Aypok's Event Summary(I have to apologise for the photographs: I accidentally overwrote the original hi-res images with these much smaller images :( I'm sorry, guys)
Despite the distinct lack of organisation and the last-minute plans for the event, everything went off without a hitch and everyone seemed to have fun. I certainly did. Here's what went down.
Some pictures of the scene before anyone arrived:
That SMS II of mine sure is dirty... Eugh.
Ninjabearhug was the first to arrive at about 11:30, to find me messing around with
Marksman Shooting. We chatted for a while and enjoyed some cool shmups on the Asian Mega Drive he brought with him (and later gave to me! :)). PlayGeneration turned up at 12:10, so we went outside to his car to see what goodies he'd brought - only to find Phil and Rupert had just arrived, too. Full house!
Some of the goodies:
* Asian Mega Drive with games (all shumps) and a PlayStation (Ninjabearhug).
* Sports pads with games (Phil, PlayGeneration and myself).
* Handle controller with foot pedals (Phil).
* SC-3000 and games (PlayGeneration).
* SMS kiosk and the new (flat style) Tec Toy SMS (Rupert).
I'd not used or even seen (in real life) any of those things (expect the sports pad), so it was great to not only look/touch, but also try them out.
After we'd set up some of the new stuff, Rupert powered-up the kiosk unit for us to gawp at. An interesting machine, although somewhat limited in usefulness - what with games running for about one minute before moving to the next one. Still, there were some prototype carts in there, which were cool to see.
Actually, we put
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine in there and that played fine for what must have been five minutes...
The kiosk unit, sitting next to the boxed Tec Toy SMS. We did unbox the SMS and take a look - it's very shiny. :)
Shortly thereafter, we picked some games to play and Rupert took charge, sorting out who was to play whom:
I know only five people are listed, but Moobert showed up later (before the games started, so was added in).
That picture is pretty useless as you can't read the games, so here's what we went with:
Putt & Putter: Lowest score in the first section (six stages). Lowest score wins.
Micro Machines: Standard knock-out elimination.
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine: Standard knock-out elimination.
Home Alone: Speed-run on stage one. Fastest time wins.
Tennis Ace: Standard knock-out elimination. First to three wins, I think.
Power Strike II: Standard knock-out elimination. Highest score wins - played until game over.
It was then decided that perhaps
Home Alone wasn't the best choice for a speed-run, since players could just copy the previous player, so we replaced that with
Out Run - the fastest first lap wins. The twist was that we all had to use the handle controller and foot pedals.
However, before the games started, we decided to try out the sports pads on
Sports Pad Football and
Great Ice Hockey. To say they're terrible is an understatement: we thrashed the controllers and it barely made our on-screen characters react. Completely useless but absolutely hilarious. My jaw was aching from laughing so much. We abandoned that after a while and went to play some real games. :)
The
Putt & Putter competition was won, unsurprisingly, by Rupert - as was the
Micro Machines competition. I'd hoped to do well at both, but didn't. We didn't keep a record of the runners-up - just the winners, I'm afraid.
I was looking forward to the
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine challenge, because I did well last year. I'm pretty sure I got to the semi-finals with Retro Reserve - but could be wrong. Alas, things did not go well - Rupert knocked me out in my first game. Three games down and I was still sucking. The lack of winning didn't make it any less fun, though. :)
Tennis Ace was a weird one. I'd not played this before, I don't like sports games (generally, at least -
Virtua Tennis is pretty cool) and I don't know the rules of tennis - so this wasn't going to end well. Myself and Moobert were first up at this and it lasted ages... Admittedly, we did play until one of us has six wins (the rule was latter changed to three wins, to speed things up). It wasn't bad once we got a volley going, but serving was annoying. Phil was the overall winner - as he was in
Micro Machines.
As most of us had never used the handle controller before, we all had a bit of a practise with it. I was genuinely surprised by how good it is and how well it worked. I've tried steering wheels for other consoles and they've generally been poor, but this was pretty good. This competition was won by Phil (I forget his lap time).
