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フマぺろ - マドゥーラの翼

SHAX@PAX2008 PART 3: Never Forget Me...
Well, what can I tell you? Probably the same thing I've BEEN telling you- we really didn't spend that much time at the show itself.

Our first day was spent mostly in the company of fandomgreen, games journalist, boss of the Lemonrangers and my positive-matter-alternate-universe double. As a member of the press, he escorted us through PAX's main exhibition hall, pointing out all areas of major interest, both generally well-known (the Telltale Games booth and Sony's Little Big Planet demo) and in relevance to our particular interests (The fact that the X-Blades chick wears NEXT TO NOTHING, Pink Godzilla's little slice of Akihabara-brand retro-gamer paradise- more on the latter in a bit). I completely failed at the training mission of Rhythm Heaven at Nintendo's booth, he took on some jerk at a quick match of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe over at Midway, I HUNTED HIM LIKE AN ANIMAL in the PVP-only demo of Eidos' upcoming Nintendo DS iteration of Gauntlet, but generally the three of us just walked around to see what was going on.

That first day summed up most of our actual GAMEPLAY at PAX; on Saturday, Kou and I returned to the exhibition hall for a slower walkthrough, checking out some of the exhibitors we'd passed during our first visit, but our gameplay was mostly limited to Nintendo's booth, where I tried out a level of Wario Land: Shake It! and she more or less beat Spring Breeze in Kirby Super Star Ultra.

I don't know, folks. The latest generation of games just doesn't do a whole lot for me; I don't feel a burning need to own a 360 or PS3. I really only own the Wii 'cause I'll always be an unabashed Mario fanboy and yes, I WILL buy a system for just one game if that one game lets me bounce Mario off a Goomba's head. Beyond that, though? The last FPS I was really big into was Wolfenstein 3D which, according to most players, doesn't even COUNT. I'm guaranteed to be lost if combos figure into gameplay in even the most rudimentary fashion; this locks me out of pretty much every fighting game since Street Fighter II, but also out of an increasing number of modern action games as well. I don't particularly care for Guitar Hero much, though I DO have a pretty good time singing in Rock Band (or, at least, attempting to, but what I lack in skill, I enthusiastically make up for in PRESENCE). Unfortunately, that makes up about 3/4 of what you'll find in the PAX Exhibition Hall. Nature of the beast, I suppose; these are companies that are out to get you psyched for their newest and shiniest products coming out SOON!, and there's just not much there for someone who spends most of his gaming time making a clunky 8-bit sprite whip a vampire in the face.

Fortunately, PAX had places for us embittered oldsters fossils relics of gaming's pre-history retro-gamers to go; in addition to freeplay rooms for PC and modern game consoles, there was a room dedicated entirely to classic game consoles. 2600s, Master Systems, Genesises (Geneses?), Dreamcasts, NESes, SNESes, N64s- anything ten years and older, practically. I even spotted a Pong console and a couple Vectrex. One patron asked if they had Virtual Boys, and the staffing Enforcer replied that they couldn't due to pending litigation from people hurt from playing Virtual Boys LAST year; it was probably a joke, but IT SOUNDS SO PLAUSIBLE.

So Kou and I took an hour-long break while I played through part of Mega Man VI. Never played much of it before- my classic Rockman experience ends with III, and from most accounts, it sounds like I stopped at JUST THE RIGHT TIME. I played through IV not long ago, and while it wasn't AWFUL, I can't say I liked it as much as III, and it couldn't hold a candle to the brilliance of II. I blame those goddamn hippos, personally.

V and VI, though, I've never heard much good about. Until recently, however; hating on VI seems to have fallen out of fashion on the Internet, and it's now secretly a good Mega Man game. So I sat down to judge that for myself; I checked it out from the room's extensive catalog of NES games and, after the requisite cartridge-blowing, embarked on my quest to stop the evil machinations of Mr. X.

I was about halfway through Wind Man's stage when a couple dumb kids wandered into the room from the open door behind me. Apparently they hadn't gotten the Internet's memo, as they remarked that the game was "so shitty." Not sure whether they were speaking specificially about Mega Man VI, about Mega Man games, NES games or anything Pre-Crysis in general, but on those last three counts they're COMPLETELY wrong. In the case of Mega Man VI, however? I can't say; shortly after they moved on, Kou sat her bag on the table to get her PSP out, and that action jostled the NES JUST enough to freeze the game up. Whoops! I took the opportunity to swap Mega Man VI out for The Goonies II, a beloved game from my childhood I hadn't played in YEARS. I thought Kou would get a kick out of the part where you punch an old woman five times to get a Candle, but alas, she was heavily engrossed in a round of DJ Max Portable 2 or somesuch.

