I originally posted this over at Seasoned Gamers, but I wanted to share it with you guys as well. This is my personal experience of the VGXPO 2008 weekend. I apologize for the picture size, but you'll understand the problem when you read. Please enjoy.

 

 

Video Game Expo 2008 Recap

It sucked.

Okay, that's not the whole story. A little while ago I caught an ad on TV for the Video Game Expo (VGXPO) here in Philly. Naturally, with the lack of national media coverage I was extremely skeptical. The entry fee was less than $15 though so I thought, "What the hell?" Of course, I needed a partner in crime, so I got LazyChris on the horn. He's my best good buddy and we can make the best out of any situation. He didn't need much convincing, especially when I said, "Hey, worst case scenario we get really drunk." That always works on Chris.

The weekend of the VGXPO arrives and Chris comes to town. We immediately head to the liquor store. It's important to get this weekend of debauchery started off the right way. We also run to Taco Bell and grab an order of Fully Loaded Nachos each. I, of course, spend the extra .40 for jalapenos. Do you want this done, or do you want it done right? 9:00PM we sit down, beers and nachos in hand, to watch Tropic Thunder. 9:30PM I feel like I'm going to die. What they don't tell you about the nacho bowl is that it's really a taco salad, but instead of lettuce you have chips. Needless to say, it's brutal on your digestive system. By the time the movie's over though, I'm ready to rock. We fire up some Gears 2 and start hitting the Insane campaign. It was touch and go in the beginning, but we hit our stride on the derricks. Our campaign came quickly to a halt during the first split-section in Landown. For all the improvements Gears 2 made, the COG AI is still really sad. After watching Tai and Carmine die about a dozen times, we called it quits. We had to be up semi-early the next day, so it was off to sleep.

By semi-early I mean 10AM. I putter around the house while Chris whores the Seriously 2.0 achievement by reloading the derrick ride over and over again. By 11:30 we are out the door, but not without a loss already. My wife took the camera with her for the weekend, even after I specifically asked her to leave it behind. Dagger. (She freely admits how ridiculous this is, mind you). This is a serious problem. We take the train into Philly and stop into a Rite-Aid. Luckily, they have a shitty $20 digital camera that Chris offers to buy. Naturally, he is optimistic while I am 100% sure this thing sucks balls. That's how our friendship works. Once we figure out which way the batteries go (yeah, this thing is so crappy they don't tell you where the positive and negative ends go) we head down to Finn McCool's (excellent place, I highly recommend it) for some lunch and a few pints:

After we got a decent buzz going we walked up to the convention center. Of course, there are no signs for anything, so you just have to walk around hoping you find the right entrance. The first entrance we go to has a sign in front of some stairs that says the VGXPO entrance is on 12th and Arch. Well that's useful. Two thirteen year olds walk up behind us, read the sign, then turn to me and ask if this is the entrance. I give them an incredulous look, where my face is saying, "Are you f--king serious?", but my mouth says "No." We head out the door and these two jokers start following us. After walking half a block, they come up on us again and ask, "Do you know where you're going?" I say, "Nope." even though I know damn well where I'm going. They run off in a different direction. Mission accomplished.

We get to 12th and Arch and there are two entrances, and a throng of people. People are going back and forth between the buildings and I have no idea why. A truck is parked across the street handing out free Monster. Chris says, "Nile! Nile! Can we go get free Monsters?!" to which I calmly reply, "Hell no." If you're ever around Chris, you'll understand why. He's got the attention span and energy of a squirrel as it is. After calming him down, we enter one of the buildings. We ask the lady where the entrance to the VGXPO is, and instead of answering us she just yells to the crowd in general, "Marathon signups here, Video Game Expo is across the street!" Aha, that would explain why all the athletic people are heading this way and the rest of us are going next door. Chris shouts, "Wrong building nerds! We're across the street!" We get in the right place, and there's a giant line for something. Whatever it is, I'm not interested, because I freaking hate lines. We go to the pre-registration table, get our passes, and head upstairs.

The expo area is pretty small, as far as expos go. Right off the bat, there are two LAN areas. One is playing COD4 and the other WoW. We're off to a great start if you like to play old games. We did a quick lap around the area and come to find there are no new video games to be had. Several booths had some version of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, and Digphilly.com even had Left 4 Dead set up, but there are actually no game developers there. The closest thing was Intel, who had a sizable portion of the expo floor, but who I could give about two shits about. There was some trailer set up with a long line but I couldn't tell what was going on in there. It could have been the portal to Never Never Land, but I'd never find out. You know how I feel about lines. We pass by some stage where a guy's up there talking about what sounds like MMO classes. A lot of people are in the stands watching, but I could only stand about five minutes before we had to go. At the end of our lap was a retro arcade with a bunch of classic cabinets. There are a mass of people there though, so we decide to skip it for the time being.

After our first lap, I turn to Chris and say, "Jesus man, I'm not nearly drunk enough for this right now." He snapped a picture with the AssCam 2000™ of how not amused I was: 

So, we did this:

Yep, we went down to the Field House for a couple of hours and drank. The Penn State game was on, so we had to deal with the drunken hooligans shouting about every poor call, but by the fourth beer I was yelling with them. I personally hate Penn State, but that's not the kind of thing you advertise around that crowd. In hindsight, it might have been funny to talk loudly about how much Joe Paterno sucks, but I digress. Once we felt we'd drank enough to deal with the expo again, we headed on up. The crowd had actually dissipated a little bit, which was nice, but there were still lines for everything. We did another lap, and came upon the stage again. We actually sat down this time to take it in, because people were playfighting with swords. After five minutes I realized what was going on. This was some show about LARP. Now, I personally don't have anything against people who LARP. If that kind of thing is fun to you, then by all means have fun, but I don't understand it and I can't take it seriously. I turned to Chris, who hadn't figured it out yet, and said, "We have got to get the hell out of here."

