Day 137: TV Dinner

Tonight was a sad night. It was the last ever TV Dinner at the Highball.What is TV Dinner you ask? Well, let me explain.

A while ago, I don't know how long but it doesn't matter, our friend John Smith told us in addition to hosting Geeks Who Drink at the Highball he was going to start hosting a thing called TV Dinner on Monday nights with his Geeks Who Drink co-host James Pound. The idea was for people to come to the Highball and hang out for a couple of hours while watching some of our favorite TV shows from when we were younger. They started with three weeks of Saved by the Bell and over time did a bunch of other shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a line-up of classic Snick shows, Arrested Development and finished up with the best of Judd Apatow which was mostly Freaks and Geeks and a few episodes of The Critic. We attended pretty regularly at first and took part in a lot of the between-episode-games like designing an album cover for a Zack Attack Greatest Hits or the classic Bluth Family Chicken Dance-Off. Shaun usually attended with us and was always active in tweeting along with the episodes.

Over time we stopped going as frequently. It seemed we were always busy on Monday nights or we didn't have the money to spend on it. TV Dinner itself was free, but we would inevitably spend money on drinks and often eat there just because of the timing. I guess attendance was never quite what the Highball was hoping for and they decided to stop doing it. Last night was the last one.

We hadn't talked about going, but when we heard it was ending Shaun, my wife and I knew we had to be there. By this point James had been hosting it by himself for a while and we wanted to help give him a good last night to go out on. Plus he was showing Freaks and Geeks and The Critic, so what's not to love?

We showed up and enjoyed some snacks and drinks. We laughed at inappropriate tweets from other audience members, we made paper airplanes and left a mess of them all over the stage. Even our friend Mandy joined us one last time. The last episode of the last night of TV Dinner was the finale of Freaks and Geeks. If you've never seen the show I highly recommend it. It only ran one short season and the ending was so bittersweet it kills me that there weren't more episodes. To me it feels very similar to the final episode of Home Movies. It was the perfect episode to end TV Dinner with and everyone had a really good time.

So thanks John and James for hosting a really great show even if the number didn't always reflect it and even if we didn't always come. And thanks James for bringing it to a close in a most appropriate manner. I guess this means we'll have to make it out to Geeks Who Drink more than once a year now.

Day 80: Michelangelo Plays an Awesome Arcade Game

Remember that awesome FantasticFest arcade I was going to post about, but then I posted about Journey instead? Well, I went back there for a panel and all the games were still set up! I guess I wasn't paying much attention to the website and thought that only a small amount of the more "indy" games were remaining through the weekend, but I was wrong, dead wrong.

The reason I went back in the first place was to attend a panel about story telling in video games and film. It was mostly about story telling in video games, but they used methods of story telling in film as a contrasting view. It was actually very interesting when it wasn't completely hilarious and absurd. The panel was made up of the writer and two other creative team members from LightBox Interactive (Warhawk, Starhawk) and two Spanish film makers. It was really interesting learning about the unique challenges in developing a story in a video game, but probably my favorite part was when one of the film makes went on a rant about not liking Angry Birds because they're too angry and comparing them to Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists. It sounds mildly offensive and it probably was, but it was also hilarious.

Afterward I got to play a few games I didn't get to the first time around at the arcade and by the time I left I felt that I definitely got my money's worth out of the free event. Man, I love Austin.

Day 77: Journey

Today I went to an awesome PlayStation party at the Highball to kick off FantasticFest. I was planning on writing a blog about the party and all the awesome games I played, but I was so impressed with one specific game that I decided to do my post about that game specifically: Journey.

Journey is the new PlayStation Network downloadable title (available sometime in the near future) by ThatGameCompany. I loved Flower, one of ThatGameCompany's pervious releases, and I'd read a few things about Journey that made me really interested to play it. Journey was the main reason I wanted to go to the PlayStation party in the first place. When I got into the Highball I found four TVs set up to demo the game. It didn't take long before one of them was available and I sat down to try it out. A woman named Robin introduced herself and talked to me for a minute about the game and the development team before she handed me the PS3 headset and controller.

I was immediately sucked into the world of Journey where you play as an armless be-scarfed character. The first thing I thought of was a Jawa because of the hooded, black face with glowing eyes, but your character is taller and infinitely more graceful than any Jawa. You move smoothly over sand that flows like water towards a mountain in the distance. Along the way you are given very little instruction on the controls and no instruction on how to accomplish your goal or even what your immediate goal is, but that's part of the charm of the game; It's all about the experience of discovering the world on your own.

Eventually you meet another person, another real person, playing the game somewhere else, but no words are ever exchanged. The only communication that occurs between you is the movement of your characters or your songs. Pressing Circle causes your character to sing a note, hold it longer for a more powerful burst of music that can activate things around the world or recharge your companion's scarf. I found myself using short songs to communicate my thanks or encouragement to the person I was playing with. I don't know why, but I got the impression that the person I was playing with was female. I wonder who they imagined they were playing with?

