-Hey, yo! I posted this a few months back on another blog of mine, and just realized it would be relevant here as well, so please indulge with me another travel-blog about my 2018 Midwest Gaming Classic (MGC) experience! It wound up being my first MGC since my last blog here about it in 2013! Yes, five years since I visited a lot of the old crew from the TFL/VGevo/PSnation community that I went to nearly every year from 2007-2013. I was looking over a couple of my past MGC recap blogs, and it brought back a ton of memories, so I thought I would try and make a special one-time return post on this blog for a abbreviated MGC recap.
-A mammoth, late-season snowstorm approaching into my 10 hour driving route to Milwaukee forced me to leave several hours earlier then expected. The drive went smooth and I only ran into about an hour of rain/light flurries on the way there and back and made both trips with only two stops at the same gas stations! I was hoping the Hyatt I was staying at in Milwaukee would let me check-in several hours early, but they did not have rooms ready for about four hours after I got there so I killed time in the lobby.
-I did not decide to go to MGC this year until about two weeks before when a couple people reached out to me on Twitter to see if I was going. Props to Glenn/Torgo and Jeff/Biffstix for reaching out to me and inspiring me that five years was too long to go by. I met up with them and several others from the MGC community on Friday night for dinner and post-food drinks. I had a fun time catching up with everyone and hanging out to around midnight-ish before retiring.
-Saturday I met up with several more of the VGevo/PSnation community for breakfast and made my way onward to the show. This was the first year MGC emanated from the mammoth Wisconsin Center venue. It is a huge step up from the Sheraton/Olympia banquet areas from before. The Hyatt I was at was one of two or three hotels connected to the Wisconsin Center via skywalks which were extremely convenient that weekend when that storm swept through the Milwaukee area. There were two big halls there where one was home to the mammoth vendor hall and the other to the museum that had tons of consoles and computers hooked up to play from all eras and countless pinball and arcade machines on display. At the Sheraton and Olympia those room were nice, but getting cramped while hear there was ample room to walk around and also room to grow for years to come!
Another big improvement from before is not one, but two speaker halls. At the previous venues there was no room for panel rooms and the organizers made do with what room they could scrounge up in a concourse hallway and the hotel restaurant, but this is far more professional. I caught three panels on Saturday. One with the Retronauts podcast doing a panel on Atari’s ‘raw deal’ of the blame it received for the videogame crash, arcade legends Jarvis and Stern talking about their arcade game and pinball careers, and longtime No Mercy competitor and youtuber Joe Drilling about various video game ports over the years.
-Saturday was a blast, and it flew by checking out what I could of the vendor hall, the other community rooms adjacent to the main halls and catching the panels. There were a lot of cool community rooms once again, with the highlight being one that showed off NES homebrew games where a designer sold me on his bean bag toss game utilizing the Power Pad and I wound up buying one.That night a bunch of us got together again at a great BBQ place for dinner and wrapped up the night playing SNES on a huge projector Glenn had set up in his room. People petered out throughout the night, but Glenn, Nikko, Tyler and I closed out the night playing tons of SNES games I have played and never played before such as Royal Rumble, Sanrio Smashball, Top Gear, Sunset Riders, Axelay, BS Out of Bounds Golf, Street Fighter II and a Super Famicom sequel to the Crush series on TG16 I had no idea about until now.
-I was originally planning to be at MGC for only one day because of only getting so much time off work, but the storm kept me there an extra day so I was able to check out the whole event. Sunday was a little more laid back with no speakers so I had time to check out all the remaining areas of the huge vendor hall I had yet to explore and time to play a good chunk of the games set up on display. The vendors were surprisingly cordial to deal with as a couple of them offered discounts after they noticed me eyeballing some products when I was accustomed to it being the other way around. Look for a loot haul below.
I had a theme going into MGC to get the last of the three Power Pad games to have a complete collection of all six Power Pad games for the NES. I tracked down all three for under $10, and then found the extra homebrew game, Tailgating Party on top of it! I also tracked down a few Zapper games since I found my old Zapper at my mom’s while she did some housecleaning and I wanted a few more Zapper games aside from Duck Hunt. I wanted to also get a handful of affordable Game Gear games to have more than the same five or six I have only had for all these years and luckily I ran into a vendor who offered me Game Gear games for a dollar apiece and so I picked up six of them.
In past MGCs I had the tradition of picking up one TurboGrafX and one 3DO game, but there were very few 3DO games at MGC this year and holy crap did TG16 games went up in price since my last MGC visit in 2013. I was looking at an old photo of one of my old podcast co-hosts' MGC hauls where they picked up a TG16 and several games for around $10 each and I saw most of those common games going for $30-40 and other games I saw once for around $20-30 are now near the triple digit range. It was ridiculous….I had no idea what was the catalyst for that and am glad I got most of my TG16 games at decent prices several years ago.
-On Sunday night a bunch of us gathered at Mark/Savory Cade’s place and hung out there for the night. His wife made some righteous lasagna and then we laughed away at nonsensical YouTube videos before watching Man vs. Snake off Netflix. It is a documentary from 2015 I surprisingly never heard of before that looks like it was made from the same people who made the awesome King of Kong documentary I believe I wrote about on here around a decade ago. This one is about two arcade scorechasers competing for the high score in Nibbler and features appearances from King of Kong stars Walter Day and Billy Mitchell. Man vs. Snake wound up being quite awesome and well-produced and was a great way to wrap the weekend!
-So as I alluded to above, I will wrap this up with what I picked up at MGC for 2018
NES PowerPad – Athletic World, Short Order/Eggsplode, Dance Aerobics, Tailgating Party
NES Zapper – To the Earth, Hogan’s Alley
Game Gear – World Series Baseball, Jeopardy Sports Edition, Terminator 2, Sonic 2, Madden NFL '95, Poker Paul Solitaire
Genesis – Triple Play ‘96
GameCube – 4x4 Evo 2, Knockout Kings 2003
Wii – Ultimate Shooting Collection
PS2 – TNA iMpact!
PSone – Delta Force: Urban Warfare
-Once again, it was great to see so many awesome people from VGevo/PSnation I have not seen in years and it was great to catch up with everyone and hang out over the weekend. I will definitely be coming back again much sooner than later to MGC!
