Welcome to hell!!!

-So I just finished up my awesome vacation from work and got back in town last Sunday from Wisconsin and the Midwest Gaming Classic. But before I get to that I must pick up where I left off.
-Started vacation on Thursday, and mostly spent the day hanging out with Matt. We played through the first few levels in Iron Man & XO ManOwar on PSone which was a very basic sidescroller with some ok graphics for the time. But then we teamed up and finished off the rest of the Metal Slug games on Anthology on PS2, and completed Metal Slug X, 3, 4, and 5 in an average of 45 minutes each. Simply put, the Metal Slug games rule. Add Civil War and Metal Slug Anthology now to the games I have completed this year so far and it raises my total to 7! hoo-rah!

-I finished up a couple more trades since my last update. Astonishing Xmen #1-12 was an amazing read. Prolly the first time I recall really enjoying an X-Book. I am also nearly finished reading the first DMZ trade from Vertigo. I really dig the art style in the near post-apocalyptic future and the story has me hooked thus far.

-I somehow managed to do 2 podcasts within four days which is a new record where I consider myself lucky if I manage to do two withing a month of each other. Episode 30 I recorded with Ryan and Kubryk and it was all about basketball games.....or was it? Episode 31 is the audio blog of my 2 day experience at the Midwest Gaming Classic, if you don't want to read a whole lot more I suggest downloading and listening to that instead.

-So on Friday I left and started my 10 hour trek to Wisconsin. Didn't do too bad, left at 9am, got to my hotel on the outer suburbs of Milwaukee around 7pm. Only made 2 gas/food stops. There was a Texas Roadhouse and movie theater directly next to my hotel, I was going to visit both establishments that night, but the drive there drained the hell out of me and I ended up passing out instead.

It was then Saturday, the first day of the MGC. I made an entrance in grand fashion decked out as none other than Hulk Hogan himself. I only had the wig and bandana on for just a few minutes upon early cuz I roasting under it and I could see jack shit in the convention center. But anyhoo, the convention center was set up quite nicely. Think of it divided into two big halves. One half consisted of vendors and arcade/pinball machines set up on free play. The other half had a section squared off for speakers and other machines and consoles set up for pinball and shmup (shoot-em-up) tournaments, the rest of that section was a mini-video game museum which had nearly every console and portable system made on display and many for play.

So I spent a good while Saturday first looking at vendors. There was quite a selection of games to choose from. There was even an import shop that had a very nice selection (Mad Gear) of imports. I ended up getting a bunch of old comic book licensed Genesis games, along with a couple 3DO and TurboGrafx games in order to start racking up my collection of games on those platforms. My two favorite purchases were Punisher on Genesis (which is a port of the arcade game I loved so much) and an English version of Mother (Earthbound Zero) for the NES.

Moe, John, and Hilden from Team Fremont were there and had a booth set up at MGC for recording interviews and to host a trivia show they called the Midwest Game Show Classic. It was a Jeopardy style trivia game, but with videogame questions and gameplay challenges. It was pretty fun to watch as Moe did an awesome job hosting the event, and the crowd got really into it in some very close matches in Street Fighter 2. Click here to check out a quick little video snippet I took from it.



After the game show classic, I must have spent at least a couple hours in the game museum checking out all the systems on display and reading up the little history cards with them that were filled with many little factoids that I didn't even know about on many platforms. There was also many games to play there and on Saturday I spent a good deal of time playing almost all 14 Virtual Boy games ever released (along with a Japanese shmup I think called V-Force), and also played a bunch of Lynx games (from what I understand every singly Lynx game ever released was there for play), and played Gate of Thunder and Bonk's Revenge on the Turbo Duo. It was the first time I ever played a Lynx and Turbo Duo, also played a Vectrex for the first time ever as I wasted a lot of time on what I called "Vectroids" until I found it was called "Mine Storm." I had a blast playing all these games on platforms I barely ever touched before.



After playing a bit of games, there were some speakers I got a chance to see afterwards. They had about 7 speakers in total for Saturday, I only had a chance to see 2. One was Ben Heck, a console hacker who had a cool presentation of how he hacked apart many game consoles and turned them into portable and other gadgets he crafted. The other presentation I saw was former EGM writers Trickman Terry and Sushi-X giving a presentation about the good old days in the 90s at EGM back when it kicked major ass and the new site they are working on now, VGevo.



