Tuesday, April 01, 2008
-Yes, that is right, the Midwest Gaming Classic happened a few months early this year, and I made the trek down to Oconomowac, Wisconsin, alongside Joey & Chris. We took, Joe's vehicle which is a far better option than mine due to more space and more importantly, cruise control! But before I move on with my recap of MGC 08, I got a few other things I have to run down that happened prior to MGC.
-I had a 5 day break from work, first time I had that many stretch of days off in a while. Didn't leave out of town until Friday morning, so Wendesday night I met up with Chris, and we picked up in the middle of the third mission of Army of Two, and played it for five hours straight until we completed the game in co-op! That makes Army of Two game #4 I completed thus far in 2008!. Game was made for co-op, and was a fun co-op experience all around, I'll say I had better experiences in Halo 3 and Gears Co-op, but Army of Two shouldn't be overlooked by any means. Unfortunately, for some weird reason, I didn't receive the end mission achievements, but did receive ones for 25 revivals, 250 assault kill, and a few other culminative achievements, but trust me I did beat it!
-On Thursday, I met up with Ann and a couple of her friends at Bucs and we shot pool for a couple hours. First time I got out in what seems a while. I actually nailed the 8 ball on my first call in what seems like the first time ever. Must be all that practice from Bankshot Billiards on XBLA.
-So Friday morning I met up early around 6am with Chris and Joey, we got some crappy McDs breakfast and started our 11 hour trek towards Oconomowoc. We got on the road around 7am, and finished unpacking at the hotel around 6:30pm. We scoped out the hotel, which also happens to have the convention center in it where MGC will take place. The hotel had a pretty awesome arcade in it too, with Simpsons pinball, Madden and Blitz football, Cruis 'n Exotica, Crazy Taxi, and a few others that we toyed around with! So after checking out the place, we scoured the little bit of Oconomowoc I knew for something to eat, and ended up at Rocky Rococoa's Pizza, which specialized in some mighty awesome pan pizza. After getting back from righteous pizza, the club in the hotel just happened to be doing karaoke, and I just had to participate. Everyone else was singing country songs, so screw that, I went up there and rock and rocked out to Metallica's Fuel! After killing everyone's ears for that song (I should have sang more!), I retired to the hotel room, played a little bit of Phoenix Wright on the DS, watched an episode of South Park Joey recorded off of tv onto his laptop, and passed out with ease.
Check out this short vid of my horrible, and the Gruel means horrible...karaoke skills
So Saturday was the first day of the convention, and unfortunately I could only make it to the first day because I had to leave late Saturday to be back in town on Sunday for Wrestlemania, yes Wrestlemania 24 because as longtime readers of this blog shall recall, I go all out and have been throwing awesome Wrestlemania parties since Wrestlemania 19! Anywho, we got in shortly after the doors opened at 10am, and I immediately noticed the teamfremont.com booth, where John & Hilden were residing for the majority of the show! Twas awesome to see those guys again since last year's MGC in June. I said hello, and introduced them to Joe & Chris, and we quickly made our way to do some geeking out and emptying of our wallets. I made 3 out of my 4 purchases within the first 15 minutes I was there. I picked up Devil's Crush on TurboGrafX-16, Family Feud for 3DO, and Tyson's Punch-Out for NES. My last pickup of the day later on was Pinball - Gottileb Collection for PS2.
MGC had a far better layout this year, with now far more vendors in the main hall than last year, plus they had a better arcade machine turnout this year too. There were a ton of arcade and especially pinball machines set on free play for anyone to walk up to and play their hearts away. The tournament hall also seemed improve, I didn't participate in any tournaments last year, but I was told the shoot-em-up tournament was far more streamlined this year and was executed a lot smoother. This year I did try my hand at the Guitar Hero 3 tournament there, you had to qualify on selected songs on hard, and unfortunately I never got around to practicing for a couple weeks so of course my timing was off and I failed miserably to qualify. The last hall, the museum hall, seemed mostly unchanged from the year prior, and it had damn near every video game system imaginable on display, as long as a couple dozen hooked up to try out (I think they had nearly every single game ever released for the Lynx available to play), I got a chance to play the Vectrex again, Mine Storm is awesome!
