DragonCon 2026 Aftermath

Well another DragonCon is done for the year. I currently sit in the Westin, a high class hotel I ordinarily could never afford, here after the con has concluded only by the grace of a roomshare, a bunch of people who chip in for a room together, an arrangement I think is ordinarily against the rules, but hotels put up with because it ultimately gets them more business for a thing like DragonCon.

DragonCon bills itself as “the largest multi-genre and pop culture convention in the world.” That may seem artfully put, and it may be, but DC casts a very wide net of subjects. A few examples, it hosts an “Apocalypse Rising” track of world-ending fiction, a Military Sci-Fi track in addition to tracks for general sci-fi, Star Trek and Star Wars, a Digital Media track, a British culture and media track, Anime and general animation tracks, a puppetry track that’s a lot of fun, and much more.

DragonCon crosses with this blog’s umbrella via the Video Gaming track and associated events, including two arcades, a console gaming space, and (though it takes a bit of exploration to find) a couple of installations of Artemis Cosmos, formerly known at the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not directly involved, but has a relationship with Electronic Frontier Georgia, and they maintain a small but informative presence there. Yet while there is are fair number of game-related activites there DragonCon is not generally thought of as one of the big video gaming conventions, in a field containing the PAXes, or even Southern Fried Gaming Expo, which takes place in the same city a month earlier, and has hundreds of video arcade and pinball machines.

This was the 40th anniversary of the convention, which had 80,000 attendees in 2017, and fills five hotels and multiple floors of two other buildings besides. This year they hosted Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, who was involved in multiple panels. Garriott was in fact a guest at the first DragonCon back in 1987, and has returned occaisionally since. I met him at one of his panels, and he said he’d answer my questions via email. I haven’t written them yet, and when he sees the kinds of things I ask he may have second thoughts about it. We’ll see.

Stephen Seitz once again ran his multiple Gamecube gaming panels at night, where people could pop in to play video games like Smash Bros. Melee and the original Kirby Air Ride, set up to play using the Gamecube’s little-used LAN mode. Air Ride is starting to look a little long in the tooth now, finally, that a greatly expanded sequel is out for the Switch 2, but the original is still very playable.

The two arcades at DragonCon this year, as in recent years, were the retro-themed Joystick Gamebar, serving alcoholic drinks and classic arcade games and pinballs, and Save Points mostly Japanese lineup. Of the two I enjoyed Joystick’s more this time. Arcade games at cons often end up a little cursed; for example, the Twilight Zone machine never felt like its flippers lined up well with ramp shots, and the upper flipper was a bit weak making it hard to hit the important Piano shot.

The best-playing pin at Joystick this year was White Water, a classic Williams machine with high risk/high reward play. At one point I had the Grand Champion score on the machine at 524 million, although I got edged out later on. I got to show off Ed Boon’s secret “EJB” menu in Mortal Kombat II a few times to interested players. A few other great games there this time were Joust, Gauntletn Atari Tetris, NBA JAM, Donkey Kong, Frogger and multiple Pac games.

Save Point’s arcade tends to skew heavily towards Japanese rhythm and fighting games, some of them recent, which aren’t my favorite types so I don’t have a great deal to say about them. In previous years they brought out the Japan-only arcade version of Rhythm Heaven, Sega’s weird Cosmic Smash, a Point Blank sequel and, most interesting of all, Rainbow Bombergirl. The most interesting games there this time out were Sega’s Monkey Ball (the predecessor of the console Super Monkey Ball series), a Japanese Tetris game, the original Space Invaders, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man and, in the arcade area, Bally’s classic World Cup ’93.

Next year my plan is to volunteer in the board gaming and RPG tracks. I hope that I get in for, while I know a number of money saving tricks, DragonCon gets more expensive for me to attend every year. Here are some photos from this year’s convention, with commentary.

From Mortal Kombat II’s EJB Menu
World Cup Soccer ’94
The ever-charming Richard “Lord British” Garriott, after his talk about his plans for reviving Ultima once he, due to a quirk of copyright law, wrests control of it away from Electronic Arts.
Monkey Ball! They also had The Typing of the Dead, but it wasn’t nearly as well-localized as the English Dreamcast version, and all the text was Romanized Japanese words.
The banner for the Joystick Gamebar, posted on the outside of its temporary location in a defunct Benihana.
BE ADVISE! ESTROOM FOR TRONS ONLY!

Sundry Sunday: Why ProZD Doesn’t Play Fighting Games

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Still DragonCon. Still low effort posts. Here’s ProZD on why he doesn’t play fighting games (23 seconds).