After those speakers day one of the convention was coming close to an end at 8pm. One of the MGC organizers was cool enough to reserve one of the banquet rooms for us that night which we used for an aftershow party and had plenty of alcohol and pizza. It was cool catching up with many of the same people I met at the Daryls last January like Moe, John, and Hilden from Team Fremont, Torgo from the Playstation Nation podcast, the so called "Couch Bandits" Savory Cade & Cap'n Rawkenschpiel, and finally meeting the Broadcast Gamer crew of MC Wilson and Boric. Here is a short youtube vid of the afterparty I took so you could get an idea of what it was like.





Besides shooting the bull, there was Guitar Hero 2 set up and a PS3 installed to keep the 25 or so of us occupied, and there was lots of DS multiplayer throwdown going on with Bomberman Land & Touch and Tetris DS. To my shock, I actually won a first to 3 wins multiplayer match in Bomberman between 7 players. I won it within 5 rounds in quick fashion, which is just as shocking considering I couldn't even win a single round in 10 player Saturn Bomberman at the Daryls. So overall, the afterparty kicked all types of ass. But around 12:30 I went back to the hotel to pass out and prepare for day 2!

Started out day 2 playing a lot of games. Played quite a bit of pinball, then met up with Torgo and challenged him in NBA 2K7 on his PS3 he brought along. We played 2 minute quarters so we didn't hog the machine. It was a very close match and my dumbass couldn't get the hang of the controls and I still missed a couple key shots and I ended up losing at the wire 23-22. I followed that up by playing Ninja Spirit, Battle Royal, Kickboxer, and Dungeon Explorer on the Turbo Express. I then played a good amount of Jaguar games for awhile, of which I came out really liking Super Burnout, Brutal Football, and Tempest 2000. Dammit, now I want a Jaguar. After that it was about 1pm and time to meet up at the Team Fremont booth to record a podcast. I was a little skeptical going into it beforehand because from what I understood there was going to be eleven people recording and I had no idea if they'd be able to pull it off with that much equipment and not have us talking over each other all the time, but major props to Hilden for being one hell of a moderator and it turned out to be real good. You can check out the 11-man podcast here.



After the podcast recording session there was just a couple hours left which I used to play some more games and hang out with the aforementioned people. From leaving the convention center I went out and grabbed a quick bite to eat and immediately started my trek home around 7pm and got back home at 5am. Thank goodness for energy drinks making that drive possible. Overall it was a damn good experience that I am thrilled made the trip down for, and I can't wait to make the trip down there next year. Here is all my purchases from the MGC

Genesis - Maximum Carnage, X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Punisher, Captain America and the Avengers, Comix Zone
3DO - John Madden Football, Total Eclipse, Blade Force
Turbo Grafx - Side Arms, Bloody Wolf
NES - Mother (Earthbound Zero)
Game Gear - NBA Jam


-Upon getting back from the MGC I arrived to Forks with it being hot as hell. I wanted to get my A/C installed but just couldn't find someone to help me install it on Monday. I ended up escaping my roasting apartment by seeing a couple movies at the air conditioned theater....

Ocean's 13 - Makes up for the crap that was 12. 13 brings it back to focusing on the heist, and less on the wacky side hijinx. Very good, but I still like 11 better. 8.5/10

Knocked Up - Very funny flick, it walks that fine line of being a spoof but doesn't go too over the top so it can still be taken somewhat seriously. Comedy of the year thusfar for me. 9/10

also checked out this film on DVD while I was at the hotel...

Now You Know - filmed in 2002, but just released last year on DVD, this one is an indy film written and directed by Jeff Anderson, more commonly known as Randall from Clerks. Tiz about a couple breaking off a wedding at the last minute and returning home to find themselves. I was skeptical going in since Anderson never had any experience making movies, but he pulled this one off very good with some very engaging dialogue and I enjoyed it until the end. Kevin Smith and his wife also make interesting cameos at the beginning of the film. 8/10

-Okay, now this long ass entry is done! If you managed to read/listen to all that, major props! Time for me to pass out. Latez!

Labels: The Midwest Gaming Classic 2007