I had a very busy and fun day that day, which made me all the more sad for missing out on the second day for browsing and game playing. At 1pm Team Fremont did their annual roundtable podcast that I got a chance to be a part of, it wasn't quite the 11 man behometh it was last year, only 9 guys for this one. Originally the podcast wasn't suppose to happen until Sunday, and I was a little bummed I was going to miss out on it this year, however John caught up with me a little later in the show and told me he wanted to make sure to get me in the show that they decided to bump it up a day. That was very awesome of the Team Fremont guys to do that, and go out of their way during their very busy MGC schedule....thank you so much for doing that! Right click and save here to download that podcast!
After the Team Fremont Podcast, at 2pm they had Walter Day as a guest speaker, for those who don't know, Walter Day is the head referee at Twin Galaxies and was featured throughout the awesome documentary, King of Kong. He did an awesome presentation clarifying a lot of what the King of Kong documentary failed to mention, and how it put a very heavy spin on portraying Twin Galaxies in a negative light. After that finished up I was picked as one of two participants from the Team Fremont forum community to compete in their annual Midwest Game Show Clasic, which is essentially videogame Jeopardy, but with lots of videogame challenges thrown in the mix for good measure. There were two teams, me and the other TF forum member, Boric were placed on separated teams and joined with two randomly selected participants from the crowd who entered earlier to be drawn to compete. And guess who one of the two other participants was.......that's right, my own brother Joey....so as John announced the PA, "Looks like we're going to have a sibling rivalry!"
The Game Show was definitely a standout highlight for me. Those questions were no walk in the park either, I consider myself to know a pretty decent amount of the history of games and got a few oddball questions right like knowing of the Ultra games label, Johnny Turbo, and the "Morph" line of games on the Jaguar. But damn were there a lot of other trick questions, but the guy who made the board (the guy's name escapes me right now, darnit) did a damn good job at testing our knowledge. The gameplay challenges were fun too, there were two player and single player challenges like a 2 player challenge to see who can get a higher score in a level of Raiden 3, or single player challenges like beat a level of Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but I drew a single player challenge where I had to beat a whole level and the level end boss of Castle Shikagomi 2 on PS2 with just one life, now I'm admittedly horrible at shmups, and I'm lucky if I can make it to the second or third level alone on the default number of lives in a credit. To make things worse, the host got the crowd involved on single player challenges and allowed up to two people to verbally assualt me as much as possible in order to distract me and if I failed then they won a prize, but if I won, I got a prize, and one of the guys was literally screaming right up in my ear at insane levels to the point of insanity....but somehow, someway I managed to pull off that amazing feat with just one life, I have no idea how I did it, but I did, and won a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2, which was well earned if you ask me.
By the time we got to the final question we were both in negative points, so whoever won the last gameplay challenge was going to be determined the winner, and Boric and I faced off in a round of Street Fighter Alpha 3...Chun-Li vs. good 'ol Ryu for me....unfortunately I'm horrible using the arcade stick for fighters, and it showed I missed my good 'ol D-pad as Boric ousted me in two straight rounds, the second was a lot closer though and the crowd was really into it. So we loss, but me and my partner (I think his name was Paul) got a ton of consolation prizes like some games for systems I don't own (some game on the Lynx and Blue Lightning for the Jaguar CD), a Ninja Gaiden DS stylus, a Dreamcast controller, a Genesis controller, an N64 keychain, and a SOCOM first aid kit. Overall, it was a blast to compete in, and I had a helluva time.
After the Game Show, I went and watched another presentation, this one put on by former EGM staff, and current vgevo.com founders "Trickman" Terry Munich, and the former "Sushi-X" Ken Williams! They told some stories about the good 'ol days of EGM, like how whenever they needed to vent at the office they kicked around a copy of the old mock up box cover for the NES New Kids on the Block game, and Ken did a very special preview Street Fighter 4. Great presentation, after that I immediately went over to the TFL booth again where we were recording another podcast for Glenn's show, Playstation Nation. Real good discussion which turned into an interview midway through as Walter Day himself joined in out of nowhere and we got a chance to talk to him in person. To download and check out that podcast Click right here!
