Hi folks! Been a while since a Patron-only update, I know, and I apologise for that! I thought I'd take the opportunity to share what I was up to over the weekend, and upcoming plans for the site.
The Davison Cup
As I've gotten older, there are fewer and fewer friends I have the opportunity to see on a regular basis, mostly due to them having "adult" commitments like children and whatnot. I, on the other hand, have a wife, two cats and an enormous game collection, and intend to keep it that way without any sprogs to ruin my life. But I digress.
There are four friends I see semi-regularly for fortnightly board gaming evenings. All of them are nerds to varying degrees — though interestingly, none of them are particularly Internet-literate in the sense of understanding stuff like memes, social media trends and suchlike — and all like video games. Even if one of them plays nothing but Skyrim these days.
Last year (also around my birthday, as I recall), I decided to host a session that would both tickle their nostalgia glands where applicable as well as introduce them to some games they might not have played before. And I thought I'd make a competition out of it.
The Davison Cup was born; a series of challenges loosely inspired by the '90s TV show GamesMaster, in which the participants compete in a variety of games from the 2600 era onwards to today in order to demonstrate Who Is The Best.
This year I organised things to minimise console HDMI cable and disc-swapping, with dedicated rounds for Atari 2600 games (via the PS4 versions of Atari Flashback Classics), Namco arcade games (via the Switch version of Namco Museum), Taito arcade games (via Taito Legends on PS2), SNES games (well, Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter II), Neo Geo games (via Hamster's Switch ports), PS2 games, Wii and Wii U games and finally modern Switch and PS4 titles.
This year's challenges only had three participants, unfortunately, as two of our number had prior commitments, but we still had a good time — even if we had to call things early due to one of our number having to run home and rescue his wife from their children. (And you ask why I don't want children?) Unfortunately we only managed to get as far as the PS2 round, but that was plenty to fill a good 6 hours or so!
Things still worked well despite having an odd number of people; for two-player games we adopted a random seeding system, where two people would play against each other, and the winner would go on to confront whoever won a dice roll before the game began. For games based around high scores, this was simple enough to manage. And there was also a bonus round in which I gave everyone five minutes with the Honey Select Unlimited character creator to come up with… something, which my wife would then judge. And, uh, well…
I was delighted to discover that the games the guys knew less well — such as the 2600 titles and some of the obscure PS2 games, like the utterly absurd BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles — proved to be the most popular by far. This is perhaps because one of our number is considerably better than the others at games like Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter II and thus the results there felt a bit like a foregone conclusion. Combat on 2600 with invisible tanks, though? I dominated!
If you have the opportunity to do something similar with friends (and the available hardware with which to do so!) I highly recommend it. It's a great excuse to bust out bits of your game collection from all eras as well as share your passion for your hobby with people who might, as in this case, focus mostly on brand-new titles.
Upcoming plans
Okay, so onto what's next for MoeGamer. I have a tentative plan in place for the next few months that looks something like this:
May: Gal*Gun 2
June: The Shantae series
July: Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash
August: The Sonic the Hedgehog series
Yes, that's right, August is going to be Sonic time, though with there being a whole lot of Sonic games out there I won't have time to cover all of them.
As such, I need your help! If any of you reading this are actual fans of Sonic I'd be interested to hear which games in the series you'd regard as the most interesting — not necessarily the best, but the ones that at least try something different, regardless of whether or not they're successful.
I'm particularly interested in the post-Dreamcast games (and primarily the console games, since handhelds aren't practical to screenshot/capture), as I have decent familiarity with the Mega Drive and Dreamcast titles in particular; I'd like to know which of the "modern Sonic" games you think might be worth checking out.
Currently I'm interested in Sonic Generations, Sonic Colors, Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces (as well as Sonic Mania, whose Plus version will have released just before I run this feature, hence its timing) but if there are any others you think worth a look, let me know!
All right, that's enough for now. $5 Patrons, watch out for a wallpaper later! And, as always, thank you very much for reading and supporting my work. You are all wonderful people!