andrea Campton of NintendoGal.com. She was most awesome, and had the foresight to grab a camera. We also met a fellow I will simply call “X”. X was one of those people you always see in disaster movies who has the minor freak out every time his blood pressure goes up. Apparently he was having one of those moments, because as we’re joking about the non-fire and smoking on our cigs, he gets about a foot away from me and simply says:

This isn’t funny. There’s a fire. I saw smoke.

I won’t say who he was or who he worked for, but if he’s reading this: No you fucking didn’t. You know why you didn’t? Because there was no smoke due to the fact that there was nothing to cause smoke. There was no fire, only a loud ass alarm that snapped everybody wide awake, and the harsh realization upon reentering the hotel that one of the fire prevention measures the hotel had taken was to close all their doors.

All their wooden doors. Because the best way to protect people from a fire is to seal them between two doors made of materials that in absolutely no way could conduct heat, let alone burst into flame. AMIRITE?!

Highway Robbery

Friday morning. Before Perry and I packed our things we went down to McDonalds to grab some breakfast. While we were gone the cleaning staff went through our room and tidied everything up. It’s what they do, you know? Well, when we returned with our breakfast we found that the room had indeed been cleaned up and everything was nice and tidy. But… there was something awry.

You see, in a room that had two laptop computers, a digital camera, an audio recorder, two novels, a notebook, two bags full of clothes and a literal pile of loose change… they stole my hat. My $20 1UP hat. While this would have normally sent me into a rage that would’ve ended with the LAFD returning to the hotel, I had become so mentally exhausted over how badly we were fucked by our hotel that I simply sat down on the bed, stared out the window for a minute or two, and laughed. Not even a real “ha ha” laugh, but one of those “…how ’bout that?” laughs that you make when you see or hear something so completely outrageous that you simply don’t know how to react.

In Closing…

E3 was one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences of my life. The people were great, the atmosphere was amazing and I cannot wait until E3 2010 rolls around to do it all over again – impromptu Dr. Scholls purchases and all. But the Kawada Hotel… I’m convinced that if we had stayed there three more days, Perry and the cute Indian chick who worked the desk would’ve been posessed by demons, climbed to the roof and summoned a shapeshifting Sumarian God or something.

“But JW, why did you have to write this long piece?” you may be asking. Well to answer your question, diligent reader… self-therapy.

Popularity: unranked [?]