The Big Spiel About Omegacon - Part I
Gosh darn, that was a fun weekend, wasn't it? I went in with no goals or expectations, enjoyed things as they came up, laughed a lot, drank a lot, and left wishing we could do this a couple more days.
It already looks like this is going to be bizarrely long, so I'll be splitting it up.
I brought my little joystick console with Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Xevious, Pole Position, and Mappy, and set it up in the bar room in consuite. It was a wise decision, I'm always surprised by how enthusiastically people greet that thing. I never even had a chance to set up my Sega controller. And in petsnakereggie, I found one other person on the planet who not only knew about Mappy, but wanted to play it too. Too bad the batteries didn't last longer.
Of course, I couldn't stay away from We Love Katamari. The most compellingly weird and addictive game maybe ever. I wound up playing it more than ever this weekend. It was usually free, I guess other people have started to find it old hat. Fine by me. If I ever break down and buy and actual real videogame system, it'll be a Playstation just so I can play Katamari in some form. I never got around to playing The Typing of the Dead, which is sort of a hack of House of the Dead II, only you have to type random phrases on keyboards to blow up the zombies rather than shoot them. Weird concept, but it lets the less twitchy-thumbed in on the fun.
Best new game I played was a strategy board game called Ingenious, maybe the only product produced by Fantasy Flight Games not to have swords and dragons slathered all over it. It's kind of halfway between dominoes and Pente. Alas, we messed the rules up a bit, so that absolute pantsing of a victory I won on my first try maybe didn't happen.
There was also the laugh riot Things In A Box, not so much a game as a terrific set-up for people to bring out their inner stand-up. And I watched some others play a DVD Trivia Game featuring the characters from Little Britain, and yes it featured Tom Baker narration.
The popular homebrewed name-guessing game of Salad Bowl was played multiple times. Always a blast. montecristobo got people to guess "Patrick Macnee" by pointing to his knee, getting us to say "knee", and then saying "now, if my knee were Scottish..." Someone (theseamster?) was so confused by a Welsh-named character from Little Britain (Daffyd something) that he ran around to various tables asking people how to pronounce it. And, to everyone's great amusement, I blew a headgasket when I blanked on the name of the second Robin. How in heck could a comic geek like me forget Jason Todd?!
I like games that make you laugh. Maybe you didn't pick up on that.
It already looks like this is going to be bizarrely long, so I'll be splitting it up.
I brought my little joystick console with Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Xevious, Pole Position, and Mappy, and set it up in the bar room in consuite. It was a wise decision, I'm always surprised by how enthusiastically people greet that thing. I never even had a chance to set up my Sega controller. And in petsnakereggie, I found one other person on the planet who not only knew about Mappy, but wanted to play it too. Too bad the batteries didn't last longer.
Of course, I couldn't stay away from We Love Katamari. The most compellingly weird and addictive game maybe ever. I wound up playing it more than ever this weekend. It was usually free, I guess other people have started to find it old hat. Fine by me. If I ever break down and buy and actual real videogame system, it'll be a Playstation just so I can play Katamari in some form. I never got around to playing The Typing of the Dead, which is sort of a hack of House of the Dead II, only you have to type random phrases on keyboards to blow up the zombies rather than shoot them. Weird concept, but it lets the less twitchy-thumbed in on the fun.
Best new game I played was a strategy board game called Ingenious, maybe the only product produced by Fantasy Flight Games not to have swords and dragons slathered all over it. It's kind of halfway between dominoes and Pente. Alas, we messed the rules up a bit, so that absolute pantsing of a victory I won on my first try maybe didn't happen.
There was also the laugh riot Things In A Box, not so much a game as a terrific set-up for people to bring out their inner stand-up. And I watched some others play a DVD Trivia Game featuring the characters from Little Britain, and yes it featured Tom Baker narration.
The popular homebrewed name-guessing game of Salad Bowl was played multiple times. Always a blast. montecristobo got people to guess "Patrick Macnee" by pointing to his knee, getting us to say "knee", and then saying "now, if my knee were Scottish..." Someone (theseamster?) was so confused by a Welsh-named character from Little Britain (Daffyd something) that he ran around to various tables asking people how to pronounce it. And, to everyone's great amusement, I blew a headgasket when I blanked on the name of the second Robin. How in heck could a comic geek like me forget Jason Todd?!
I like games that make you laugh. Maybe you didn't pick up on that.