Soda is the hizouse! I know how much everyone needs their monthly
dosage of Soda in the WIR so I won’t deny you any longer. I wanted
to give everyone a heads up as to what’s going on with the SB lately
and in the near future. If you’re a regular reader of the site than
you probably have already heard about the Austin
Gaming Expo we’re scheduled to attend. I have to admit that
I’ve had mixed feelings about us having a booth there, but as the
event gets closer I am getting more excited. Cone came up with some
pretty good ideas for our booth and some things we could give away.
If you’re going to be in the area come by and give us a shout. It’s
only five bucks and we’re always excited to meet a fan. We were
also hoping the have our t-shirts ready for the show. In a way we
do, but it’s not exactly what we were hoping for. We released our
first T-shirt designs this week in the forums, for those of you
who didn’t catch it here
is the link. I already explained to everyone in the forums that
they are iron-on’s, not screen-printing. I have my shirt already
and it looks pretty nice, The Wraith informed me that his washed
really well too. Everyone is more than welcome to check them out
and we hope that you guys are willing to sport our logo and support
our site. Of course all this recent marketing we’ve been doing is
all leading up to one big event; the unveiling of Snackbar V.2.
We’re trying to keep everything about it as much of a secret as
possible so I’m just going to tell you that it’s going to be sweet.

Last week at EB I picked up a copy of NFL 2K3 for the Xbox.
The main reason I bought such an old game is that it was really
freaking cheap, and I’m a sucker for a sports game. I figured that
I’m more than likely going to be the one to right the reviews when
the 2004 football games come out and I haven’t had any experience
with Sega Sports football since 2K1 on the Dreamcast. I played if
for a while, I defiantly got my ten bucks worth out of it. The reason
I mention it is that Sega Sports made an announcement this week
that their sports line will no longer carry the 2Kx title. Since
they already use the “ESPN style presentation” in their
games Sega decided it would be a good idea to try and capture a
larger audience by using the ESPN namesake in their game titles.
For example; this years Sega Sports football game will be titled
ESPN NFL Football 2004. I would tend to agree with Sega Sports
that this is a good move since they are desperately trying to keep
up with EA Sports. Since EA has already told us that they aren’t
going to offer sports games on Live I say anything that increase
Sega Sports’ budget for future games is a good thing.

Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter hit the Xbox and PS2 this week.
I know that many people have been anxiously awaiting this game,
Pretzel included, but I have to go on the record as saying that

I’m not terribly excited. While I don’t dislike First Person Shooters,
it just seems like they are cranked out these days. Every week someone
is all pumped up about another FPS, last week it was Soldier
of Fortune 2. I’m sure that Mace Griffin is going to be a pretty
good game, and I’m not going to jump to any conclusions before I
even play it, but isn’t it time for some creativity? I guess as
long as people keep buying them, companies will keep making them
and we’ll keep reviewing them. It’s a vicious cycle.

In all honestly I’ve pretty much covered every bit of news from
the previous week that I consider important. It seems that I keep
getting stuck with uneventful weeks. I wanted to take a second to
talk about something personal. When Cone, Pic and myself came up
with the idea for Snackbar we never dreamed it would become what
it has in such a short amount of time. The response we’ve gotten
has been overwhelming positive and inspiring. Over the past six
months we’ve welcomed many people into the SB family, and we hope
that our readers have enjoyed seeing our characters develop and
find our style and place in the internet community. The fact that
we’re about to take this thing to the next level is both exciting
and unnerving, we can only hope to receive a fraction of the success
we’ve had so far. Above everyone else I wanted to give The Wraith
a gigantic thanks from the SB crew. He’s the manager at the EB Games
we all shop at and the more involved he’s gotten in the site the
better it’s been. I just wanted to let all our readers know that
he’s one of the major factors that helped us keep ticking and all
the EB guys can take a lot of credit for the success we’ve had in
our first 6 months.

Until next month, Soda Out!