We LaZer Dorks attended this year's 2006 Midwest Gaming Classic located in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin - a town you have to be a native in to be able to pronounce the name. After visiting this two-day convention with high expectations, I came out with my expectations fulfilled only more.
The Midwest Gaming Classic (MGC) was loaded with a variety of amusements. To list all of them, there was a free play section with lots of arcade and pinball cabs, plenty of square feet of many game vendors with a huge variety of games to sell, Atari and Coleco Vision homebrew section, Atari JagFest (Jaguar convention), DreamCon (Dreamcast convention), Underdog Chamber (classic computer kind of section), gaming museum, and a speaker hall. All of these were divided into two main rooms: The Main Hall and the Event Hall.
The Main Hall consisted of the arcade and pinball freeplay, store vendors, Atari and Coleco Vision homebrew section, and was also the room that Team Fremont was located in, which I will discuss later. The freeplay section had plenty of good games available, not quite perfection in my standards, but still very good. A few really good arcade games that come to mind are Red Baron, Altered Beast (you know you love this), Neo Geo 4 slot (Blazing Star, Samurai Shodown IV, Bust-a-Move, and something else), Operation Wolf, and this really awesome classic arcade shooting game that uses real props, mirrors, and even projected graphics (if anyone knows the name, please let me know!). What I really liked about the freeplay section were all the pinball machines and there were tons! Some games I can remember were Cyclone, Twister, Haunted House (I think that's what it's called), Doctor Who, Terminator 3, and Water World. What really makes free-play pinball great for me is that whenever I go to an arcade and see a pinball machine or two, I won't play them as much because for the same price I can play some arcade game instead and this only leaves me playing pinball for a game or two, so now I can finally play pinball as much as I want and even more so than the arcade games.
According to the MGC's Official Site, there were 16 video game stores in the convention and they took up nearly half of the Main Hall! To name just a few, the GOAT Store, Trade-n-Games, and Warzpone Video Games. I wish I could get an item count on how much stuff was for sale there, because there was just so much and you could smell the sweet smell of electronics, plastics, and cardboard as soon as you stepped in. The stores mainly consisted of American products, though it had its own fair share of some Japanese stuff as well. The Warpzone store featured a variety of neat Famicom stuff, including a boxed Famicom (for $120 I think), boxed Famicom Disk System ($100, I think), boxed Japanese Power Glove (forgot the price), and two boxed Famicom 3-D glasses ($80 each, I think). The owner of Warpzone store was really cool as well and sold us NES games for fairly cheap prices and found our cheesy game humor hilarious (What can we say, we love Puss n' Boots for NES!). He even had lots of awesome little Japanese accessories, including these radical Super Mario Bros. stage recreation toys with extra accessories to add to them, go here for more info. My favorite store had to be Trade-n-Games though, because the owner was great and had good tastes, prices were very good for a lot of stuff, excellent selection, plenty of boxed consoles (I almost bought a complete Jaguar from him for $50), and the owner would let you bargain prices for really nice deals. I wasn't so fond of the Goat Store however since their collection wasn't quite as good as the others (lots of Genesis games though), prices were a bit higher, and you couldn't bargain since the real owner wasn't there. To simply end it, we all loved the vendors and we ended up buying lots of stuff!
There was a small booth in the back of the Main Hall which featured a section of new homebrew games for Atari 2600/5200/7800 and Coleco Vision. I don't know much about the Atari and Coleco homebrew scene, but I was impressed by some of the new games that were made. There was a game called "A-VCS-tec Challenge" for the Atari 2600 and featured a cool third person view of a running, half-naked dude having to avoid arrows that were being shot from the sides. What really impressed me about this game was the excellent music and sound quality; you wouldn't believe it was coming off an old Atari 2600! Another cool Atari 2600 homebrew game was like a mix between Atlantis and Missile Command. It featured the stage layout of Atlantis with the city on the bottom and three gun cannon things, but it had a targeting system like Missile Command. Unlike those games where the enemies go in one direction, this game had these spinning UFOs that would scale in from the background and go in any direction they'd like and it was a lot of fun to play, it's just too bad I don't know the name. The other fun game I could think of was a vertical shooter for the Coleco Vision that was very similar to Xevious, except you could scroll the screen horizontally. It was certainly a section worth checking out and it offered a lot more homebrew games as well.
