Arcadia

Posted by Skrud at Sunday, November 6th 2005 at 7:04pm

Last night was the awe-inspiring second night of the Arcadia Festival, Montreal’s first gaming convention that’s open to the general public. The festival spans 3 days and 2 nights, with the night events being restricted to people aged 18 and over (i.e., no little kids to kick your ass at the video games).

With blasting trance music and really sweet video screens placed all over the venue, we started off in the Retro Room, cleverly placed right near the entrance, where Harley destroyed me in a game of Pong. We also discovered a Sega Saturn with Virtua Fighter 2 and played a few rounds, then a Panasonic 3D0 with the original Need For Speed on it. Good stuff. There were a number of Atari Flashback 2 systems available complete with old school looking TVs and couches. We played some Missile Commander, Asteroids, Battlezone … and Harley destroyed me at Pong again. We also found an old school Bejeweled:

On to the XBox room. There was an XBox 360 available for playing, with some unrecognizable game that looked like fun, but there was always a massive line-up so I didn’t bother. The highlight of the XBox room was a racing game coupled with a completely ostentatious driving chair. Watching Leilani try to play it was a spectacle in itself. The Scooby-Doo game was a lot of fun, and there was a perplexing “urban” game where it seemed that the objective was to spraypaint the entire city. I really couldn’t tell what to do with it so I ignored it. (Arcadia was really bad at letting you know which game you were playing, and pause screens and title menus are extremely uninformative). There were a few King Kong systems set up as well as a 4-player Halo LAN, which looked cool.

The Playstation room was a little more exciting. Crowds formed around the people playing Flow: Urban Dance Uprising and the EyeToy games. The same Scooby-Doo game from the XBox was also present. I had a lot of fun with Ratchet & Clank and Sly 3. I was really disappointed with the severe lack of Guitar Heroes. Clearly this would have been an awesome crowd-forming fun game to play. What with the built-in Symphony of Destruction and all. But alas, no Guitar Heroes. :( There were some PSP’s apparently, but I think the Playstation animators had to hold them for you because there were no stands.

The Nintendo room completely stole the show and utterly squashed the competition. Who knows how they managed to jam so much stuff into one small lot. There was an entertaining Mario DDR game which always had a crowd. The centre of the room was lined with Nintendo DS systems and Gameboy Advanced hooked up on stands with tons of different games on them. Gamecube stations had so much more variety than any of the other rooms could even hope to offer. Most impressive was Super Mario Strikers, in which one could play against some Nintendo presenters to win giant fuzzy Nintendo dice as well as girlie T-Shirts. (I kept the dice and gave away the shirt :P). The game was so entertaining that it monopolized the giant screens all over Arcadia, even in the background while the bands were playing. It’s kind of like Mario Kart, because you can even throw shells and drop banana peels while running around the soccer field. I also played some Viewtiful Joe 2 which was really cute, amusing and highly entertaining. Simple and fluid gameplay with lots of cool little moves and effects. Nintendo also had what I would call the most addictive game ever: WarioWare, Inc.; the Gamecube Party Game version. WarioWare, Inc. consists of loads of micro-games. I say micro, because mini games would be much longer. You have to play each game in less than 5 seconds, and then it speeds up!!! If ADD could be embodied in a video game, this is it. A seemingly infinite number (really there are only about 200) of tiny little games that get your reflexes into overdrive… and they’re weird: Dodge a box, throw a hammer, catch a baseball, match a square, find a bug, brush teeth, pick a nose, squash a bug … Clearly it wouldn’t be as much fun if you were sitting there by yourself in your darkened room, but at a party surrounded by friends – I bet it would be awesome.

Needless to say I have a new-found love for the Nintendo Gamecube, which I never thought would have been possible. It seems that while the other game companies have been trying to outdo each other by upping the graphics and violence factor in all their games, Nintendo has been off doing their own thing, creating simple, fun, and enjoyable games. It’s kind of like how people fell in love with Katamari Damacy for it’s simplistic, fun and addictive gameplay. (It was also something that was missing from Sony’s Playstation room).

But that’s not all – there was a whole LAN set up for gaming which appeared to have Call of Duty 2 and some other games. … Mind you this was less interesting than the other console games. :P

Then, the concerts started. Members of Generation 8-bit performed, followed by Minibosses and Junkie XL. There’s nothing like live music to pwn a good game convention. We left sometime during Bubblyfish’s performance (which was some pretty cool Psy-Trance-like stuff) to get some food and returned in time to catch the tail-end of Nullsleep’s set. Nullsleep plays remixed Nintendo theme songs. It sounds fucking awesome. Like MIDI gone wild. Even better, all his music is available under a Creative Commons license so that you can download, share and copy it all you want, for free.

Following Nullsleep, the infamous Minibosses took the stage playing classic NES rockified. Like Castlevania II, Megaman 2, Goonies… and tons of others. Even though I couldn’t recall all the games their music was from I certainly recognised the familiar tunes. I don’t even think they had a set list, it seemed they just chose at random which song to play next. Totally. Awesome.

Finally I went to go play some more GameCube games before we had to leave. (I wasn’t paying attention to whether or not Junkie XL was playing or not … but the music was still kick ass).

I will be there next year. For certain. Definitely.

Tags: festivals, games, geek, music 2 comments