In retrospect, she probably did me a favor; I've played through a few stages of MMVI since getting back, and I'm not terribly impressed. Charged Mega Buster shots really DID screw this series over; yeah, having to figure out which weapon each boss is weak against CAN be kind of a pain, but it's not exactly hard to figure out, and certainly didn't warrant making the Mega Buster's charged shot the ONLY WEAPON YOU NEED for any given boss in the game.

Sad as it is, that pretty much encompasses my entire PAX experience. We DID attend one panel- How to Get Your Girlfriend into Gaming, hosted kinda early in the afternoon on Sunday- but that was mostly just for the lulz. I was curious to see how many times Cooking Mama, Nintendogs or any stripe of Petz game would come up. Gotta admit, I was pretty surprised at how cool and professionally the panel was conducted; there weren't any stupid questions, the panelists were all girl gamers themselves, and the place wasn't full of sad, lonely guys looking to pick up chicks, and the conversation was actually pretty informative. I don't know- I guess I"m just used to the Anime Convention panel formula where, yeah, you'll generally have a collection of folks who know what they're about hosting things, but by and large panels are given to ANYONE with a rudimentary outline, and next thing you know a 45-year-old fat guy in a Di Gi Charat costume is trying to explain why Ichigo Mashimaro is the most important animation of the past 30 years.

HOWEVER! For what little gaming we did at the convention itself, we MORE than made up for it outside the WSCTC.

Turns out our hotel was directly across the street from the Seattle GameWorks, and it was one of the very first places Kou and I explored. Since you can't make money running an arcade anymore, GameWorks kinda pushes its Sports-Bar-With-Arcade-Games angle pretty hard, so when Racewing mentioned that we'd HAVE to go visit it during our stay, I was fully prepared to spend the whole visit huddled around a Street Fighter III machine in the corner, unable to hear anything out of it for the sound of whatever stupid pre-recorded NFL game they were playing on one of the bar's twenty big-screen TVs right above us.

So I was pretty amazed to discover that no, there actually IS an arcade in there- one that spans a couple of levels! More amazing was the fact that they had actual GAMES in it. I've heard some remark that GameWorks was OKAAAAAAAY, but nothing great in terms of arcade goodness, and sure, it's no local bowling alley circa 1990, but they actually had stuff in there I WANTED to play. Fact of the matter is that any local arcade I've gone to in the past five years or so has dancing games, shooting games and driving games. Once I went to a putt-putt place at the beach that actually had a Lucky & Wild machine, giving players the opportunity to drive and shoot at the same time. It CAN be fun if you're there with the right people, but there's nothing there I'm particularly interested in playing.

GameWorks had a small collection of retrogames on the second floor, right past the fighting game corner, but that wasn't what made me buy a $10 card. No, it was this:

TAIKOOOOOOOOO

Man, I love this game. It's totally the damnedest thing, too, since I usually have NO time for music games. I guess the act of playing a game by beating on a giant drum does something to a raw, primal part of my mind- probably akin to what a dog feels when you scratch their belly just right. And it's even better, since Kou's a big Taiko fan, too! She actually has all the PSP and DS iterations of the game; I'm borrowing her copy of the first DS game on extended loan. Got gold crowns on all the Easy Mode songs, and I'm well on my way to all-goldin' the FUTSUU level.

We were all over that damn Taiko game. Kou's a much more experienced percussionist than I, but she gamely put up with a few easy-level songs before stepping us up to some ungodly complicated Hard Mode tune I failed the HELL out of. I pulled mostly from the Anime and Game music catalogs, myself; a round of Hare Hare Yukai here, maybe some Magical Sound Shower there. We'd just come down off a particularly great Super Mario Bros. medley session when I noticed a tune towards the edge of the listings I hadn't seen before- MAPPY! Now, I'd played a BIT of the arcade game (maybe its NES port more often), but the only real exposure I'd had to the game's music was a Flamenco-reinterpreted version by Fumapero/Sepia'n Gamers.

