Numba 59 is live and again it is just me and Mssr Haygood. I even managed to drop the f-bomb thirty seconds in! Stephen will bleep it out, but the uncensored phrase in question is "I'll tell you what I don't want to talk about, fucking PETA."
I talk smack about Home, which apparently you're not supposed to talk about since being in the beta carries along your tacit agreement to a non-disclosure agreement. Which is probably bunk, in all likelihood. I mean, Home has been in beta for like a year and a half and I think fully 80% of all PS3 owners have now made it inside the beta through one means or another. For me, my beta invite arrived last Friday as Sony closed down the increasingly irrelevant PlayStation Underground. I guess the Home beta was intended as a final thank you for years of Underground membership - which was originally a pay service I think, but became just a fan club sometime during the PS2 era.
Anyway, the Underground is being folded into the more popular and accessible PlayStation.com account system, so at some point I need to work my way through that. But Home? Yeah, I checked it out on Friday. It's dopey. I know that game launching and the micropayment store and other features are not in there at the moment, but it's still fairly purposeless and entirely lacking in personality. Sony has had years to work on this - as a concept it should have launched when the PS3 itself did - and this is all it is?
I've said this before, but Sony knows Home sucks. And they have no idea how to fix it. Haygood calls it a knockoff on Second Life, but it isn't even that interesting. At least in Second Life I could revert back to my old MUSHing days and actually create rooms and items and such. Second Life is a creation tool. Home is a chatroom. I have also gone on record as saying that we'll never get Home, that Sony will quietly shelve the whole bloody thing and work on it for the PS4. I'll be wrong on that one; Sony will eventually open it up and take the inevitable black eye over it being weird, pointless and full of unwanted pay DLC.
Home needs some purpose. It needs some unique features. Maybe the game launching will offer that. But as Joe Haygood says in the podcast, most of Home's supposed cool features have already been extracted from Home and brought into the PS3 OS... trophies, various XMB features, you can already do video chat straight from the buddy menu.
This podcast was recorded about an hour after I got home from the Video Game Expo in Philadelphia, so I was pretty exhausted. We did a lot of walking, both in the con and out of it, not to mention the Massively Multiplayer Dance Dance Revolution that I played. More about that later.
I got about three minutes into my rundown of VGXPO and Haygood interrupted with a "You're not impressing me." He's right; it's no E3. The big three were not around. Almost no developers at all. The boneheads from America's Army were there, and they had a line around the block simply because there was nothing else to stand in line for.
We saw plenty of Rock Band and Guitar Hero setups, as vendors unrelated to either property leveraged interest in their actual wares by letting people rock. Lots of places that sold gaming furniture, which was odd. Also two booths letting people play Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, I suppose because that was the highest-profile new release this week. There was an unlabeled GameStop booth that was regularly handing out random preorder items. We raided those punks, to the point where I felt terrible grabbing things. That was how I got four access codes to the God of War DLC bonus pack for LittleBigPlanet, by the way.
The main exhibit hall was small. Far smaller than Origins or Wizard World Philly, my two go-to conventions. For me, a measure of exhibit hall success is how many stands are selling old Star Wars figures. Not that I want to buy any, it's just usually a good indicator of how deep the vendor selection is. VGXPO had exactly one such toyselling booth.
Outside the exhibit hall, there were two other rooms in the toy game, and VGXPO has the unbelievably arrogant chutzpah to claim these other rooms are somehow "separate" concurrent conventions... Retro Con and Anime Con. Yeah, right. Believe me, cruising a smallish room selling classic gaming paraphrenalia and another smallish room selling imported toys and artwork was a highlight... but they're not separate conventions. Come on. Just throw those vendors into the exhibit hall, which would give them more space and make the main hall look bigger. Weird decisions all around.
Some nice cosplay was in effect... we spotted the Ice Climbers before we even got out of the pre-reg line. Plenty of Marios. One Luigi. The usual Star Wars guys. Big guy with Majora's Mask. Cute teens dressed as their favorite Kingdom Hearts characters. Do the Suicide Girls count? Tony posed with nearly every one of these. I'll link out to his photo gallery as soon as he preps his family for the debauchery.
One guy showed up as Mr. Terrific, which was crazy awesome. I had to congratulate him on a fine cosplay choice, where usually my policy is not to talk to these people. Great job, sir.
But all in all, Josh, Tony and I were pretty much done with the thing after an hour and a half. There just wasn't much to see or do. Any complaints are sort of negated by the paltry admission price of $15 or less, so I can't be too upset. Still, even $15 is a little much. We couldn't believe that there were hour+ lines of people waiting to get in as far as 3pm in the afternoon. I guess if you're more into tournaments and PC games, you'd be more into it. Hell, gaming supergod David Jaffe was scheduled to do a live video chat, and the expo cancelled the talk without even telling him about it... so that should give you some idea how this joint operates. Shame. I would have liked to attend his talk and kick over his laptop.
And about the DDR. We're walking blindly through the convention hall trying to find more things to do, because the show did a really awful job of letting you know where everything was. One of the siderooms sounded like a techno jamfest, so we peeked inside and saw Dance Dance Revolution Heaven. Thirty wireless sturdy dance pads, al synced to a special multiplayer DDR system. An emcee was picking playlists and the whole room was rocking in unison.
Best of all, it was totally free. Anybody could wander in and grab a pad. The three of us did a six minute set (about four songs) and among the untrained masses I landed third place. Then I jumped in to a ten minute set and stomped my way to second place. Clearly, the thirty or so competitors were not professional DDR players, if I could hop in cold and dance to second, but it still felt pretty good. Josh and Tony snapped all manner of silly photos and video of me dancing, like this intense action shot:
So I guess if you're somewhere near Philly when this event happens to be going on, it's worth a few hours for some freebies and quasi-interesting video gamery. But it's probably going to have to shut down once Penny Arcade Expo East Coast launches.
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