Over the twenty or so minutes that the demo lasted I became completely absorbed in the desert world around me. The closest experience I can relate it to is the way I felt playing Shadow of the Colossus. The open, mostly lonely world and the lack of any sort of narrative or explanation left me to fill in the blanks myself. It's an intensely personal and emotional experience, at least for me, and difficult to describe. I love the idea of a game evoking so much emotion with such a minimal amount of guidance. It's a bit like listening to an instrumental piece of music. It can make you feel a certain way without lyrics to describe what the song is about. To me Journey evoked feelings of sadness, but also hope in the accomplishments of myself and my nameless companion. I know I had a big stupid grin on my face while playing the demo, but as it ended I found myself a little misty eyed over the experience.

I love video games and a good story is always important. I love the Uncharted series, Dragon Age and inFamous because of the acting and story lines, but it's games like Journey that I can totally immerse myself in. Even just playing the demo I instantly forgot about everything that I had been stressed about during the day and just enjoyed the experience. It's hard to overstate how excited I am for this game to come out so I can delve back into the mysterious landscape and meet another nameless adventurer.

Day 76: The (Turtle) Gang Kicks Ass at It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Trivia *UPDATED*

I had to change the title of this post. It was originally titled "The (Turtle) Gang Loses at It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Trivia." I wrote the first part of this post before we went to the trivia contest and the last part after we got home.

So today is a big day for us--us being me, my wife and our friend Shaun. Today is the Geeks Who Drink It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Pub Trivia Challange, hosted by our very own good friends John Smith and James Pound. Why are we so excited, you ask? Well, stupid, because It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of our favorite TV shows and we're going to kick ass! (I hope)

About a year ago I had to go to Singapore for a month for my job. Singapore's not a big place and I figured during that month I would probably have some down time so I downloaded all five seasons of It's Always Sunny that were out at the time. I had a few friends who highly recommended it and I figured this would be a good time to give it a shot. Once I started it I couldn't stop. I watched all 55 or so episodes in about a week and as soon as I got home I watched it all over again with my wife. Since then we've become huge fans and are constantly quoting or referencing the show. We even went so far as to make shirts for everyone going on the trip we planned last year to watch the shuttle launch identifying our roles in the "the gang." I'm The Brains, Shaun is the Wildcard, our friend Ricky is The Looks, our friend Josh is The Muscle and my wife is The Useless Chick. We filmed quite a bit of our trip and my wife did an amazing job editing it into something far more enjoyable than your standard vacation footage, but my favorite part? She did a cold intro (starting with a title card of the time and day) that lead into a parody of the Always Sunny title sequence complete with title card (The Gang Goes to a Shuttle Launch), landmark footage shot while driving and set to "Temptation Sensation" by Heinz Kiessling. It turned out almost too perfect.

Anyway, as I write this we're just a few hours away from trivia time at The Highball. We still don't have a team name, but we have been studying our asses off. We watched the entire series again (my wife only missed about 5 episodes of season 6 due to rehearsals) and I even tried making it through season 6 one more time and during each episode we recited the names of the landmarks shown in the opening credits (though my wife turned it into a game of how ridiculously she could twist up the landmark names). I read through the show's wikipedia and imdb pages as well as the main character's wiki and imdb pages. We even took some quizzes on Sporcle and I've been doing quite well at those. The only thing I didn't get to do that would have been good was to watch the DVD episodes with commentary and the Nightman Cometh live performance.

A few months ago we tried to go to the Arrested Development Geeks Who Drink pub trivia, but it was already full. I wish we had done it if only to have a clue as to what kinds of questions they might ask tonight, but we're going in blind. The wife and I did the Lost Geeks Who Drink pub trivia back when the series ended and it was a lot of random stuff, so even though I feel confident that I know the show I'm not totally confident I'll be prepared for the questions they're going to ask. I guess we'll know in a few hours.

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Well, we just got home from the trivia contest. Saying we killed it might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I will say that we led the entire game and we won by 2 points. The questions were all about the show's plot lines and characters and there were surprisingly quite a few questions about things that we had made a specific point to remember

Our team consisted of me, my wife, Shaun and our friend Mandy, who's never seen an episode and just joined us for fun. We settled on the name "We Eat Stickers All the Time, Dude" about ten minutes before the quiz. We all had studied so well for it that I really feel if we had split into our own teams we would have easily held the top three spots. I know it's just a stupid pub trivia competition, but I have to say that I am honestly really proud of how well we did. I'm not much of a competitive person normally but this quiz definitely brought out that part in me. I was informed by Mr. John Smith that we were 3 questions (4 points) away from a perfect game and according to the official Geeks Who Drink blogs we tied one other team for most points at any of the quiz locations. I believe that officially makes us three of the most knowledgeable fans of the series in the nation.

We ended up walking away with $205 to split between us.

I think we're gonna buy a P. Diddy shrimping boat with it.

 Geeks Who Drink Blog

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Bad news. I guess not all the bars that were hosting the trivia had posted scores when I checked this morning. Another team from San Antonio had a score of 86, but I'm still damn proud of our performance. ALMOST WORLD CHAMPS, BITCHES!