Tomorrow is the last day. Back at it then. Richard Garriott is at DragonCon again this year, maybe I’ll be able to make a post about his talk.

Gamefinds: Estimania

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

It’s Saturday and DragonCon is now in Day 3, so here’s another quick post that I prepared ahead of time.

Estimania is a simple web quiz game that asks you five numeric questions every day. It doesn’t expect you to absolutely know any of them, although in the rare chance that happens you’ll get a perfect score of 100 for that question. Most of the time though you’ll have to guess, making a good estimate of the answer, and the closer you are the closer to 100 your score for it will be.

A question from a few days ago….

After five questions you’ll be told your total score, and how your answers rank among the others who have taken that quiz for that day.

…and the answer to that question, with an explanation, along with my score for that day. I did okay that time.

It’s quick and fun! It also lets you try the previous day’s quiz, although your score won’t be counted in the stats for that day, or its leaderboard.

U Can Beat Videogames’ Top 100 Secrets & Strategies

We’re still in “low effort” mode here while DragonCon is going on, so here is a video list (2 hours 26 minutes long) of U Can Beat Videogames‘ 100 “top” secrets in games, whatever “top” means here. Most popular? Most famous? Can’t say. It does serve as an entertaining condensation of years of UCBVG’s strategy videos. Watch it directly to remember old games, or leave it on in the background while you do other things.

An Online Place Called Samhan

The internet has been around in one form or other since the 1960s, but we can date the creation of the first web browser to Christmas Day, 1990. But there have been other services upon the internet, and although people don’t mention this nearly as often as they once did, they deserve to be recognized separately. The internet is not the Web.

Some of these services, which actually began off the internet itself, as features on private networks, are MUDs, or “Multi-User Dungeons,” the first form of what are now called MMORPGs. And one type of these is the graphical MUD, where you don’t have just a parser and a text crawl telling you your surroundings and what’s happening, but you can see your character and what lies around them.

To my knowledge the first graphical MUD is not a settled question. Here are a few early MUDs and MUD-like worlds: Habitat, Club Caribe, Isle of Kesmai, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version). Before all of these though there were the multiplayer dungeons on ancient PLATO systems, which were frequently presented graphically. Some later graphical worlds include Worldsaway, The Palace, Ultima Online, the oft-forgotten Sims Online, Runescape, Legends of Kesmai, Everquest, Second Life, World of Warcraft (of course), Conan Exiles, Glitch, and a slew of other titles. Now I think it’s safe to say there have been more forgotten online graphical worlds than remembered. Some of these forgotten games were even popular. Who remembers Asheron’s Call? Dark Age of Camelot? City of Heroes? The answer: a cadre of former members who retain fond memories of it, even after Capitalism demanded that the world they once lived in sink beneath the cold waves.

One of these worlds was, and still is, called Nexus.tk. While Nexus continues to survive through the years, a while ago a number of players splintered off from it and started a new game along its lines, Chronicles of Samhan, which is now open for a “soft launch.” A friend-of-the-blog, the worthy Statue, is interested is involved in its running, and they care very deeply about it, and if they care, we care too. Here is a screenshot:

It has purposely pixel art-ish graphics, a tile-based game world, monsters to fight, items to earn and levels to gain. Right now there aren’t many players, but that itself is a point of interest, a way to get in early and gain wealth and stature when the competition is low. I know that Chronicles of Samhan is run on a shoestring budget, completely on the backs and out of the wallets of a handful of hobbyists. They are unlikely to go corporate and enshittify it to hell, and these days that’s another point in its favor.

There have been many of these worlds, hundreds of them, and there’ll probably be hundreds more before this Internet grinds to a halt. I think everyone should try a few of them. Joining up is free, so as I often say, why not give it a try?

A few images showing off the fairly large regions to explore:

A portion, zoomed out, of the town of Seasong and nearly areas
A portion of the Marvel Mines

Mr. Game & Watch’s Judge Isn’t Completely Random

We linked to videos in PKBeats’ long Smash Bros trivia series recently, but while perusing some other things they’ve uploaded this came up (18 minutes), and frogdarnit, it was too interesting to let pass. You could also load the video starting directly at the start of the discussion, almost three minutes in. Text info below.

Here’s the gist. In the Smash Bros. series, Mr. Game & Watch has a move called Judge, where he holds up a sign with a number from 1 to 9, and depending on the number one of nine different effects can happen, with possibilities like dropping food, producing a fire effect, damaging G&W himself, or, if a 9 comes up, executing an extremely powerful attack like a slightly weaker version of the game’s famous Home Run Bat item, that usually KOs an opponent.

