PUMPED! Gaming

So, CGS 2009 has come and gone! Since I last attended the previous year, I think I had built up golden expectations about what would go down this time (you know how things seem better in your memory?) While I still had fun this year, there were a lot of frustrations and shortcomings that I just can’t avoid expressing when talking about the event. I’ll put them in an orderly list for easy consumption:

1. Overcrowding is a problem. The entire CGS is held on 2 floors of a community college building, and with 1,500 or more attendees, things get cramped. Maybe at some point expansion to other buildings or a different facility will be possible.

2. Many tournament directors were just not prepared for their day. Without mentioning anyone in particular, I want to say that competence in setting up the tournaments, having the PCs or other equipment ready to roll, and possessing the overall social skills needed for something like this were qualities that were hard to come by. However, some tournament directors did an excellent job, so I won’t melodramatically act like this problem plagued every event.

3. The music at the awards ceremony was too loud!

4. Having Papa John’s there to charge $2 for a slice of pizza was a bit much. That is some major exploitation of young males who have little else to turn to for food in the moment. I don’t know what Chik-Fil-A was charging but I’ll assume they followed suit.

5. I couldn’t attend or enjoy most of the exhibits and speakers (any, really) because of the chaos associated with the tournaments. I know the myriad of attractions on one day is really the heart of the event, but I can’t help but wish that the exhibits were one day and the tournaments on another. Having the event on two separate days would create a multitude of issues, so I’ll just leave that one alone.

6. I would have liked to see the BAWLS sponsorship back this year. Vitamin water just doesn’t feel like its a gamer’s drink.

Okay, enough bitchin’ and moanin’, yeah? Let’s talk about what I enjoyed about the event this year:

1. The awards ceremony was awesome. There were introductory videos of each game so that people who weren’t familiar with particular games could see what tournament winners were actually playing. This part was fantastic! Good job CGS and a great idea!

2. The plaques for first place look really good. They are something I would proudly show to friends and nongamers as proof of my worth as a human being.

3. Although I couldn’t listen in on any of the speakers, I presume that they were a good addition to the event that provided some more intellectual focus on the gaming industry.

4. It is great to have a chance to compete in a local setting. CGS is only thirty minutes from my house, and I probably wouldn’t be able to attend if it were in a different location. Hoorah for local events!

So, that’s the short list of how I felt about CGS this year without going into a lot of details. As some of you may know, I competed in the Unreal Tournament 3 tourney this year, and I’m proud to say that my partner and I did quite well and won first place! The major drawback is that we didn’t actually play Unreal Tournament 3. We had major issues with the servers freezing computers and other various crap, so we ended up playing an open source version of Quake 3 called Open Quake. I had never heard of it before, and I hope I never hear of it again. Open Quake tries to be like Quake 3 but it just ain’t. The weapons are screwy, the movement is terrible and the mouse input is godawful. However, I won’t complain further seeing as how we won the tournament.

The prizes were pretty cool. My teammate and I both received a 1000W Kingcraft FSP Power Supply, a beautiful first place plaque with UT3 graphics, and a copy of Unreal Tournament 3 signed by Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney. We had to squeek out our win against a couple of great players, so kudos to them for playing some great games!

I’m pretty sure I’ll attend the event again next year, so be ready for another report on what improves and what doesn’t!