Shortly after that podcast ended the show was about to close for the day, I used the last little bit of time I had to play a little more pinball and browse around some more. Then after that it was time for the annual Team Fremont afterparty. Team Fremont got a suite and there were a ton of people there and I got to throw down in some Mario Kart DS multiplayer, and Rock Band, as well as converse with the awesome community there. Chris played a lot of Crisis Core on PSP while we're there, but we managed to grab him away from that for some Rock Band, Joey played a lot of Mario Kart with Sushi and Boric and I and a bit of Rock Band also! Around 11pm we had to leave to make the long trek home! That drive home sucked, we recorded a podcast right when we got on the road with Chris's cell phone, I have no idea how well it'll turn out....I don't have high hopes though, but thank goodness for energy drinks or else I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.
If you haven't already had enough pics to see, you can check out the rest I took right here
And all of Chris's photos can be found here
All in all though, a damn awesome time, and I can't wait again for next year's event!
-So I managed to get home by around 10am Sunday, and I passed out hard for a good 5 hours and quickly got ready for Wrestlemania 24! I already prepped up my trivia board days before, last year I did a wrestling themed Family Feud, this year wrestling themed-Jeopardy, and it was all based around Wrestlemania, with categories like "Undertaker 15-0, Wrestlemania's Craziest Matches, Celebrities at Wrestlemania, etc" I put a damn lot of effort into it, and it looked like everyone had a lot of fun. It was too bad I had a shorter than usual turnout for the PPV. Dick, Dave, Ryan, and Whitney made it over again which twas awesome, but Paul couldn't cause of the hockey game and Steve was there for a short while but left cause he wasn't feeling too well.
Wrestlemania 24 itself was awesome, I have no idea how the WWE continues to pull out all the stops and deliver at Wrestlemania. Money in the Bank lived up to its name with a bunch of crazy-ass spots, Cena didn't win the belt, Flair-Michaels was an all time classic Wrestlemania moment in and of itself, the Mayweather-Big Show fight didn't end up being the debocle I thought it would be and ended up being a damn good entertaining spectacle comparable to Vince/Shane at WM17 (everyone at the party was really into it!), and just when it came to Edge/Taker in the main event and I thought how could they possibly top everything else, they did, and pulled out all the stops to have a classic title match! Great Wrestlemania all around, and a definite must buy on DVD!
-That is all I have for this insanely long entry, thank you for reading it if you made it this far!
-I had a 5 day break from work, first time I had that many stretch of days off in a while. Didn't leave out of town until Friday morning, so Wendesday night I met up with Chris, and we picked up in the middle of the third mission of Army of Two, and played it for five hours straight until we completed the game in co-op! That makes Army of Two game #4 I completed thus far in 2008!. Game was made for co-op, and was a fun co-op experience all around, I'll say I had better experiences in Halo 3 and Gears Co-op, but Army of Two shouldn't be overlooked by any means. Unfortunately, for some weird reason, I didn't receive the end mission achievements, but did receive ones for 25 revivals, 250 assault kill, and a few other culminative achievements, but trust me I did beat it!
-On Thursday, I met up with Ann and a couple of her friends at Bucs and we shot pool for a couple hours. First time I got out in what seems a while. I actually nailed the 8 ball on my first call in what seems like the first time ever. Must be all that practice from Bankshot Billiards on XBLA.
-So Friday morning I met up early around 6am with Chris and Joey, we got some crappy McDs breakfast and started our 11 hour trek towards Oconomowoc. We got on the road around 7am, and finished unpacking at the hotel around 6:30pm. We scoped out the hotel, which also happens to have the convention center in it where MGC will take place. The hotel had a pretty awesome arcade in it too, with Simpsons pinball, Madden and Blitz football, Cruis 'n Exotica, Crazy Taxi, and a few others that we toyed around with! So after checking out the place, we scoured the little bit of Oconomowoc I knew for something to eat, and ended up at Rocky Rococoa's Pizza, which specialized in some mighty awesome pan pizza. After getting back from righteous pizza, the club in the hotel just happened to be doing karaoke, and I just had to participate. Everyone else was singing country songs, so screw that, I went up there and rock and rocked out to Metallica's Fuel! After killing everyone's ears for that song (I should have sang more!), I retired to the hotel room, played a little bit of Phoenix Wright on the DS, watched an episode of South Park Joey recorded off of tv onto his laptop, and passed out with ease.