The number that appears, and so the effect product, for the most part seems random, and a good thing too with Number 9’s immense power. Judge never executes the same move twice in a row, so if a 9 wasn’t the last result produced, you have a â…›th chance to get it the next time… usually.

It had been noticed by some that, in certain circumstances, Judge produces a 9 result much more often, like half the time, but the details of the phenomenon were not fully known. Through sheer bloody-minded experimentation, PKBeats found out that the result is largely due to whether Mr. G&W is behind in scoring, and not just behind, but far behind. I’ll let the video give the precise lowdown, but in essence Mr. Game & Watch must have half or less of lives (sorry, “stocks” in Smash lingo) remaining compared to his opponent, and there must be 30 seconds or less left in the match.

So: it’s yet another catch-up mechanic, a way for G&W to clear opponents rapidly if it looks like he’s going to lose. Since it only comes into play at the end of a match, it almost never can make a difference though unless G&W is on his last life, and his opponent has two lives left. In that scenario G&W has a good chance of getting off a 9 and taking off a stock immediately… putting both characters on their last stock, and now G&W has to run up his opponent’s percent in the short remaining time without the increased Judge 9 chances. Doesn’t seem too useful, but then if it were actually useful, someone out there would probably have built a strategy off of it, so I guess it’s for the best that it’s so infrequent.

NeoGamer Presents 200 Weird Games

We’re approaching DragonCon again in a few days, meaning my time is going to be taken up with wandering around and probably playing more of Bombergirl in their game room. So for the next week it’s low effort posts to make our demanding once-daily schedule. Here we go!

NeoGamer on Youtube has an entertaining, not to mention loooong, video with short clips from 200 strange games they’ve played in their channel. (1 hour 27 minutes) Right off the bat they start out weird, and they don’t let up. Please consume responsibly.

Sundry Sunday: WarioWare, but it’s NBC

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Ah yes, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that Sundry Sunday was intended to showcase. I’m telling you, quality randomness like this don’t come down the intertubes that often. From TheIridiumic138, it’s just a bunch of clips from NBC television, that’s the National Broadcasting Company, but presented in the form of a WarioWare video game collection (3 minutes). It’s exactly as simple, as stupid, and as brilliant as that. It’s even filled with deep cuts like the old animated NBC peacock segments, which were before even my time! And it ends with a perfect Conan O’Brien bit to cap it off. You really have to see it to believe it, so why not watch/realize now:

Matthew Haughey’s Review of Big Walk

I must admit that I have yet to play Big Walk, the long-awaited game House House made after their phenomenal hit Untitled Goose Game. UGG hit right as COVID was getting underway, when many people were stuck at home during lockdown, and gave them a brilliantly short but funny experience to obsess over, going as far as the pages of The New Yorker. While it’s impossible for Big Walk to reach those stellar honking heights, it’s gotten universal acclaim from the outlets that have covered it, and may actually have longer legs than the Goose, since it’s not over with in a mere hour.

That I haven’t played Big Walk, I should say, isn’t entirely for my own fault. The biggest thing that limits Big Walk’s adoption is the fact that you must have at least two players on-hand to play it, at all. There is no solo mode, and it’d largely miss the point of the game to try it. Beyond that it’s an even better experience with more people: Big Walk supports up to 12. Most of my friends don’t usually play video games together, and the one that usually does play with others is a FPS enthusiast, and not too into a game fundamentally about communication, and getting lost in a wilderness. Throw in the fact that it’s a game starring weird gourd people, and I imagine he might actually get ill if he tried playing it.

Image from A Whole Lotta Nothing.

Matthw Haughey, founder of Metafilter and owner of the newsletter and blog A Whole Lotta Nothing, has a typically fine piece about the joys of Big Walk. He mentions that the greatest challenge of the game is simply starting it, finding a number of friends who are motivated to try such a quirky experience and can all schedule time to play it together. Fortunately it doesn’t all have to be finished in one session.

I’m itching to try it, maybe some time soon. I’ll be at DragonCon in a week. If any of you are there, maybe we could meet up somewhere and go for a Big Walk?

oldgame.cz, A Place To Play DOS Games Online

The people who run oldgame.cz (English link) emailed me and outright asked if we’d link to them. Imagine that, an honest request without any exchange of money involved! Someone just offering to give me something to post about today. It’s a thing of beauty, it is it is.

Honestly I don’t know that much about them, but the page says you can play DOS games in your browser there. I know they’re not the only people who offer that (heck, the Internet Archive even does it), but the barest examination of their site doesn’t show any intrusive ads, paywalls or scammy behavior, so I’m happy to give them the link.

Of course, I reserve the right to remove the link later if they suddenly morph into Trantor the Malware Demon. But barring that, please enjoy!