Welcome to hell!!!

-Hey Yo! Here it is, time again for my yearly MGC blog. Make sure you got the time to spare, because this blog is going to be a novel like previous MGC entries. After last year's bizarre drive, and due to conflicting schedules, Joe and I drove down separately from Chris & Lyzz. The show started on a Saturday, March 27, but as usual there was a ton of preplanned festivities with the VGevo community the day before the show.

Since I could only get so much time off work due to it being a busy time of the year for us, I was only able to start my vacation on Thursday, which did not leave any room for me to adjust my sleep pattern so Joe and I ended up starting our drive late Thursday night around 11pm. It was going to be a long 11 and a half hour drive to Milwaukee. Joe drove the first two hours. Then he passed out for a majority of the remainder of the trip while I drove throughout the night, so not being able to adjust my sleep pattern ended up working out for the better. We got into Milwaukee around 11am and Joe wanted to hit up his favorite pizza joint we have only seen in Wisconsin, Rocky Rococoas, and so the first pic I took of the vacation ended up being there. Luckily, there was a Rocky's in a food court right across from the hotel we were staying at in the Sheraton.

From there we went to the hotel lobby where Joe and I ran into Glenn, host of the PSNation podcast, another show off the VGevo Podcast Network. Also ran into VGevo user Fluffy Nuts who flew all the way from Australia. They wanted to catch lunch, but Joe and I were already ate and I desperately needed to catch a quick nap before the night's festivities started. After catching a few hours of zzzs we met up with around 20 or so people from the VGevo community at a local sports bar-esque establishment for dinner. Highlight of that was me thinking the waiter forgot about my beer 10 minutes after I ordered it, so I went to the bar to get one and came back to him just giving me my brew so I had to double fist them.



After dinner, everyone reconvened at the hotel bar where they brought in a local karaoke DJ with over a 100,000 songs on file. He had one the biggest song lists I have ever seen. Lots of people were pumping in requests too so I was only able to get up there and sing just two songs for the five or six hours karaoke ran. I belted out Green Day's "Minority" to a certain degree of success, but then proceeded to bomb the holy hell out of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." That was one I always wanted to sing, but I guess I did not have the chops for it, that and I was quite drunk too. I think I had a bit much to drink that night, but when reviewing my tab receipt the next morning I think the bartender must have forgot to add at least a few drinks to my tab, that or many people were generous that night.

So Friday's festivities resulted in a mild hangover for the first couple of hours of MGC. In previous years VGevo itself had a couple tables setup where the two founders Ken & Terry would usually run the table all weekend. This year however VGevo got an entire conference room, which meant each podcast had their own table. Each show brought a television or two and had games running all weekend. Most brought pretty sweet HD sets, I did not trust hauling my LCD TV for that long of a trip so I brought my puny 9" standard definition TV, and had an N64 hooked up to it the entire weekend. MGC usually specializes in selling more retro games and has a sweet videogame museum there, so I went a little old school compared to the rest of the podcasters, who are all huge Street Fighter IV fans and throughout all of MGC there could have easily been at least one or two sets there where you could hop on and play Street Fighter IV. I rotated several games, and I recall Mario Kart 64 and The New Tetris getting a lot of play by attendees.

Since VGevo had a far greater presence this year, Ken & Terry asked each podcast to run some kind of event or show, or live recording to always have something going on. I planned two events, both went relatively well. The first event was on Saturday and had Chris, Lyzz and I recording an episode of On Tap from the sweet recording table that Scott of the Gamers Only Older podcast had set up at the show. It was a fascinating experience with lots of background noise from all the show-goers, and lots of random crowd pops from attendees playing in an intense Street Fighter IV tournament. Besides talking about all the loot we picked up that year, we also did our episode on the NES retrospective since it was the 25th anniversary of the system in North America. This was easily one of the episodes we had the most fun recording, please right click to download and listen.



The other event we ran was the second annual On Tap WWF No Mercy Invitational. Where I take on all comers until the first two people who beat me in a one-on-one match in No Mercy wins a $20 game of their choosing out of the vendor hall at MGC. I practiced a little bit earlier in the day and was just abysmal against everyone, and had fears of quick tournament at MGC, but in the hour I ran the tournament I only lost once, and that was to my brother because he is super cheap with Stone Cold! I did beat the guy two times who beat me twice last year, so I did vindicate my two losses from last year! I think in total I beat around 10 people before the hour ran up. It was one heck of a time as I turned it up in the moment of truth!

Other random MGC highlights include the Saturday night after party in the VGevo room which featured lots of drinks to go around! I belted out "Highway Star" in Rock Band, while VGevo user The Marquis got so into it on bass that he stood up on a table and rocked out hard! On my way up from the party back to our room I saw Joe and his buddy Zach in the WiFi area all drunk, giggly and watching weird YouTube music videos. MGC was in a new venue this year, and I like it more than the Olympia it was at the previous three years I attended. Only downside was that some parts of the event were kind of separated on opposite sides of the building, and I did not get a chance to visit them until late into the show.

