The Video Game Revue

Fragapalooza 2006

Fragapalooza (http://www.fragapalooza.com/) is on this weekend. In fact it's happening right now, as I type this, and has been happening for the last two days. Today I went down to the site with a buddy of mine (Ace-High) to partake as spectators. Good times; I could see myself wanting to participate as an entrant sometime.

The culture out on the floor was definitely amusing. There were all sorts of games going on; the majority of it was Battlefield 2, although I also saw a bit of Counter-Strike, some Quake GL, and too many others to exhaustively enumerate. One group had setup a GameCube and were playing Super Smash Bros along-side their PCs; that stood out. Another guy was playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 on what must have been an emulator. Yet another guy was playing Dance Dance Revolution using arrow keys (fairly common, I know.) A lot of people were watching various movies, TV shows, and anime. At least two guys were watching Clerks 2 (still in theatres, not yet released on DVD), and I could have sworn some guy was watching Bubblegum Crisis--the old one.

We brought our Nintendo DSes along in the hopes that we'd find some pick-up games, and while we did play some DS, there didn't seem to be others hanging about with them. One guy passed us and tossed of the comment "DS--For the Lose!" if I heard him correctly. I think that may have been some kind of attempt at PC gamer hate-on for non-PC games, but I could easily be mistaken; it didn't seem worthwhile to press for clarification from him.

I'm not a big fan of case mods, personally, but I don't hold anything against them either, and they sure look pretty in the dark. I was glad to see that out of the whole floor, I only noticed one Dell XPS and one Alienware case, which is to say that just about everyone had their own custom-built box (and really, that's the only way to go with serious PCs.) Intel had sponsored the play-off area with some nice looking boxen, and nVidia and ATI were both there with demo booths and free play areas. The effect of the illuminated case mods is amplified somewhat when you've got a bunch of identical models sitting in a row.

I made use of one of the free play areas to see what F.E.A.R. is like on a real GPU. It sure was cool. The environments themselves only seemed marginally better, but the enemy models were very much more detailed, and the difference was especially clear during bullet-time shootouts. Whereas when I'd played F.E.A.R. on my home PC, enemy targets had been fairly generic rag dolls that went limp when they were beaten, on the more modern PC I could see exquisite detail as bullets flew through the air and victims crumpled under fire.

In the end, Ace-High and myself didn't hang out for too long. Things move pretty slowly if you're just a spectator; you really need to be there with a rig to keep yourself entertained. I did get a chance to observe some of the crazy WarCraft 3 skills happening in the tournament, though. Those guys have mad mouse skills. If I do end up entering some year, I'll be sure to stay well away from the RTSes. :)

posted by Parappa @ 7:29 PM