But whatever- it's old game music, and I feel like banging a drum to it. How hard can the Normal Mode version of it be?

Turns out it can be REALLY DAMN HARD. Espeically given that, like the Super Mario Bros. medley, it's entirely NES-chiptune-style. UNLIKE the SMB medley, though, it doesn't have an easily-identifiable bassline, and what there IS of it is easily drowned out by the sound of the Guitar Freaks system just a couple steps away. I couldn't hear a damn bit of the music; certainly not enough to recognize when exactly I needed to hit the MILLIONS OF BEAT MARKERS SCROLLING TOWARDS ME HOLY GOD

About halfway through the tune, Kou pointed out my ABSOLUTELY DEJECTED drum avatar on the screen and remarked, "Awww, he looks so cute all flooped-over like that!" Turns out she'd never seen what the normally-happily-flailing drums do if you just fail as hard as you absolutely CAN. The entire experience prompted one of several memes that'd last the entire trip; I'd suddenly break out into the opening notes of the main Mappy tune before transitioning into a series of FAILs. "Doo doot doo doot dooo dooo, doo doot dododoFAILFAILFAILFAILFAILFAILFAIL".

Taiko wasn't the only action GameWorks had to offer, though. Kou's been steadily getting into the Pop'n Music series lately, but that game is for TOTAL PUSSES. HURF DURF LOOK AT ME I'M PRESSIN' BUTTONS TO THE BEAT. Man, HELL with that noise- grab some sticks and WORK for your score!

Actually, I'd probably be a lot easier on Pop'n Music if it weren't for the other players. I mean, the game has some genuinely neat music, including a lot of medleys and remixes of some of my favorite game tunes. They have The Goonies R Good Enough, for god's sake. Kou gave it a shot and passed it, but it's clear I've gotta get that movie to her post-haste; kept messing up some of the beats coming off the bridge.

She was, however, playing it on 5-button Enjoy Mode, using only around half the available buttons for no real stakes. This elicited rather rude comments from one player who is, apparently SERIOUS BUSINESS ALL THE TIME. Dude had the build of a CLAMP character and the wardrobe to match; he stepped up to the machine after Kou was done and attempted to show us how it should REALLY be played. And I won't knock his skills, but good lord, man. There was a time people could play a game just because they wanted to have FUN.

I told Kou that only girls play Pop'n Music. I still stand behind that assessment, because that other player WAS NO MAN.

BY AND LARGE, however, our most memorable gaming experience came courtesy of Racewing and his editor, Mr. Tim Lindquist. We didn't get to spend MUCH time with those guys; we got up with 'em on Saturday, and they took us on a tour of a couple of their favorite Seattle hotspots, including Pink Godzilla's actual store, which is very pink and very godzilla. It was fairly odd- the store itself was almost as big as PG's PAX booth, but there were MANY more old and rare games available. Racey had warned me that I should be prepared to GAWK at the prices for some of the more rare titles, but honestly, I wasn't surprised by THAT so much as the fact that Pink Godzilla tells you ABOUT how much money you'll spend on a product. That copy of Ouendan 2 will run you ABOUT $25. Interested in those Super Mario Galaxy cellphone straps? They're ABOUT $5 apiece. It quickly became yet another meme between Kou and I.

Just across the hall from PG was a rather neat Japanese model/hobby shop I didn't catch the name of. They had a pretty rad Gundam painting across their front window, though, and some really impressive models displayed behind glass inside- one of which fell over and lost its head during our visit. UN SPACY ENGINEERING AT ITS FINEST.

Next up was a stop at RE PC, a wonderland of obsolete technology. In the days before DOSBox emulation, I had BIG PLANS to build an MS-DOS-based machine to run all the old games I'd loved during my X86 days, but gave up on it when it became apparent that no stores around here carried stuff that old anymore. I could've built it EASILY from the stuff I found during our half-hour in RE PC, and not spent more than around $10 on it. WHAT WE WERE THERE FOR, however, was a switch for Racey's network, as after that we'd go to his place and set up his new entertainment system and play HELL OF GAMES ON IT.

That plan didn't exactly go through; home A/V can be a complicated beast, and Racewing's system took every opportunity to MAKE things complicated. Most of our time was spent exchanging files to and from the external hard drive I'd brought to Seattle with me and watching episodes of the old Ruby-Spears Mega Man cartoon- which reminded Kou and I of the infamous GUTSMAN'S ASS video, which, of course, prompted one or the other of us to yell "IT'S GUTSMAN!" at various points over the weekend, which would prompt the other of us to grit our teeth and clench our fist in DRAMATIC TENSION.

