KEE: POST-MORTEM FOR THE FIRST (AND LAST) OF ITS KIND

Not unlike Camilla, my girlfriend Tuna's career as an artist draws her to table at comic & entertainment conventions. We've only been to a few so far, and all within the city, but Vancouver has  tons of small conventions that go on throughout the year which draw a diverse and enthusiastic crowd. A colleague - Chaos Lindsay - caught wind of a new, first-ever comic expo going on in nearby Kelowna and invited us along. Tuna signed up, split a table with Art Ikuta, and last Friday our merry band packed up & set out for the Coquihalla highway.

The old good cop/bad cop routine.

Our expectations weren't terribly high. Most large conventions are now 4- or 5-day affairs, organizational ziggurats of nerd-merch, fan-art, and tweetable conference-room reveals.  If anything we were testing the waters of a small, but seemingly well-to-do convention in a nearby growing city. Judging by dinner conversation the Friday before the con (tales of of epic fails at other first-time conventions), we were really expecting the very worst and hoping just to recoup travel and attendance expenses. (SPOILER ALERT: We didn't.)

I was rather confused as we rolled up to the Capital News Centre on Saturday morning. In the sprawling parking lot were two huge buildings. I saw signs for a swimming pool, a fitness centre, a public library... a couple of open bay-doors revealed the exhibitor entrance to the expo floor, which was an astroturf indoor soccer field. The floor was small (we were separated from the other half of the soccer field by black mesh) but spacious, everything hedged in by lovely (and no doubt budget-hemorrhaging) curtains of black fabric. We finished setting up and counted down as the match timer on the far wall counted down to 10:00.

My 1-word description for Kev & Linds alternated between 'badass' and 'adorable' during our 24 hours together.

Our time at the con may have ended with a whimper, but it started with... also a whimper. It was hard to tell if the doors were open. We met some lovely people - I was a particularly big fan of the genderbent Prince Leia and Han Solo couple who were walking around. There was a hired Robocop cosplayer who scared the shit out of everyone. Two or three of those charity Stormtrooper guys were on duty. Billy West's autograph table was almost indistinguishable from the other exhibitors. After lunch we asked the door volunteers how many people had attended so far, and they couldn't tell us. They didn't know. I headed out to grab some food for my exhibitor family; I think it was a 20-minute walk to find the nearest Subway. By the time I got back around 4:30, there was nobody on the floor except for exhibitors checking out other exhibitors and volunteers playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. Nobody had recouped their expenses by this point. An hour later, everyone at both our tables had melted down to the soft bed of astroturf, waiting out the ennui.

Then Lindsay's eyes lit up and she asked us what we thought of cutting & running, just skipping Sunday altogether. Then everybody got going and the next thing we knew, a con organizer (because this felt much more CON than CONVENTION) asked us why were packing up in such a hurry. We told him we were leaving and not coming back. With a dejected grimace he quietly nodded and said he couldn't blame us. We were hugging goodbye at King George SkyTrain station by 11pm that night. 

Don't get me wrong. The Okanagan has got some awesome artistic talent. There were lots of quality exhibitors and guests - I liked the inlander penchant for crafting - and the space was well used. But between an absolute vacuum of marketing power, and competition with the young but successful Kelowna Fan Expo earlier in the year, there's just no enthusiasm for the KEE. We heard from others that some of the artists had gotten together Saturday night and distributed flyers themselves to rouse up some rabble for Sunday - so what, exactly, did these exhibitors pay for? As far as I've heard, not a soul has gotten a refund for this lackluster event.

All told, we had a fun weekend. We made friends with radical people, realized that sometimes "Best Value Inn" really does mean "Best Value" and not "Worst Quality," and made enough bad train puns to guarantee an eternity in the deeper levels of comedy hell.

THE VENT: METAL GEAR SOLID V STANKS!

I like to think I'm a reasonable person who has just experienced some very unreasonable things. Thank the good lord i was not out in public when this game ended,  I probably would have had a full blown adult tantrum. I realize that this tirade is not going to be respectful or in any kind of good taste and I don't care.

I grew up with Metal Gear and have been a dedicated fan despite the numerous shortcomings of the series. I had a lot of fun playing MGS:V, everything was fine up until the end that is. Somehow all the sloppy supplemental dog shit of the series ended upright in my lap as I watched the credits roll yesterday.

The VENT is a special place. It will allow us to spew negative mental annotations off the record with no regard for any ones feelings. A huge portion of criticisms tend to be unconsciously edited; trading off a negative trait for a positive one. Well here its all con baby! Here we don't give a fuck. 
What follows is a unabashedly annoyed gamers thoughts on MGS:V:

Fuck the repeat main missions. I can't be  the only one amazed by this insulting mechanic. I didn't buy a game to play the same main missions including cut scenes 3 times over, and this happened with maybe 5 of the main missions, which, if my math serves creates at least 10 useless missions that I could have simply chosen to replay with a different approach. The side ops are even worse. Every time i rescued a prisoner it would just spam it again and add the same fucking mission back onto the god damn list of shit i had already completed with a check mark beside it. So fuck that. Also fuck that replay of the intro at the end of the game again. The fuck was that about!?

