Am I a complete and total loser if I keep blogging about how cool my wife's life is? Yes?
Sue me. Her life rules, and parts of it belong in my blog.
As many of you know, she's is the store manager at our town's one and only EBgames. Apparently there are these ginormic conferences held by the big three gaming companies each year, and EBgames/GameStop managers are required to attend. Required? I don't know a GameSpot forumite who wouldn't give his left leg (never an arm or hand, though. . . we needs our thumbs, don't we?) to go on a four-day vacation to a fancy hotel in Dallas, TX and listen to the bigwigs give bleeding edge, reliable info on their next-gen strategies and whozeewhatzees. My wife is getting paid decent money to attend an event I'd give a paycheck to be at. GameStop and EB might slowly be becoming too corporate for their own good, making it extremely hard to love this job, but you gotta love the perks.
Speaking of, I haven't really gotten into those yet. Amanda called me yesterday, elated to tell me that the Regginator himself would be giving Nintendo's conference. First, how cool is your wife if she thinks it's rad to be around Reggie? None of the other managers knew who he was, but my wife wanted to score a photo with the guy; maybe an autograph. Cool.
After Reggie was done reading off the list of names of asses to be kicked (or possibly somewhere in between), he informed the attendees that they'd be receiving some free loot from Nintendo. It's not uncommon for these store managers to make out like bandits at these events, apparently (last year, Amanda's former boss scored an XBOX 360), but the list of freebies was better than expected.
One free classic controller. What can I say? I was pretty mad and confused when this wasn't packaged with the Wii (although cynics would have sneered even if it had been), and now I...er.. Amanda is getting one for free. In addition to that, sh...we... I'm getting 7500 free Wii points. For those who aren't keeping up, that's equivalent to 75 smackers. Thanks, Nintendo!
And that's not all. They're giving us... er... them... some free DS games too, none of which have been released yet. Amanda listed about three or four, most of them RPGs, but only one stood out: Yoshi's Island 2: Yoshi on the Go (or something close to that). When she told me, I was pretty much stoked. The other games don't mean much to me, but the new Yoshi?!
She also picked up a little baggie from Sony. Not expecting much, she was surprised to find a new copy of Shadow of the Colossus inside, as well as LocoRoco. Of course, the usual assortment of lanyards and tee-shirts was also in place; pretty cool swag for nerds like me. But it's really just filler. We all know it's just filler.
So yeah, Amanda's in Dallas right now in a sweet hotel, checkin' out the Wii, PS3, and 360, eatin' and drinkin' on the company dime, gettin' free stuff. . .
. . .and complaining to me on the phone about being "so tired". Gee, it must really suck being in Dallas having the time of my life. Poor thing.
P.S. I love my wife.