I did not end up buying that much loot this year compared to previous years. Only real big purchase I got was Super Mario RPG on SNES for $30. Other than that, I grabbed four random N64 games for $10, one of which was the awful Superman 64, which I ran on the N64 at the On Tap table for a couple of hours to many showgoers dismay. Rounding off my purchases were Lost Vikings & Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City for SNES, Battle Royal for TG16 and the new homebrew puzzle game for Dreamcast, Irides. My loot haul was nothing in comparison to what Chris & Lyzz racked up, they picked up a TG16, a Atari 7800 along with plenty of games for both platforms as well as a shitload of NES games. Do not believe me, check out this pic they took of their hotel bed that they spread all their loot out on!



All in all it was a great time, and immediately after it ended I was psyched to watch Wrestlemania 26, since it took place an hour after MGC ended. I got the directions for a sports bar that was airing it, and was pumped as hell, but Joey and his buddy Zach wanted to hit up Rocky Rococoas one last time, they were quick about it but by the time we got to the sports bar it was just a couple minutes after the PPV started and the bar was at maximum capacity. Joey was ecstatic because he got out of watching wrestling, that prick! On the plus side, Matt DVR'd Wrestlemania 26 and I got to watch it on his mammoth big screen in HD!

Wrestlemania 26 was a little disappointing compared to last year, I mean Money in the Bank is always a good spectacle, but it seemed everyone else was trying not to steal the show and let Undertaker/Michaels have the spotlight. Which is fine because they delivered another truly awesome match for the ages(I still think their WM25 bout is better, especially since I watched the BluRay of WM25 several days prior and it still holds up as my all time favorite match). We did an in depth Wrestlemania 26 recap on the latest Cheap Pop, so please right click and download for our WM26 recap show! Now I just got to hope that MGC does not plan occur the same weekend as Wrestlemania again next year because I missed out on a couple of awesome Wrestlemania parties in town.

-In real world news on the home front, I renewed my lease and am stuck in my pad for another year. Each year I keep considering just moving out of town to either Fargo or the Twin Cities, thinking it would greatly help me pursue my degree. Also noteworthy is our town finally made passed a smoking ban in bars which goes into effect in a few months. Nothing against smokers, I know plenty, but second hand smoke seems to be getting to me more and more over the years. If I go to a bar and it is over half full, I can barely be in there for an hour before all the smoke gets to me. Plus if smokers are forced to go outside to smoke, there might be an unintentional side effect where they will smoke less due to the hassle of getting up and going outside, and they will burn through less cigarettes in a night, huzzah!

On another note, after nearly a five year battle with the NCAA, our campus has decided to drop the Fighting Sioux nickname so our local venues can broadcast NCAA playoff games. The weird thing about this is our five star hockey arena is literally plastered with the Sioux logo, and the man responsible for funding it specifically stated that if our campus changes its nickname all the logos will stay, so if the Sioux ever have another playoff game there, then they will be forced to cover up all the logos so their games can be broadcasted on television.

-Some quick thoughts on some recent films I saw. Clash of the Titans was allright, but the 3D was horrible and unneeded, and there were some serious lulls in the film. Repo Men was better, I liked the nod to Old Boy with its own ridiculous hallway fight scene. Wrong Side of Town is a budget action film with Rob Van Dam and Batista with cameos by a couple of rap artists. RVD seems stoned throughout and some of his deliveries are campy fun bad, but Batista surprisingly confident and comes off as a legit badass in his supporting role. Movie itself is not all that good I have to admit, but the action scenes redeemed it a little for me.

Now here are some quick thoughts on the television shows I have been keeping up with lately. 24 recently announced this will be its last season, I am surprised it has lasted this long, but I am digging how this season is playing out so far. Freddie Prinze is a shockingly good fit on the show as a CTU agent. The Office still is my favorite comedy, and their recent episode where they hit up a Dave and Busters-esque joint is a hoot! I checked out the recent Facebook episode of South Park several friends told me I must see, and yes you must see it too now. It is all so true on how addicting it can be, I know of people who are Farmville/Mafia Wars addicts, maybe I can get CM Punk to save them. I only got one disc left on season 5 of Entourage. Loving almost every episode still, and I hear there is only one more season left. Entourage has one of the best casts to ever grace a television series.