Fuck Konami for pulling funding on a triple a title mid development. Of course the root problem of most things is money and this Konami/ Kojima situation is no exception. What the fuck did you think was going to happen Konami?

"Kojima! You've gone over budget, and were really only into pachinko now and shit people can insert money into. So your done here. Unless we can find a way to insert money into your butthole and get a 200% cash return on the investment your finished here.We don't care if your games 'almost' done we'll make assloads of cash from the name alone not to mention the pre-orders and make sure all the reviews that come out will be 10's somehow. BWWWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."

                                                                                                                                - Everyone at Konami

Fuck anyone who thinks this game is a perfect 10. Also fuck numerical scores in general. Based on nothing really. But shit people like to see numbers instead of reading so let's just do that. Aren't reviews suppose to be a well rounded broad picture? Grading all aspects of a game experience? And if so how could you give an incomplete story 10? If the rest of the game was amazing,  but the story is something a drunk handicapped parrot could have told you and you felt generous and gave it a 9. The average is NOT 10. So fuck those reviews. The more i think about it the more i think the parasite in the game activated when anyone installed MGS:V and caused them to only give perfect 10's.

Fuck the boss fights. Everyone knows metal gear bosses are awesome. Kojima really phoned it in this time. The man on fires weakness is.....wait for it....waaaait.....water!! Omg of course? And washe Volgin from Metal Gear 3?  And was that baby psycho mantis? Guess we'll never know. How did they both work together? were they actual people or apparitions?  The fucking skulls are stupid. They were not fun to encounter at all.  Many of us had no idea how to deal with them. And who were they? If I knew what or who they were I might have been more invested in the mummers farce that was the 'battles'.Yes plural. You fight them many many times over. And what's with the unexplained woman skulls unit? And why the fuck were they still after me when Skull face died? And why didn't I get to fight skull face? I compulsively thought on Metal Gear 3 and how much fun all the boss fights were and how smart i felt after beating most of them. Especially The Sorrow. That game was, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the series.

Fuck Kojima for being a bad storyteller. I know the entire game is a kind of farce or goofy anime but come on dude. I feel like ive been trained to think being confused by a story is normal The joke i'm starting to understand now is that even with an incomplete mess of a plot MGS:V  still ended about as well as all the others. He's clearly started eating crayons and throwing his sippy cup across the room when its empty, grow up dude.

Fuck Quiets character. A naked woman who doesn't talk!? That's dumb and juvenile, she could have been slightly more dressed which would have made me take her a bit more seriously but it's kind of hard to to learn about a character that says zero things. There were explanations about why she couldn't wear clothes...or talk. Something about speaking the English language would give her a virus and she absorbs shit through her skin instead of eating or whatever.  

Fuck no David Hayter. He IS snake. Why would you spend way more money on an actor that has 5 pages of dialogue in an entire game that sounds like every other male character in the game? He must have cost millions of dollars to aquire, no wonder they went over budget. How many people bought the game because; Jack Bauer?

I'm running out of fucks to give here. Only a few left. So fuck the ending! As a gamer I don't care if your company shut down your product. You don't get a sympathy 10 from me because I know it was hard for you. Your grown ass men and you released a very incomplete game. So who was cypher exactly? Where did the metal gear go? Why was Huey such a fucking stupid bitch of a character? So I'm not me in the game? And no chapter 3? You know like every story ever has 3 parts. Konami's all like: 'nah bro. 1 big chapter and a second small one that makes zero sense is what we're about now.'

You know what, fuck me for writing this garbage. I guess I just boiled over after the game, no, the series ended on the worst note ever. In fact. I don't think I've been more annoyed with such an otherwise polished entertainment experience ever.

We encourage comments in the VENT. Insult something! it feels good. 

GAMING ALBUM: 10/8/2015

Just a few screenshots of what I've been playing lately...

Dragon Age: Origins. While the Fade plays out as nightmarishly as the dreamworld it's supposed to represent, old women seem strangely immune to fire-pains.

Dragon Age: Origins. As you can see, this is the "dragon" part of the game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. What self-respecting propaga- ..*ahem* news agency wouldn't want a statue of a godlike hand grasping a helpless Earth?

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I laughed.

Darkest Dungeon. Love Interest + Deviant Tastes means that Umfraville both must relax at the brothel, and yet is forbidden. "I'd do anything for love... but I won't do that."