Since I've been playing practically nothing but shmups over the past few months, I figured I'd do well at
Power Strike II - despite having never played it before. I did quite well, actually - I got to the level two boss, before losing all my lives. My score was about 269,000. I was proud of that, until Ninjabearhug (another fan of shmups) beat my score. I wasn't hugely surprised by that, though. His score was about 350,000 to 400, 000. Others tried and failed to beat his score, until the last entrant -- PlayGeneration -- stepped up and attained a score of about 450,000!
By this point, it was almost 16:00 and we were starting to get hungry. Rupert's snacks (Doritos, Pepperami, Pringles and Pepsi) had sustained us that far, but we needed something more filling. A quick on-line order to the local Pizza-hut later and we had a few large pizzas. That went down well, so we resumed gaming.
Since it was still early, we picked some more games to play:
Mortal Kombat II and
Pie Slap. Here's the updated score-board, showing the out-come of those games:
As you can see; Ninjabearhug won the
Mortal Kombat II tournament, with me winning at
Pie Slap! Yay! :D
Phil was therefore declared the over-all winner of the day, having won three of the eight competitions - with Rupert coming second (two wins). No prizes were given out this year - the winner just got the knowledge that he is the best SMS gamer in the world. Or at least in that room at that time - at those specific games. A much-revered accolade, nevertheless. :P
From this point onwards, we decided to just mess around with whatever seemed like fun: cue lots more battles in
Micro Machines and
Pie Slap, the latter being great fun to watch - as were most of the games, come to think of it.
Other two-player games we enjoyed include:
Super Off-Road,
Putt & Putter,
California Games and
Gangster Town, as you can see here - behind Ninjabearhug:
Front-left: PlayGeneration. Standing: Ninjabearhug. Sitting at the back, from left to right: Rupert and Phil.
And a few more pictures with humans in them:
PlayGeneration and Ninjabearhug.
Rupert and Phil.
As the event was winding down, at about 21:00, PlayGeneration set up his SC-3000 - something I'd been looking forward to, since I love old computers. We tried in vain to get games working, but they all gave a blank screen and various continuous tones - it wasn't looking good. We eventually got it playing games, but alas, whatever we tried,
Zaxxon wouldn't work.
First up was
Monaco GP, which is a simplistic racer which has very similar game-play to
Spy Hunter and
Action Fighter (but without the shooting). It was surprisingly fun. Then we -- or should I say: I -- played
Safari Hunter (I think that's the name). It took us a while to figure it out, but I spent a good while enjoying this game, much to the amusement of the others. :)
After each game, we tried
Zaxxon again, but it stubbornly refused to run - so we continued with the other games:
Champion Golf and
Lode Runner, neither of which were played for long.
Then, a miracle happened!
Zaxxon booted!. Well, the title screen half loaded. A quick power-cycle got that working full, allowing us to enter the game - but controls were unresponsive. Another power-cycle and the full "glory" of the game was revealed. Not very fun or nice to look at, but we took it in turns to play it a bit.
Everyone was stood to the left of this shot, as we were all watching the SC-3000 on the "main screen".
We ended the evening, not long before 22:00, by showing-off the latest version of
Digger Chan. The traps proved amusing. And annoying. :D
Home time. Rupert was the first to leave, followed by Ninjabearhug shortly thereafter. PlayGeneration and Phil stuck around for a bit longer - until just after 22:00, I think.
Conclusion: It went down much better than I had hoped. I figured my lack of planning and the low number of attendees (half the number of last year) would stifle it, but I was wrong. I had a brilliant day and hope the other did, too.
A final thanks to everyone for showing up and bringing your cool stuff for us to enjoy! Roll on "Sega8bit Event '10"! :)
. I especially enjoy playing 2 player games with Phil as he really gets into the action. We played Quartet for a while but spent most of the time trying to get the jetpack from each other ;D.
. Zaxxon was pretty cool too, but I've never been much good with joysticks so I sucked pretty badly at it.
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