I still am on the love/hate relationship with Lost, it seems like some weeks we will get a great episode which finally resolves and answers past questions, like the episode all about Richard recently, and then they follow it up with another I barely care about at all with another new threat facing the Lostees which will probably be killed off in a couple episodes anyways. Only a few episodes left of BullRun for the season, and I am still a sucker for that show. I wonder how the last few episodes will wind down and how they will keep it interesting with only a few teams left. Matt turned me onto a couple of new shows, one is Sparticus that I caught the first three episodes of. It is like a hybrid of Gladiator and softcore porn, and it is available on Netflix instant streaming so watch it now! Over the Limit is all about cops dealing with drunks. Sometimes they make arrests, sometimes they just end up getting their patience tested with college jocks making a fool out of themselves.

One last show I would like to touch on and that is The Tester. It is an eight episode series exclusively on PS3's PSN service. Goal was between eleven people to become a tester. My only gripe was the contestants were eliminated based on their performance in real life challenges such as paintball, LARPing, etc. That is fine, but there was no videogame component in the challenges until the final episode. I really got into the WCG Ultimate Gamer reality show on SyFy last year because they combined a silly real life challenge with a creative videogame challenge to determine eliminations. The Tester was fine for what it was, and it had an entertaining cast of characters that reality shows just make so easy to attach to, it is just that they could have done so much more with it I felt. Regardless, each of the eight episodes are only around 25 minutes long, so it is easy to breeze through and I recommend checking it out if you have a PS3.

-Microsoft decided to fuck me over twice this past month. First, my third Xbox 360 suffered the three red lights of doom. I was expecting it for awhile to tell you the truth, since over the past year the disc tray started to randomly jam, then it stopped recognizing the back USB slot and then the front memory unit slots. At least this one lasted longer than my first two 360s which both lasted around 10 months before they bricked on me, my third 360 lasted just a few months shy of three years. Good thing I got a backup 360 anticipating its failure when I bought it from my sister in a sweet deal a few months ago. The other nasty occurrence was my Zune bricking on me. This one was partially my fault as I made the mistake to unplug it while it was syncing still. This caused it display a message saying I needed to reinstall firmware, and in the process I discovered through troubleshooting I reacted a little too hastily in attempting to fix it and skipped a few vital steps which resulted in my 80gig Zune being permanently fucked. That sucks too because it worked great the past year and a half, I already ordered another one online that should be getting here any day now.

-Speaking of Xbox, the original Xbox Live service will be shutting down within a day of writing this. There has not been a new Xbox game released since Madden NFL 2009 a year and a half ago, but Microsoft has kept the service up primarily because of the couple thousand of consistent users still playing Halo 2 and several other games online. So the past couple of days I have been digging out some of my favorite competitive online Xbox games to get some final rounds in. To my surprise a lot of the online lobbies remained dormant. The only games I was able to find people and get matches in was Street Fighter III Third Strike off the SF Anniversary Collection and of course Halo 2. I was very rusty in both games and got schooled online. Xbox Live was a huge innovator for online console games, and it sucks to see it go. So many awesome memories of playing many sports games online. NFL 2K5 especially. I even recall getting mildly into the XSN online leagues in NBA Inside Drive and NFL Fever 2004 because there was nothing else like it on consoles. I also supported some games that had smaller online audiences like demo derby racers like Flatout 1&2 and Crash 'n Burn, and other racers like TOCA Race Driver. Online in Burnout 3 & Revenge also provided many good memories. Original Xbox Live, RIP 2002-2010.

-And to finally conclude another crazy long blog, here is a quick rundown of the latest games I have been playing.....

TMNT ReShelled - Beat this for the fourth time a couple days ago with Matt and his wife online

Yakuza 3 - Rented this and got through chapter 3. Just like how I remembered the first Yakuza. Story started of kind of silly, but by end of chapter 3 I was hooked!

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing - Since I do not own a Wii, this is a worthy replacement for Mario Kart. I guess buying since it was the first game to feature Ryo Hazuki since Shenmue II was not that bad of a decision after all!

Just Cause 2 - I was a huge fan of the first Just Cause, and the sequel delivers! Some tweaks to the controls took me a little while longer to get use to, but once I got past that I was hooked. If you like open world/sandbox games, then this is an easy recommendation. I already got nearly 20 hours sunk into this. Though I am still getting use to seeing Square Enix publishing label on the front of the box.

Retro Game Challenge - Finally got past the last challenge in Robot Ninja Haggle Man that I was hung up on for the past several months and already got a couple challenges knocked out in Rally King.

Lego Rock Band - Matt and I are rolling through this, we only got a couple vehicles and rock power challenges to unlock in the career.

My NES collection - Threw in my entire NES collection in prep for the On Tap NES special, so I played each cartridge for about 10-20 minutes per game. Some quick highlights: Ikari Warriors is still awesome, and levels are still as long as I remember. Ice Hockey remains my favorite hockey game, Maniac Mansion is still a blast, and I ended up getting back into Super Dodge Ball and plowing through the entire world cup in about an hour.

-OK I am finally done with another long installment, hopefully the length will make up that this was my first blog in a month and a half. Peace!