Darkest Dungeon. First run on the latest patch had my whole party die of heart attacks in one combat. Reynauld woulda' lived, too, if not for the damn corpsepile.

CHOOSE WISELY

Clearly, with games as large and involved as they are now, us older folks must pick and choose what to play and when- very carefully or else end up with an incredible museum of untouched Relics. Unfortunately, the idealist in most of us is merely a high pitched 'urkelish'  voice that we stamp out so we can continue purchasing games well never-ever finish. Have any of you ever played a game for 10 minutes just because you bought it and, maybe, feel guilty for not ever experiencing someone else's hard work that you paid for?

These choices can become strangely overwhelming. Buying the thing is the easy part. Getting excited about playing them is also the easy part. Scheduling in the time is the quasi challenging adulty part i don't think ill ever fully master.  But choosing something from the expanding library, well, it can be a bit of a motherfucker. Just the other night i had a half bottle of Whisky and some designated game time. I was ready to zone out and play something for a few hours. That didn't happen. In fact not much happened at all. I got the 'fear' you see. The enormous amount of choice before me caused a mental 'GAME OVER' for me before i even picked something out to play. Distantly i  swear i heard a slide whistle being slowly drawn out foir me and my sad attempt. I went through the backlog out loud. By myself. Which i seem to do often now.

This would not make me a happy man

In this case, on this particular evening i chose non-wisely.

"Metal Gear!?- Yeah, i'm only 10 main missions in. I should catch up a bit..Quiets boobs are awesome. WTF was Kojima thinking?...maybe..."

"Witcher 3?!- SURE! wait....where was i? I'm only 25 hrs in, i should really put in some time here. Nurture it a bit. Give it some attention But then ill run out of money or my sword will break or ill get distracted and start doing shit in the forest.......aw fuck it."

"Dont Starve Together?!- TOTALLY! Such an adorably charming little game, and my Bro just put a new computer together maybe i should call him? "In an hour you can  play!? Sure ill just play something else while i wait....maybe."

"Heroes of the Storm!?- Haven't really go into this yet, I've heard great things, like its a lazy mans DOTA. Built by the actual company that inspired it. Cool, i have not the time nor the patience to DOTA. But wait maybe i should finish....."

"Wolfenstein- Its been a while hasn't it Wolfy? Now where was i here, almost at the end. Right. The hard part and the reason i let you sit on the shelf for too long. Kind of like..."

"Hotline Miami 2- Hrm. Well- i don't know if i'm up for a super unforgiving, intense game. But a friend suggested 'Pillars of Eternity.' Oh shit, 50 bucks! Man, well maybe...But thats another time sink. Oh my bro just got back to me. He can't play."

Aaaaaand now i'm lost and somehow very confused. 

So over about 2 hours i didn't play anything for a variety of different reasons. Something I've notice recently, and its not only to do with games, is the incredible, unfathomable amount of choices we have now for any given item. If your shopping for mustard and your indecisive i pity you. There's like 50 different kinds of mustard out there! Usually i notice my wife trying to make an entree choice at a restaurant. We no longer visit the cheesecake factory for this very reason. She'll spend most of our time there reading through the bible of food and choose nothing. Or choose something thats just 'ok' and spend her meal feeling disappointed that she's missing out on everything else. It's a sickness, you see.  A fear of missing out or 'FOMO' which is a real thing that tends to creep on me with online games. I guess I was so worried about missing out on one particular experience that i chose exactly nothing to play. Under acute circumstances this is was a profound wake up call. PICK A GAME AND SHUT THE FUCK UP TRISTAN.  

At any given time I have about 12 games i really want to play. I'll complete maybe 6 games a year. So mostly i'm biding  my time until the next great game with arbitrary titles i have very little interest in. Out of pure habit i suppose. Maybe my friends are playing something online so ill jump in just for the social aspect and get a few laughs out of it (which is vital). But time is a fickle bitch and the best revenge, seemingly, is to get vigilant and only choose the games we really are interested in.

I think when i'm truly at my happiest with a game is when I've waited for a great one player experience to come out and just sit on the couch (still the best place to play games) and really tuck into it and see it through till the end; when the disk doesn't leave the console until its finished. All that's  important is that i get an enjoyable experience as a return for hours invested regardless of what could have been or what i could be playing instead.

I no longer find myself hunting for what i want to play. The more games we play the more defined our tastes become. That could be said for anything we spend quality time with. I know i love being scared, the methods may be cheap sometimes but i feel like i get my monies worth if my systolic blood pressure maintains a steady 150. I love a great story and atmosphere above all else. I'll dabble in online competitive gaming but i find i soon become frustrated and consumed with self doubt quite quickly. And the time involved to become better is just a chore for me now.  I gravitate towards a certain type of game, so i  read and research release dates for titles and publishers i respect and make very rudimentary plans about what order what game should be played in. If i have a choice of 5 games to play right now ill go straight for what i know and like vs something completely new. Which now that i think about it creates a very boring image of myself. 