Lastly in the Main Hall, there was Team Fremont's booth. For those who don't know, Team Fremont is an online gaming site that features an online podcast that talks about various video game subjects, whether it be retro or modern, and also has game reviews and a online comic series. Team Fremont became a pretty big part of the convention because they had a live podcast going on with interviews of speakers of the MGC and had two big events: a video game trivia/competition contest (like Double Dare) and a Billy Mitchell hot sauce give away/X-Box 360 give away/PC NES auction.
The video game contest started on Saturday night and to enter you had to sign your name on a piece of paper at their booth. Since there were four of us LaZer Dorks and not so many others that signed up, two of us LaZer Dorks were teamed up and entered into the contest to verse another team! Team Fremont gave names for each team; the opponent team was called "Red Cabbage" and our LaZer Dork team was called "Slip-and-Slide". Unfortunately, Red Cabbage beat Slip-and-Slide by double points because Red Cabbage had this crazy little kid that knew a lot about classic American video gaming, and also Slip-and-Slide got hammered with some difficult questions, while Red Cabbage getting more of the easy ones. The good news though was that my brother in team Slip-and-Slide was allowed to change the team name to "LaZer Dorks" halfway through since Team Fremont felt sorry for them. And even though team LaZer Dorks lost in the end, I must add that us LaZer Dorks KICKED ASS when it came to actually playing the games. The finale was one round of Saturn Bomberman between Red Cabbage and team LaZer Dorks and I am proud to say that team LaZer Dorks DOMINATED those wimps at Red Cabbage in Bomberman! The coolest part about this contest was that literally everyone won something, whether you were a team, an assistant (the remaining two LaZer Dorks member were, including myself), or even an audience member and it didn't matter if you won or lost. So even though team LaZer Dorks lost, we ended up winning two Atari Flashbacks, two copies of Combat for Atari 2600, two Turbo shock PS2 controllers, a cheesy Sega Saturn starter kit (controller, laser cleaner, and something else), and a N64 controller keychain. The real winners of the contest got to win two copies of Guitar Hero, but boo on them.
On Sunday, the auction of the PC NES started, but we really didn't stick around for that. Instead, we stuck around before that to see if we could win some specially made MGC hot sauce by Billy Mitchell himself and an X-Box 360. However, we didn't win either.
Before I discuss the Event Hall, I would like to mention that just outside the Main Hall there was the ticket booth, cafeteria, and a trading area that I just found out about! There were a lot of free pamphlets, pens, and other little things at the ticket table you could pick up, so we picked up one of each for each us. The cafeteria food smelt like crap, so we went to Taco Bell instead. I didn't know of the trading area when I attended the MGC, but from what I heard there were people with lots of rare games for trade, which I wish I could've saw myself.
Now finally on to the Event Hall. The first three things in the Event Hall are DreamCon, Underdog Chamber, and JagFest. DreamCon had maybe six units set up playing Cool Herders (homebrew game), a DDR homebrew game, and Rez; nothing too exciting. I did enjoy that Cool Herders game though, it was a 2d multiplayer game where you controlled a sheep herder and whoever collected the most sheep wins. In single player mode, there were traps in your way to prevent you from obtaining some sheep, while on two player mode you could steal or protect sheep from the other players. The game reminded me of a mix between Bomberman and Flicky. The DDR game was basically just playing DDR on your controller only with a small twist by having some arrows wiggly while they traveled upwards, so needless to say I wasn't too impressed by that. What I did really like about DreamCon though was that there was a table with free homebrew CD-Rs for you to pick up and play for home, which I did so and thought was great!
The Underdog Chamber had some classic computers playing some really old games, a Vectrex, a Genesis with Streets of Rage 2, an old cassette game console, some other old hardware, and a bunch of Mac computers playing the Marathon trilogy games. Not so much else to say here except it was fun playing around with old 80's obscured hardware.
