I wrote a pair of Back to School features for G4TV.com this week, just in time for all of the college students out there starting the new school year. The first gave me a chance to play with and talk about my favorite gadgets: Back To School Tech Checklist — What You Need To Survive College Life. In addition to suggesting tech for the classroom (like the LiveScribe Echo smartpen) and money-saving ideas for the dorm (like the Slingbox PRO HD and Boxee Box), I also included “those things you always forget” including batteries. As a tribute to my parents, I ended with a free must-have gadget, LogMeIn, which allows tech-savvy college students fix their parents PC from thousands of miles away.

My second article, Video Games That Make You Smarter, counts down the 12 games that will help tweak your brain before the semester begins. Originally designed to be a Top 10 list, I crammed in as many strategy, platform and puzzle games as I could so that students can “cram” before moving up to college. I had fun writing this one and creating the minimalist art for both articles via Photoshop. Notice: Professor Oak’s shirt matches the color of the keyword “Smarter” in the graphic.

Watching my Philadelphia Phillies from the comfort of my Los Angeles apartment has been been made easier with the new MLB.TV app on PlayStation 3. I decided to turn this technology experience into another G4TV.com review thanks to the wonderful people in the MLB Public Relations department.

As I point out in my MLB.TV PS3 App Review on G4TV, highlights include being able to hear both the home and away broadcast, and simply listening to the ballpark sounds sans the sometimes-awful commentary. The roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat. Peaceful.

On its face, Okamiden isn’t the most exciting game to report on, but I was still able to write an exciting preview thanks to the engaging questions I asked during my one-on-one interview and demo with a Capcom developer. I got him to explain to me how the game series is “sort of cursed.” The first game, Okami, was critically acclaimed in 2006, but it came out for the PS2 weeks shy of PS3‘s exciting launch. Okamiden, the Nintendo DS sequel, is scheduled to come out this month, 12 days before the Nintendo 3DS.

Read my preview of this “cursed” video game on Gaming Target.

In between writing two reviews for Machinima.com, I drove down to Irvine, CA to test out a pair of games from Square Enix, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dungeon Siege III. This two day-event marked my third time seeing the highly anticipated Deus Ex game in action — I saw it in Montreal last fall and debut at E3 2010 that summer — but my first chance to go hands-on with the gameplay. Besides a few Xbox 360 debut unit issues (video game industry vets will instantly recognize this common reset screen), this preview build offered a distinct sense of choice and a strong sci-fi narrative.

Dungeon Siege III, on the other hand, didn’t strike me as anything special. I did, however, appreciate taking a tour of developer Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas. They’re a pretty big name in this area, second only to nearby World of Warcraft-developer Blizzard Entertainment.

I could retire from my hotel room after demo sessions, but I couldn’t stop playing games altogether. I’m also reviewing Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll for Machinima.com, which requires at least 40 hours of dull gameplay! I brought my PS3 console, a controller and the game with me in the car (and a monitor just in case the TV wasn’t HD in the hotel room–it was) just to stay on top of deadlines. Weird looks from the hotel staff on my multiple trips back-and-forth from the car with so much technology? You bet.

I drove to Hollywood this week to review a game for the YouTube’s leading video game trailers channel, Machinima.com. They had an Xbox 360 debug unit set up at their offices so that I could start playing this game ahead of its release. However, I finished the game in its entirety on PS3 at home this week, as it required more than one sitting to complete and it was out the very next day. Oh well, the tricks I learned on the Xbox 360 debug version let me breeze through the first half on PS3. Plus, there was no use commuting for a second day when the game download was an Internet click away. My review turned out great and is available on Machinima’s site right here.

On the way back from visiting the Machinima offices, I took a photo of the Hollywood sign in my car’s side mirror. As an east coast native, it’s not every day that I see something like this in my car’s mirror.

Change of plans. I didn’t take my flight from NYC to LA after all because Nintendo was having a press conference in the city the week after THQ’s press junket. So I hopped a train to Pennsylvania and stayed with my parents for the three days in between the two events. No use going all the way home to LA just to fly back. There was a Sony event the same night as Nintendo’s morning press conference, so I was able to report on that as well.

Nintendo’s press conference focused on the 3DS, its glasses-free handheld that I got to playtest in Los Angeles last year. Now we have a release date and a price: March 27 and $250. I published four stories about this small, but Nintendo-executive-filled press conference here, here, here and here. Liveblogging is a must these days, so rapid-fire news posts with a follow-up GamePro.com story afterward is how I covered this event.