First world problems right!? So choose wisely my friends, time is an diminishing investment. Don't settle for the mundane, be productive and challenge yourself until that next game you want comes out. Then call in sick, ignore your wife and have a drink, heck, have 2. 

Throwback Thursday: The Secret of Monkey Island

Welcome to the first edition of Throwback Thursday,  where we cherry-pick our very earliest gaming memories for the sweet, sweet nostalgia.

The earliest memories I can recall of playing a video-game must have been around 1994 -- a combination of The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, 3-D Dinosaur Adventure, and The Seventh Guest. I was four years old at the time and mostly illiterate, but I do remember clicking through these intricate adventures just for the thrill of some kind of reaction or change from the game. I vaguely recall we had a console or two in the house by that time, but my brothers were usually using them, so I resorted to bothering my parents to boot up these weird PC games for me.

Since Myst and Seventh Guest had this habit of scaring the living shit out of me from one second to the next (the first person perspective - particularly in dark and abandoned buildings - creeps out children, go figure!) and the beloved 3-D Dinosaur Adventure barely constituted a game,  I didn't spend nearly as much time with them as with Monkey Island. That game charmed me in a way that has followed me ever since, as much in terms of gaming education as in terms of humor and wit.

Even though the CD version with soundtrack came out in '92 we still had the game on floppydisk and the startup screen would play the wicked reggae theme music through the soundcard, rather than as a .wav file through the external speakers. If this doesn't tingle your spine then you must not have one:

So that plays. And then you're this dorky guy in a white shirt talking to some old dude by a fire. At the bottom of the screen there's a bunch of green verbs, next to your inventory in purple, and your cursor is a flashing white crosshair. By clicking on parts of the screen, your character (Guybrush Threepwood) will move there; by clicking the green verbs before clicking on the play area, your character will attempt to do the verb to that thing.

My first videogame hero was a coward, layabout, liar, cheat, thief, critic, and certified insult-swordsman.

Mechanically, the game is a matter of collecting and combining inventory items, as well as negotiating dialogue trees with other characters, in order to solve puzzles which advance the story. The overarching plot sounds typical: an undead dread pirate kidnaps the governor-princess of Melee Island, and the boy who loves her must come to her rescue. But the adventures in the game itself are way more hilarious and involve rubber-chickens, a no-handed two-hooked failed hotelier; resolving a crew mutiny with an explosive Grog of breath mints, gunpowder, and fine wine; and navigating the bowels of hell by threatening a sentient skull for directions through threats and insults. See...hilarious! The Secret of Monkey Island is above all a highly successful work of comedy, similar to the best part of an evening of improv theatre, motivating you to play just for the reward of further jokes and oddities.

Of course all this high-brow humour was lost on me as a child.  I would literally click around until the screen changed and consider that a success. I actually got pretty far through trial-and-error, attempting to use each action and item on each interactable thing until something happened. Today i tried to use my cucumber on a locked door. This diligent trial-and-error method would develop into a core gaming skill - particularly well-demonstrated in the Monkey Island series, where puzzles are often so quirky and obscure that you'd have no other way of solving them.

I do remember coming back to it a bit later and was able to more fully explore the game, though much of the comedy continued to go way over my head. Very similar to my love of The Simpsons as a child. I would even call Secret of Monkey Island, The Simpsons of PC Gaming.

As I child I was half-oblivious, half too-blown-away-by-meta-humour-to-understand, to this blatantly parodic tie-in.

• Each is one of the earliest examples in its medium (cartoons and PC games) to demonstrate entertainment value to adults over children. 
• Intelligent writing - taxes humor, breaking the fourth wall, the hilarity of harsh realities - the strength of Simpsons & Monkey Island's humor lies in the overlap between wisdom and absurdity.
• Both are supported by a large cast of likable characters.
• Both are led by stupid, mostly useless, yet still lovable, protagonists
• Both have stuck with me as a sort of concrete for the foundation of my humor today.

  I've come back time and again to both these series as my brain has 'matured,' and while each series has strained a bit under the weight of forced continuation, I have deeply enjoyed coming back to these familiar stories and unraveling the deeper stuff going on under the surface.

But that insult fighting though. I remember re-enacting the first scene with the swashbuckler on the schoolground at recess. Clang, clang, clang "My handkerchief will wipe up your blood!'  Clang, clang, clang "So you got that job as a janitor after all?'  Just the idea of that is still fantastic and so innovative. I remember taking a trip to mexico and was on the beach one clear night staring out into the water at a small island. I had one of those real life ---> videogame flash backs, you know what im talking about and remembered this image. Still, whenever i think of videogames i only see the word as synonymous with the Monkey island start screen.