We moved on, but not before Chris spotted a guy dressed up as Blade. This dude was intimidating, so I had to sit and wait while Chris got up the nerve to go ask for a picture. Enjoy the AssCam 2000™ results:

We weren't out of the woods with the play swordfighting yet though. We'd seen a bunch of people dressed up as jedi all day, and I finally noticed their booth. They had something set up in a corner where people could play swordfight with lightsabers. Again, I didn't get it. Chris offered to let me hit him full force with a lightsaber if we signed up to duel, but I declined. I've thrown Chris down a flight of stairs in a cardboard box before, but we've (barely) grown up since then. Plus, I was pretty sure the power of the Force would be brought down on us if we broke a lightsaber. Chris snapped a pic instead.

After this we hit up the coin-op arcade. The crowd had died down a bit here so we figured we could get in a few games. We immediately spotted a Robotron console and beelined for it. After the lady on it stepped aside for a minute, Chris and I swooped in like hawks. We had spent plenty of time (read: 15 minutes, enough for the achievement) playing the XBLA version so we felt it'd be better if we tackled the game as a team. Chris moved the guy while I shot. As you'd expect, Chris controlled the guy like a drunken idiot, and I shot like a drunken idiot. Needless to say, we didn't set the world on fire with any high scores. We moved on to another machine that was empty. After mashing the buttons like a monkey we realized the machine was broken. Bored. We moved onto another cabinet. Tac/Comm, a game I'd never played or even heard of before. It actually turned out to be pretty fun, so I showed my appreciation by furiously dry humping the hell out of it.

Yeah, I was that guy. I don't think the people next to me appreciated the humor very much. Luckily, I had been drinking, so I really didn't care. We played Tac/Comm for a while, then quickly became bored with it because our ADD is not conducive to simple arcade games. It was clear this expo was done for us. We bid it adieu and stepped back out onto the cold streets of Philly. Something was wrong though. I realized that being in there had sapped all of my buzz, whereas I'm pretty sure it amplified Chris' drunkenness. Great. As we were walking out, every fifteen seconds he says, "We should go to the bar." The conversation would usually go like this:

"Chris, no, we've got two cases of beer at home."

"But there's beer at the bar right now."

"Chris, we're not going to the bar."

"..."

"...bar?"

When we get onto Market St. I've already had enough of this clownshoe. As if this wasn't enough, he proceeds to yell to whoever will listen that he's drunk. At this point, we cannot get home soon enough so that I can reach his level again. Bless his heart, Chris had been training for a marathon for months, so his tolerance was not up to par with mine. I can't blame him, but we get down to the train and after ten seconds of sitting on the bench, he turns and says, "Hey, we should go back to the bar." I am not amused. In fact, Chris snaps a photo of how not amused I am:

You can actually see the rage in that picture. It doesn't end there either. We're on the train, and here's our conversation:

"We should drop by Wendy's on our way back."

"Chris, I told you an hour ago that we were going to get pizza tonight. In fact, we've been discussing all week how we're going to get pizza."

"Aw man, pizza sounds awesome, good call bro."

"Jesus..." (Cue me sighing and shaking my head)

We get back, we get an XL cheese pizza, 20 hot wings, and an order of pierogies. The feast is on. While eating, we watch episodes of Always Sunny in Philadelphia I've got DVRed. Once done though, we turn on the 360 to get some Gears 2 going. Shocker of the century, none of you bastards are playing. Everyone is either offline or playing Left 4 Dead. Chris almost shed a tear he was so disappointed. This was not going to get us down though. It was time to go old school with the NES. We start ripping through every game I have while downing beers. None of them are sticking, the worst of which was Battletoads. If you've played Battletoads with a friend and never seen the AVGN video on it, you need to. I completely forgot how infuriating that game is. (Editor's Note: At some point during this, Chris' girlfriend called. I immediately snatched the phone out of his hand and pretended to be the proprietor of an Asian massage parlor. This went on for about fifteen minutes. She was not amused, but Chris was practically pissing himself laughing.)

Around 2AM we fired up some Superspike V'ball. I hadn't played this since I was a kid, and I don't think Chris had ever played it at all. It was the right combination though. We're suckers for co-op play, and we'd had just enough beers to think that volleyball was awesome. After the first couple of matches, we realized that we had to beat this game. We shared a look and just nodded. Chris ran out to his car for his iPod, I hooked up the speakers, and we blared Dethklok because nothing goes together like volleyball and death metal. For the next few hours my living room was like the scene from Top Gun, except with more shirts and less Val Kilmer. We were high fiving on every spike point or block. It was ridiculous, and the kind of thing that would have made us YouTube stars. A 5:30AM we were crowned volleyball champions, and for a victory celebration we passed the F out.

I awoke at 11 with a heinous hangover. I reflected on the weekend and thought, "You know, the VGXPO might have sucked, but I'm a damn volleyball champion!" I hope you guys enjoyed your ride with us. You may not have been there, but just imagine as you look at the pictures that it was you, drunk, right there for the action.