I dug the JagFest myself. One set up had a Jaguar with toilet seat CD attachment and a bunch of games from a guy's collection next to it. The game that was usually running on it was this new Space Invader's-like homebrew game, except it was actually pretty cool even though I didn't really know how to play it. After messing with that game for a couple minutes, I took the toilet seat off the Jaguar and inserted the Raiden cartridge and played until level three, which was a fun yet interesting conversion of Raiden. Another Jaguar set up had Tempest 2000 using a special rotary controller which made playing the game even nicer than before! My favorite part about JagFest though was the Atari Lynx table, which had like eight various Lynx units to play along with a COMPLETE Atari Lynx game collection, featuring multiple copies of games (for multiplaying), prototypes, and homebrews! I was blown away by the guy's collection and had lots of fun playing Lynx games for the first time and now I want one more than ever. The table also had link cables as well, but we never got around to linking up. There were also other systems set up, but I don't know if they belonged to the Underdog Chamber, JagFest, or neither, but they included a Virtual Boy (once again with a nice collection of games by the same Lynx collector), SNES, and a N64.
Located in another room inside the Event Hall was the Classic Gaming and Computing Museum, a museum using the collections of Marty Goldberg of ClassicGaming.com and J.D. of DieHardGamer.com. This museum featured lots of hardware from the pre-NES days and even recent stuff from now. To see a list of all the hardware displayed, go here. Only a couple classic computer systems were actually set up though, while a lot of the "hard core" gaming consoles were set up on TVs and free for the audience to play. Some "hot" games in there were Dracula X, Symphony of the Night, Radiant Silvergun, Snatcher, and I think I heard that Sapphire was in there too, but I didn't see it on the Turbo Duo set up. They even had that Steel Battalion game set up using the big controller for it, but I was too afraid to even try playing it (that and it was occupied often). They also had that new Beggar Prince game set up for Genesis that I played for a few minutes, which was something I wanted to try. I would also like to mention that there was a Vectrex in the museum playing the game "Berzerk". The last piece of hardware I would like to mention was this big Atari display labeled as "VIDEO GAME SELECTION CENTER" which featured two player support with built in joysticks and buttons and allowed you to choose from a big list of Atari games to play. I don't know what it was or where it came from, but it was really cool!
And finally for the last event, there was the speaker room. Dan Loosen, Ellen Lurie, Marty Goldberg, Benjamin Heckendorn (Ben Heck), Don Caldwell and Mark Bakula, and Scott Adams were all speakers for this years MGC. We didn't check out all the speeches, just Marty Goldberg's two speeches, Ben Heck's, and Scott Adams'. Ralph Baer was going to be a speaker, but due to the old man's health, he couldn't make it and instead supplied info for Marty Goldberg to use instead for his speech on Sunday, which was my personal favorite. I never knew who Scott Adams was before, but I soon found out at the MGC and he's a really cool dude that pioneered PC adventure games and has a fascinating biography. Ben Heck just discussed the basics of what he does when he builds his wacky portable systems and showed off this new NES portable he is working on. Marty Goldberg's first speech was titled "Console Collection 101" and dealt with tips for taking care and cleaning your video game collection, including a tip using peanut butter to remove ink or something. Marty Goldberg's second speech was really interesting and talked a lot about the pre-NES gaming days, discussing common misconceptions and just really intriguing info in general. To top off his speech, there was a DVD that Ralph Baer burned and sent to the MGC to be played during his speech. After lots of technical difficulties with the DVD not playing followed by sound issues, it finally played... running off a slim PS2 and a set of PC speakers of all things! The video itself was pretty funny; it was a recording of Ralph Baer and a friend of his playing some of Ralph's very first video games and hardware.
The MGC was a blast and I highly recommend anyone near the area to visit it. The official dates of the next MGC are scheduled for June 9th and 10th of 2007, we already plan on going again.
-Keranu Friday, June 09th, 2006 9:30pm USA central Time
- Keranu