So there was some delay, but that kind of thing happens when you really don’t want it to. I am sorry.
So to pick up where I left off on my E3 coverage I am going to talk about booth babes; what they are, what they do, and probably with some amazing brand of my humor in there as well. As you can notice from the above picture, two strange women got in the way of me taking a picture of that super awesome mecha statue behind them. Oh No!
The term booth babe pretty much means exactly what it says. It is an attractive woman that hangs out around a booth at a convention and pretends to be interested in the nerds there, and sometimes even has a passing knowledge of the product that she is shilling. Things are a little different during E3 though. Because these girls are supposed to be representing video games they will dress like characters from the video game, thus you have women walking around looking like elves or, as you have seen before on the site, some type of woman from a unspecified branch of the armed forces. Things get a little wonky when the game doesn’t have a set style, as they pretty much end up wearing as little clothing as possible instead of putting time into figuring one out.
Now my knowledge of wrestling, never mind luchalibre style, amounts to less than my knowledge of the Russian language (because I know how to say no in Russian) but that still doesn’t change the fact that I am pretty sure they don’t have the above style of dress for women there. If they did they would have a mask over her and she would have some crazy wrestler name like “Venus de KILL YOU”. Before anyone can really complain I do want to point out that I know that boxing has women hold up the round numbers, but this isn’t boxing.
A strange side note about this booth, beside the giant ring in the center, is that the developer of the game flew out five massively famous Luchadores to be at E3. It was kind of cool that the company was handing out posters of all five of them, and that the guys would sit at a table and personally sign it to whoever walked up, maybe even chat a little. This seemed to kind of backfire on the company as more people where more interested in taking the free poster and walking away than they where into talking to famous South Americans. The line to pose with the booth babe was infinitely longer (I say infinite because you can’t multiply zero by anything).
Yes, dear internet, there where lines to stand next to women wearing almost nothing and get your picture taken. If there was a professional photographer there (read that as a guy with a camera, a tripod and one, maybe two lights) the line was a minimum of 15 minutes. If you had the perfect storm, like above, that the girls where kind of famous you where spending your afternoon to stand near them. Keep in mind that you are next to these women for at the most 2 minutes, and they don’t really respond to questions.
One of my favorite things about the entire event was that towards the end of the day, any of the days, you could start looking at the shoulders of the poor girls and see caked in marks of deodorant from where hundreds of guys had had their arms around them. This is kind of the point that I would like to make it very clear that I never took my picture with any of them, I was there to cover games and take pictures to make fun of other people later.
Just for those curious the reason these women where famous is because they where Playboy Playmates of a certain month. They rotated out pretty regularly, and seemingly everyone of them from the last year made a showing. The only reason I know any of that is because there was a GIANT POSTER next to them explaining that. You know, cause that deserves a three hour wait.
I don’t want to give them impression that every “actor” at the event was a woman. While it was uncommon you could still stumble on a place like THQ that would throw two guys into over sized costumes (the guy standing next to them was just shy of six foot) and have them walk around the booth. It seems weird that the only people in costume at the event that seemed to be having a good time, or had any level of unique personality where the guys at this booth. Honestly one of my favorite stories comes from here.
The story involves this guy. So I stopped to take a picture, because I am huge Relic/Warhammer fan, and notice that he starts walking away and into a crowd. Since this was the last day and I was kind of used to people walking around like they where insane and I didn’t really think anything of it, just continued to take really blurry pictures while I thought about the new Dawn of War expansion I was hoping would be announced.
That is when I noticed that he was walking quietly behind two booth babes, making no noise. Seeming to notice that someone was following them one of the girls turned around, only to notice that a seven foot tall Ogre with a battle ax was behind her. The scream was that of a person who just noticed someone was about to punt a baby. This caused the second woman to turn around with similar results, only twice as loud.
Like I said, it was the only booth that the “actors” showed any real interest in their work.