Check out this short vid of my horrible, and the Gruel means horrible...karaoke skills
So Saturday was the first day of the convention, and unfortunately I could only make it to the first day because I had to leave late Saturday to be back in town on Sunday for Wrestlemania, yes Wrestlemania 24 because as longtime readers of this blog shall recall, I go all out and have been throwing awesome Wrestlemania parties since Wrestlemania 19! Anywho, we got in shortly after the doors opened at 10am, and I immediately noticed the teamfremont.com booth, where John & Hilden were residing for the majority of the show! Twas awesome to see those guys again since last year's MGC in June. I said hello, and introduced them to Joe & Chris, and we quickly made our way to do some geeking out and emptying of our wallets. I made 3 out of my 4 purchases within the first 15 minutes I was there. I picked up Devil's Crush on TurboGrafX-16, Family Feud for 3DO, and Tyson's Punch-Out for NES. My last pickup of the day later on was Pinball - Gottileb Collection for PS2.
MGC had a far better layout this year, with now far more vendors in the main hall than last year, plus they had a better arcade machine turnout this year too. There were a ton of arcade and especially pinball machines set on free play for anyone to walk up to and play their hearts away. The tournament hall also seemed improve, I didn't participate in any tournaments last year, but I was told the shoot-em-up tournament was far more streamlined this year and was executed a lot smoother. This year I did try my hand at the Guitar Hero 3 tournament there, you had to qualify on selected songs on hard, and unfortunately I never got around to practicing for a couple weeks so of course my timing was off and I failed miserably to qualify. The last hall, the museum hall, seemed mostly unchanged from the year prior, and it had damn near every video game system imaginable on display, as long as a couple dozen hooked up to try out (I think they had nearly every single game ever released for the Lynx available to play), I got a chance to play the Vectrex again, Mine Storm is awesome!
I had a very busy and fun day that day, which made me all the more sad for missing out on the second day for browsing and game playing. At 1pm Team Fremont did their annual roundtable podcast that I got a chance to be a part of, it wasn't quite the 11 man behometh it was last year, only 9 guys for this one. Originally the podcast wasn't suppose to happen until Sunday, and I was a little bummed I was going to miss out on it this year, however John caught up with me a little later in the show and told me he wanted to make sure to get me in the show that they decided to bump it up a day. That was very awesome of the Team Fremont guys to do that, and go out of their way during their very busy MGC schedule....thank you so much for doing that! Right click and save here to download that podcast!
After the Team Fremont Podcast, at 2pm they had Walter Day as a guest speaker, for those who don't know, Walter Day is the head referee at Twin Galaxies and was featured throughout the awesome documentary, King of Kong. He did an awesome presentation clarifying a lot of what the King of Kong documentary failed to mention, and how it put a very heavy spin on portraying Twin Galaxies in a negative light. After that finished up I was picked as one of two participants from the Team Fremont forum community to compete in their annual Midwest Game Show Clasic, which is essentially videogame Jeopardy, but with lots of videogame challenges thrown in the mix for good measure. There were two teams, me and the other TF forum member, Boric were placed on separated teams and joined with two randomly selected participants from the crowd who entered earlier to be drawn to compete. And guess who one of the two other participants was.......that's right, my own brother Joey....so as John announced the PA, "Looks like we're going to have a sibling rivalry!"
The Game Show was definitely a standout highlight for me. Those questions were no walk in the park either, I consider myself to know a pretty decent amount of the history of games and got a few oddball questions right like knowing of the Ultra games label, Johnny Turbo, and the "Morph" line of games on the Jaguar. But damn were there a lot of other trick questions, but the guy who made the board (the guy's name escapes me right now, darnit) did a damn good job at testing our knowledge. The gameplay challenges were fun too, there were two player and single player challenges like a 2 player challenge to see who can get a higher score in a level of Raiden 3, or single player challenges like beat a level of Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but I drew a single player challenge where I had to beat a whole level and the level end boss of Castle Shikagomi 2 on PS2 with just one life, now I'm admittedly horrible at shmups, and I'm lucky if I can make it to the second or third level alone on the default number of lives in a credit. To make things worse, the host got the crowd involved on single player challenges and allowed up to two people to verbally assualt me as much as possible in order to distract me and if I failed then they won a prize, but if I won, I got a prize, and one of the guys was literally screaming right up in my ear at insane levels to the point of insanity....but somehow, someway I managed to pull off that amazing feat with just one life, I have no idea how I did it, but I did, and won a copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2, which was well earned if you ask me.
