Hey all!

Had a blast this weekend with the west coast gang, I want to thank everyone for coming out to support and compete. I really like the "team play" format. I hope we can do more of these style events in the future. The whole vibe was rooting your team on and not so much working to take down your friends scores. The Ken-cade was packed! So much fun and good times I can't even put it into words.

Big thank you to Aurcade Dave for such a great app to input scores and big thanks to Brotha Ken, the Knuckles Posse and Funspot all-stars for putting this thing on. Good times good times.

Kudos to MVP Steve Wagner for kickin ass.. big respectz, Ez

West Coast had a GREAT time. I was pretty stoked about making our lineup with all the players in the mix. Dave and I have a few things to tweak for next time but overall it feels like a HUGE success! Thanks to everyone involved.

-Ken

VonDummpenstein Wrote: I really liked the scoring system. There's something fun about an arcade contest where the goal is to maintain as low a score as possible. Also, not using a percentage based scoring system meant one monster score on a game didn't make all other scores for that game irrelevant. With so many great players participating there was obviously going to be specialists, but how you compared to the specialists didn't matter as much as how you stacked up against everyone else.

This explains perfectly why the team-based play and the ranking system for scores felt perfect to me. Every game has its own scoring mechanics and some are really screwy and can be much more subject to luck, like Zoo Keeper. Ranking all the players on each game makes more sense, and having team-based play encourages players to help each other improve. It allowed us to celebrate each others' personal victories rather than wishing that all other players fail so that you can win.

I got new personal bests on 7 of the 12 contest games, and it came about partially because I could see from the real-time standings on each game where I could help my team the most by jumping several places in the standings. Whereas normally I would have been content with a 150k Galaga TGTS score, I saw that if I could hit 200k I would jump 10 spots and help my team. It motivated me to keep trying, and I got a 207k. I'd never broken 200k on Galaga ever, even on default settings, and this time I did it on 'Hard' difficulty with only 5 ships. Same thing with Pole Position. I'd never finished the race in Pole Position, ever, but did for the first time on Saturday, pushing my personal best from 44k to 57,600. Also, I'd never really played Track & Field before and didn't have access to one to practice, but I learned how to play from teammates during the contest and was able to put up an 81k. I also had Matt Hall keeping pace with me on Moon Patrol and motivating me to keep trying, and I pulled out a 334k with about 15 minutes to go on Sunday.

I had an awesome time. I don't know how often we're going to get to do this, but I think twice a year would be quite possible, once in the spring and once in the fall. That would avoid most of the major CAG events and gaming shows (most of which occur in the summertime between late May and mid-August) as well as avoiding Thanksgiving and Christmas, etc.

I also love the fact that we are not relegated to having someone time our games. We are all adults and can all tell time and/or can hear a beep. Something like DK where there was a chance I could go an hour worked out great because I had about 5 bad starts where I could kill off my game and restart my timer just in case I got a good game going. In another tournament, I would be relegated to having to wait hours in between each attempt. It's feels very much like freedom being on your own gaming schedule like that. I love this format so much, was the most fun I've had playing games in a long, long time. Hopefully we are playing this tourney so far into the future that we are now all one team of Earth playing against Mars.

I hear the Martians suck eggs at Frogger. What!? It's true. ET blabs everything..can't keep his dehydrated ass mouth shut.


I could totally roll up for another BotAs in the Fall. Maybe this time we could add some vectors too. Get a date locked in.

FlyHec Wrote: Sounds like everyone had a blast. I knew this would be a kick-ass event. Sorry I couldnt make it this time but I was a little busy with another tourny myself. The sooner we have dates for another the better. I'd love to make it to one sometime. Hector

Ken and will be talking soon to plan the next one. We'll be sure to determine the date soon.

By the way, excellent collection Hector. You and I have similar tastes!

I'm a bit late to the thread but I just wanted to add my thanks for the event. I had a great time.

One suggestion that I would have for the next one would be to allow more interaction between the locations. An idea would be to have a constant Skype call going between the locations so people can get on to chat and joke around.