After not being able to do it last year or earlier this year, today finally played host to The Davison Cup 2021 (Postponed from 2020).
For the unfamiliar, the Davison Cup is a day where, usually in celebration of my birthday, my local friends and I get together and play a bunch of video games. I set up a big playlist of stuff, organise some rules and scoring, and for the last couple of occasions, provide a prize to the winner. This year I supplied an Evercade and a couple of cartridges I had duplicates of.
Things went very well, and it was a highly enjoyable day — sadly one of our number didn't quite make it through to the end of the day due to a stomach upset, but the remaining three of us duked it out to the bitter end, only for one to end up victorious and take home his prize.
The day included a wide variety of games, beginning with a selection of Atari arcade and 2600 classics from Atari Flashback Classics, then some selected highlights from 51 Worldwide Games, TimeSplitters 2, Super Bomberman R, Mario Golf: Super Rush, Burnout 2, BeamNG.drive and plenty more. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and I didn't even have to pay for dinner because it was technically my birthday celebration — even though my birthday was back in April.
The most popular games of the day included Canyon Bomber and Skydiver from the Atari arcade games in Atari Flashback Classics, Mancala and Billiards from 51 Worldwide Games, Burnout 2 (always a big hit in Crash mode), and Mario Golf's Speed Golf and Battle Golf modes. I had a feeling the latter would go down well — they're simple enough to be highly accessible, but provide enough in the way of interest to clearly be games of skill rather than just silly minigames.
I'd love to do this more often, as I enjoy the organisation and creativity of setting up the challenges for the day — I think it would work particularly well as something for a group of people to do together and either record for a YouTube video or a stream. My local friends aren't up for appearing online, sadly, otherwise I would have recorded today's challenges for a special video!
A good day had by all, then. I was certainly pleased to have hosted a successful event, and now I have lots of leftover snacks to enjoy!
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