Tim and Racey hosted us again on Monday night, though, which saw a DRAMATIC UPSWING in gaming, since we went to Tim's place- the offices of Hardcore Gamer magazine. Basically, it was exactly the opposite of what you'd expect a publishing office for a game company to look like. Tim had a desk, sure, and a nice computer set up on it with all the tools a publisher might need, but surrounding it were game systems of all generations, with complete (?) game libraries for each. A pretty decent selection of classic arcade cabinets, too! I put in time on Crazy Climber (Tim's favorite game?!), got whupped by Racey in Samurai Shodown 2 (until I chose Cham-Cham; apparently, feral loli almost-catgirls are kryptonite to Lemonranger Green), beat the third world of Doki Doki Panic on Tim's Twin Famicom, and playtested some super-secret stuff I can't tell you guys about.

What I CAN tell you guys about is Tempest 3000.

Wikipedia will tell you that Tempest was an arcade game developed over 9000 years ago by Toyota for the Xbox, and was designed by David Theurer. What it DOESN'T tell you (I assume, anyway; I can't read the article for reasons I'll get into shortly) is that David Theurer would spend the years after wreaking all kinds of horror upon Tempest, culminating in the unrelenting visual assault that is Tempest 3000 for Nuon-enabled DVD players.



I don't know. Is it enough to say that this is the easiest-to-parse visual you'll get in Tempest 3K? I really don't think it is. Here's an excerpt from the copy on the back of the game's case:

"Now Tempest is back and looking better than ever! Tempest 3000 is best described as a fusion of modern music and psychedelic visuals with a generous dollop of old school, thumb-blistering, button smashing gameplay."

No, Tempest 3000 is best described as an atrocity. Let's approximate the Tempest 3000 experience! For this experiment, you'll need:

• Two televisions/computer monitors
• a ROM of the original Tempest arcade game, plus an emulator to play it on
• A music player that allows full-screen visualization effects
• Now That's What I Call Techno vol. 9

Set the monitors side by side. Use the first one to load Tempest in your emulator; use the other to load the techno tunes into your music player. Set the music player's visualizer to the brightest, smeariest, blobbiest screen saver possible, and full-screen that shit.

Now cross your eyes until both screens merge. Play Tempest. It helps if you use a busted gamepad/keyboard. That's pretty close to the experience of playing the game; the pain you'll feel in your eyes in about two or three minutes is just a BIT duller than you'd get from a similar amount of time playing straight-up Tempest 3000.

FOr whatever reason, we moved right on from Tempest 3K to Tempest 2K on the Jaguar, which isn't QUITE so much like playing a Photoshop filter, but only because it's a BIT more pixellated. But by that point it was getting late and Kou and I would be flying out pretty early in the afternoon, so we had to get back to the hotel.

(I know I gave your games a lot of crap in this writeup, TIm, but seriously, thanks to you and Racey for an awesome time. I don't have very many regrets about the trip, but not being able to spend more time hanging around you guys is one of them)

I...think that hits pretty much all the high points! I have many more pictures of the trip up at my Flickr gallery; Kou's got a bunch at her LJ Pictures directory as well.

I got back to RDU at around 2:00 in the morning, picked up my car, and headed back home. About five minutes after getting on Highway 40, I went to pass someone going 20 below the speed limit; I put on my left turn signal, merged over, and clicked the signal off... only the blinker didn't shut off. Tried putting my right signal on, and my left turn signal just kept flashing. Basically, I drove the entire twenty miles from the airport to my house with my left turn signal on, and folks, there are NO shortage of people on the road at 2:30 in the morning who'd just LOVE to tell you that HEY, DUDE, YOUR SIGNAL'S ON!.

Turns out it was a busted microswitch, but of course you can't just replace THAT part- you need an entire ASSEMBLY. I could've probably done it myself if I weren't terrified of exploding my car's airbag while trying to take the wheel off the steering column, so I took it to the shop and got it repaired. Only set me back $133, but dang, after a cross-country trip, that kinda stings. Oh, well- it's fixed, vacation's done, and things should be nice and normal around here for the foreseeable future-



AW, MAN. THIS won't end well. STAY TUNED!