I took a different approach to reporting on the Sony event, which surrounded the launch of LittleBigPlanet 2 for PlayStation 3 and the end of a 50-hour video game marathon. Three players were involved in this record-breaking stunt and broke five Guinness World Records, including longest platform video game played (50 hours). But how do you report on the climax of a video game marathon when it’s being webcast live and people at proper keyboards can beat you to the punch? Looking for another angle. Since LBP2 is a four-player platform game, a Sony rep I talked to mentioned that they were rotating the fourth chair with various celebrities. Two of the celebrities happened to be from the Jersey Shore, JWoww and Pauly D.

Thus, an exclusive article was born: Sackboy meets Jersey Shore as JWoww and Pauly D play LittleBigPlanet 2 at record-breaking launch event. No one else had this story (but hundreds were reporting on the end of the marathon and, remember, that was being by Sony webcast on top of that) and no one had these great photos.

My three-part reporting duties in New York City have ended. Now to get back to Philadelphia and fly back to Los Angeles. Of course, not before I have to shovel at the old house one more time.

Almost as soon as I came back from Philadelphia for the holidays, I was on the road again, this time covering CES 2011 in Las Vegas. This was my first time reporting on the annual technology convention because it doesn’t always cater to video games. However, Microsoft had a large presence on the showfloor and a keynote to boot. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave this year’s keynote, which I reported on here, here and here. I also wrote about Tetris coming to PS3 and being integrated into TVs here.

CES 2011 was very different from the eight E3 video game conventions that I have attended. I found E3 to be more cohesive and organized, but that’s just the nature of the video game industry. You’re more aware of the large blockbuster games before stepping foot on the E3 floor and what’s going to be “hot.” At CES, technology innovations are often found in the nook and crannies of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Big players aren’t always the ones that make big news.

Two days after returning to LA from Las Vegas, I was off to a New York City press junket to write about THQ’s 2011 lineup. It had been snowing pretty badly on the east coast that week, so the van ride from JFK airport to the London hotel took over 90 minutes. Right away, I secured some authentic New York-made pizza and observed a surprisingly empty city. Over the next few days, a bunch of game journalists and I braved the cold to write about Red Faction Armageddon, de Blob 2, MX vs ATV Alive and WWE All-Stars.

The WWE All-Stars presentation was noteworthy first-off because the game is good. The arcade-focused gameplay reminds me of the AKI-developed N64 games from a dozen years ago. Second, THQ brought in WWE all-stars to show off WWE All-Stars: Sheamus, The Big Show, Kofi Kingston and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat. I’ve never been into wrestling, but appreciate the grappling system of the games more than most in the fighting genre.

The final day of the press junket was reserved for Homefront, the first-person shooter and Call of Duty rival THQ has been pushing. In order to get us from the London hotel on 54th Street to the event venue on 34th Street, THQ had us ride in a school bus – something that appears in the first level of the game. I haven’t been in a school bus since 2002, so this was a unique experience that all of the game journalists got a kick out of. “Wait, you didn’t save a seat for me? I thought we were friends?!”

Before heading back to the snow-less coast of California, I had dinner with my parents, who took the train from a station in New Jersey that isn’t too far from our home. We even got a picture in Time Square.

In addition to expanding my reporting to G4TV.com here in Los Angeles, I got a chance to pen a review and a holiday-focused video game feature for GamePro.com in San Francisco. This came about after I met their reviews editor while seated next to him on my flight to a press junket in Montreal. Game Pro Magazine made its debut in 1989 and launched its website a decade later, so it was an honor to be part of a publication I grew up reading.

I lived in Philadelphia county my entire life prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2009, and I consider myself a frequent traveler – 28 states and 17 foreign countries and counting. But I never made it a few hours north to visit Canada. Well, my back-to-back trips to Montreal occurred this past month – a year after I began living in the much-more-distant LA. No matter, I got to check out two games two weeks apart and, in between, visit my family in the Philly area and Penn State during Halloween to boot.