By the time we got to the final question we were both in negative points, so whoever won the last gameplay challenge was going to be determined the winner, and Boric and I faced off in a round of Street Fighter Alpha 3...Chun-Li vs. good 'ol Ryu for me....unfortunately I'm horrible using the arcade stick for fighters, and it showed I missed my good 'ol D-pad as Boric ousted me in two straight rounds, the second was a lot closer though and the crowd was really into it. So we loss, but me and my partner (I think his name was Paul) got a ton of consolation prizes like some games for systems I don't own (some game on the Lynx and Blue Lightning for the Jaguar CD), a Ninja Gaiden DS stylus, a Dreamcast controller, a Genesis controller, an N64 keychain, and a SOCOM first aid kit. Overall, it was a blast to compete in, and I had a helluva time.
After the Game Show, I went and watched another presentation, this one put on by former EGM staff, and current vgevo.com founders "Trickman" Terry Munich, and the former "Sushi-X" Ken Williams! They told some stories about the good 'ol days of EGM, like how whenever they needed to vent at the office they kicked around a copy of the old mock up box cover for the NES New Kids on the Block game, and Ken did a very special preview Street Fighter 4. Great presentation, after that I immediately went over to the TFL booth again where we were recording another podcast for Glenn's show, Playstation Nation. Real good discussion which turned into an interview midway through as Walter Day himself joined in out of nowhere and we got a chance to talk to him in person. To download and check out that podcast Click right here!
Shortly after that podcast ended the show was about to close for the day, I used the last little bit of time I had to play a little more pinball and browse around some more. Then after that it was time for the annual Team Fremont afterparty. Team Fremont got a suite and there were a ton of people there and I got to throw down in some Mario Kart DS multiplayer, and Rock Band, as well as converse with the awesome community there. Chris played a lot of Crisis Core on PSP while we're there, but we managed to grab him away from that for some Rock Band, Joey played a lot of Mario Kart with Sushi and Boric and I and a bit of Rock Band also! Around 11pm we had to leave to make the long trek home! That drive home sucked, we recorded a podcast right when we got on the road with Chris's cell phone, I have no idea how well it'll turn out....I don't have high hopes though, but thank goodness for energy drinks or else I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.
If you haven't already had enough pics to see, you can check out the rest I took right here
And all of Chris's photos can be found here
All in all though, a damn awesome time, and I can't wait again for next year's event!
-So I managed to get home by around 10am Sunday, and I passed out hard for a good 5 hours and quickly got ready for Wrestlemania 24! I already prepped up my trivia board days before, last year I did a wrestling themed Family Feud, this year wrestling themed-Jeopardy, and it was all based around Wrestlemania, with categories like "Undertaker 15-0, Wrestlemania's Craziest Matches, Celebrities at Wrestlemania, etc" I put a damn lot of effort into it, and it looked like everyone had a lot of fun. It was too bad I had a shorter than usual turnout for the PPV. Dick, Dave, Ryan, and Whitney made it over again which twas awesome, but Paul couldn't cause of the hockey game and Steve was there for a short while but left cause he wasn't feeling too well.
Wrestlemania 24 itself was awesome, I have no idea how the WWE continues to pull out all the stops and deliver at Wrestlemania. Money in the Bank lived up to its name with a bunch of crazy-ass spots, Cena didn't win the belt, Flair-Michaels was an all time classic Wrestlemania moment in and of itself, the Mayweather-Big Show fight didn't end up being the debocle I thought it would be and ended up being a damn good entertaining spectacle comparable to Vince/Shane at WM17 (everyone at the party was really into it!), and just when it came to Edge/Taker in the main event and I thought how could they possibly top everything else, they did, and pulled out all the stops to have a classic title match! Great Wrestlemania all around, and a definite must buy on DVD!
-That is all I have for this insanely long entry, thank you for reading it if you made it this far!
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