Let's cut the pointless exposition and get on with it, shall we?
Wednesday
Like any good MAGFest trip for me, it starts on Wednesday. I leave in the evening, aiming to get there just after midnight. Well, that's precisely what happened. Arrived at 12:15 AM.
Thursday
Of course, the first thing to do is to go down to registration in good ol' Expo Hall E, which so happens to be as far away from the parking as possible, and pick up my badge. Interestingly, approximately everything physical tat-related was running behind schedule, so the staff lanyards weren't ready, neither were the staff shirts, and hell, neither were the freaking swadges. The swadges are neat, but ultimately conform to the definition of "physical tat". I have a pile of them in my room here, with very little reason to go find batteries for any one of them to power them up and play with them. The two most recent ones sorta solved this by also accepting USB power, but still.
The staff shirt thing was a very last minute "we don't have them" thing where they sent out an email far too late for anyone travelling from any significant distance away to be able to read in time to pack staff shirts from previous years. Just shows the futility of changing the damn staff shirt every fucking year. They're redundant for consoles anyway, we have the vests. I don't re-wear mine outside the event, I'm not a big fan of red t-shirts.
Anyway, Thursday is always the day I'm up for all 24 hours of, and this year was certainly no exception. I planned ahead and brought a travel mug full of coffee with me, which just barely lasted me until the coffee place in the atrium of the Gaylord opened and I could procure more. A move I should have repeated throughout the day, but more on that later.
Eventually, the hotel went from being fairly empty to being "attendees everywhere" and the time of MAGFest was upon us. Grabbed a spot in line for the dealers' room so I could get in when it opened, and made three purchases which ended up being my only purchases of the weekend: A Super Game Boy 2, a cartridge of Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy, and an actual legit copy of Rogue Galaxy for the PS2.
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| It's at an angle to avoid getting my shadow in the picture lol |
- It actually runs the games at the correct speed. The original model runs them about 3% too fast, which perhaps matters more for some games than others, but it affects everything, including the music. This point is most relevant if you're going to be speedrunning Game Boy games.
- It has a link port. This coupled with having the correct clock speed makes linking to other Game Boy systems possible. They had to correct the clock rate issue and add the link port because of a little game called Pokemon. Ever heard of it? ;)
- It has an extra set of borders to place around the game you're playing, with the original model's set of borders available if you enter a button sequence. Of course, if a game has a custom border, it'll still show that by default.
- Also, some games have a different border if they detect that they're running on a Super Game Boy 2. One example I found while searching the internet for SGB2 stuff is Tetris DX.
If you sift through my archives, you'll find a whole series of posts where I was playing through Rogue Galaxy, offering my thoughts on the story and explaining anything going on in my gameplay, whether easy, difficult, or neat. Well, I kinda glossed over how I actually obtained the game, and that's because I just kinda downloaded the ISO of it and chucked it on my PS2's hard drive. Given how much I liked the game, I wanted to actually have a legit physical copy, so this takes care of that. Interestingly, when I was flipping through the manual in the case, a purchase receipt fell out. The game's previous owner apparently bought it for $15 in a GameStop in Brooklyn, NY, back in 2010. I could tell it was GameStop inventory at one point or another in its existence anyway because of the damn stickers all over it, which I managed to remove before taking the photo. What you can't see in the photo is that the case is slightly damaged, but hey, I can probably source another case if it becomes a problem. Just find some bargain bin PS2 game and do a swap. Also, the box art has some water damage, but it isn't really visible.
I made an attempt to test the SGB2 and Final Fantasy Adventure in the console room, but I forgot that the SGB2 is a Super Famicom cartridge and thus doesn't have the slots for the tabs in a US SNES' cartridge slot, and none of MAGFest's Super Nintendos have the tabs removed. Testing was postponed until I got home, where I popped the combo into my SNES and it booted right up first try, which was kinda unexpected.
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| I changed the palette from the SGB's weird default dark purple thing to the much more sensible grayscale palette before taking this photo. |
I've been dodging actually mentioning the button sequence and that's because there's a little more setup to it. To get the SGB1 borders you have to select the black border and exit the SGB menu, then enter the button sequence: . You'll hear a chime if done correctly. Go back into the SGB menu and you'll find the SGB1 borders available. If you input that button sequence with the default border selected, that's what changes its color. Finally, if you input that sequence with basically any other border selected, its idle animation will start.
Anyway, 4 PM rolled around and I was finally able to check into my room. I wasn't the first one, and actually, all four people showed up this year, so no room to myself again. I only got to talk to three of them, interestingly. The fourth was never awake when I was awake.
Fitness stuff still happened, I'll just mention that here and nowhere else.
Friday
So my first staff shift began promptly at midnight, and this is where the subject of my caffeination, or the lack thereof, comes into play. I was almost dead by the end of it. Anyway, dragged my ass upstairs and went to sleep.
After a good amount of sleep I went back down to Consoles and did some of the challenges, for which I never actually claimed the one reward I earned: a single M-point. I've got enough physical tat, and I never spend M-points anyway.
There isn't much I remember about Friday. It was really all just playing games and having fun. I figured out Pole Position on the Atari 2600 at some point. It's a surprisingly well-done game for the Atari 2600, somehow managing to cram all the necessary controls into a joystick and a single button. Like I said, fun was had.
Saturday
Another midnight, another staff shift. I was considerably less dead at the end of this one, on account of having actually gotten sleep. The consoles this year were (mostly) all in cages, locked with key-locks. Some didn't have key-locks and were instead zip-tied shut, which was annoying to encounter. This also meant that some consoles were a lot harder to do game swaps for than others. Basically any console with a front-loading disc tray, like the PS2 or Xbox 360. I still don't know what they were thinking with the placement of those, I had to turn so many cages sideways just to be able to open them far enough for the tray to fully eject. Also there was a GameCube whose lid latch had broken, which was fun to discover while attempting to do a game swap on said GameCube. It was working properly, I opened the lid and swapped the game, and then it just wouldn't close anymore. The "doing it live" solution got implemented: just tape it down.
Anyway, after that shift, sleep.
I had wanted to do another Pepper Palace run this MAGFest but had forgotten to go mid-day Thursday. Looked up their hours and discovered they were open until 10 PM, so I went after grabbing some dinner from staff suite. Tasted a bunch of stuff and ended up grabbing a salsa and a mustard. I got three bottles of hot sauce for Christmas, which influenced me to look at their non-hot-sauce products.
Messed around with some computers in the Museum for a bit before heading down to do my final shift of the event. Man, these things fly by.
Sunday
Last shift, and this one ended at 4 AM instead of 8 AM like the others. No incredibly unusual requests for games this year, certainly nothing like previous years where an attendee would ask for a game reccomendation or say "I'd like to play X genre of game on the SNES, surprise me" or anything like that. Smooth sailing through the weekend. Got off my shift and went upstairs to get whatever sleep I could before about 10 AM, just to give me enough time to get my shit together and get out of the hotel before the hotel's deadline, which MAGFest said was 11 AM but the hotel said was noon. I dunno about you, but I'll trust what the hotel says over what MAGFest says in this regard.
Anyway, the drive back was fairly uneventful, thankfully. Started to encounter a traffic jam due to an accident on I-95 southbound, but luckily the Dale City rest stop was right there. Stopped, took care of coffee-related business, and by the time I got back to the car, traffic was moving again. Some jerk tailgated me for a while on Route 20, but eventually found a cromulent passing zone and went about his way at 1.5x the speed limit or whatever those jerks think they're entitled to do.
Video games are fun.