Reporting in Montreal on Homefront, I stayed in Le Westin and met up with fellow video game journalist friends to tour the new city. I came prepared with jokes like “Hey, let’s catch a Montreal Expos game” and arrived with the goal of trying everything “Canadian” in Canada. This included eating “Canadian Bacon” and drinking a “Canada Dry.” Both definitely tasted more Canadian. I’m pretty sure of it. You can check out my coverage of Homefront’s single-player campaign on Gaming Target. I really like the backstory and, if the gameplay comes together, think it’ll resonate with players.

Of course, THQ Studio Montreal is a big, brand-new and expensive studio, so the food was tiny (either that, or I’m really getting big in this photo), and WiFi wasn’t working despite my best efforts to get a signal.

I didn’t tell my family I was dropping in – I flew from from the Montreal airport, connected in Toronto and made my way to Philadelphia. From there, I caught a van to where I live and simply rang the doorbell. I made sure the van dropped me at the start of the block to make sure my mom and dad were surprised – and they were. My dad said, “I saw you had something under your arms [my suitcase], so I thought you were selling something and I wasn’t going to open the door.” Almost backfired on me, but it went off without a hitch.

In addition to catching up with my folks and my sister and her family, I got to visit Penn State with friends for the first time since moving to LA. It was Halloween weekend and I know I won’t make it up here as often as I did when I lived just three-and-a-half hours away, so this time the visit meant a lot. It’s probably also the last time I can crash in an apartment building with people I know. The sad truth of having to book a hotel room in a city I called “home” throughout college is finally upon me.

Here are two amazing panoramic Penn State photos that I took, one at noon and the other at night:

Back to Montreal, this time to write about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I stayed at the Delta Montreal hotel – three blocks from where I was put up two weeks ago. In that time, it got much colder in Canada… lucky we were indoors except for the very short walk to the Eidos Montreal studio. There, I got to interview lead writer Mary DeMarle.

Now to spend some time back in Los Angeles…

The fall video game season is always hectic, and I’ve been experiencing the run-up firsthand with ample coverage opportunities. First up was a Medal of Honor press junket that EA held in San Francisco. I flew there, checked into The Clift hotel and walked down to the Marines’ Memorial Club, a historic building built in 1926 and bought by the nonprofit Marines Memorial Association in 1946 as a living memorial to veterans. The Marines’ Memorial has a hotel, theater, restaurant, library, museum, military history bookstore and of course a memorial. This was the perfect venue for the reboot of EA’s Medal of Honor series, which is looking to incorporate a more true-to-life military hero’s story compared to rival Call of Duty.

At the Marines’ Memorial Club, I was also to interview DICE senior producer of multiplayer Patrick Liu.

I also got a chance to chat with Medal of Honor creative director at Danger Close, Rich Farley, and talk about the developer’s commitment to authenticity.

I flew back to Los Angeles for the weekend to spend a wink of time at the beach, then flew to San Francisco again on Monday (this time staying in the W Hotel) to play a game from THQ called Homefront. Also a military first-person shooter taking aim at Call of Duty, Homefront uses speculative fiction in its 2027-set story. By then, North Korea rises to the top of the Axis of Evil and threatens an economically devastated America on its own soil. Much of this intriguing “What If” plot doesn’t seem too far off. You can read my preview of Homefront and check out the interview I did with Erin Daly, lead multiplayer designer at developer Kaos Studios.

I flew back to LA on Wednesday to attend an event on the Disney lot in Burbank, where the movie studio was showing off a nearly complete Tangled and 20 minutes (non-consecutive minutes) of Tron: Legacy as presented by the director Joseph Kosinski. I liked Tangled – it had a good cast and memorable songs, and the story of Rapunzel is one fairytale that Disney hasn’t touched for this generation. To top it off, there were some unfinished seconds in which scenes would turn into either primitive CG or moving sketches. It was pretty neat to see how things progress in the art department with these work-in-progress rough cuts.

Tron: Legacy looked stunning as well, even though it’s further from its debut compared to Tangled. Director Joseph Kosinski cautioned us on the unfinished nature of his movie and the fact that he hasn’t gone to the Skywalker Ranch yet to complete the audio. No matter, I liked what I saw and even got a picture in front of a Tron lightcycle before moving on to the after-party (and playing the Tron Wii game – why I’m there in the first place) on the lot.

It started raining on the Disney lot, so the event wrapped-up unexpectedly and the life-sized Tron statues were covered with plastic. Looks like Tron has lots of high-tech capabilities, but comes with an “I Cannot Get Wet” label. I snapped a photo of the before and after.