I tend to be on friendly terms with PR people without going to Hawaii. I see them a lot. They're typically very nice, and a lot of them are helpful and good at their jobs. I'm also pretty candid with them and don't hide what I think about a game until it's review time, which a lot of them seem to appreciate. I've given a lot of very low scores and only had one instance where a publisher bitched about it (none of which was EA, by the way, or Capcom).
It's hard to explain how these events work, mentally speaking, but I am a hundred percent serious when I say they are more often a pain in the ass than anything else. And the place I'm playing a game hasn't once had an impact on how I felt about it. It didn't make Dragon's Dogma better, it didn't make Lost Planet 2 better. In fact, events like this and their regimented schedules tend to stress me out more than local events. I have a ton of shit to get done in a very compact schedule.
I understand why people think these trips make press more likely to like things, but if you look at the coverage coming out of them, that influence is virtually never borne out. At least not while I've been active in the press. I don't want to write off the possibility that someone could be influenced, but I've never seen it happen. I think people are much more likely to be led astray or into hyberbole by their enthusiasm for specific things, which is not going to go away. It's an opinion driven industry. Opinions owe as large a part to enthusiasm as anything.
