Todd Terwilliger

In which our hero expounds on the nature of his fandom and shares some random observations.

I realized that yesterday, I went into very little specifics about what I saw at the con. This is not due to some blindness or memory lapse on my part but rather the nature of my particular interest. For me, the con was less a fact-finding mission to glean secrets profound about anything than it was all about the journey, the experience mentally, physically, and metaphysically, in the con itself.

I’m a comic fan but I’m not, at this time, a comic fanboy. I haven’t had a pull at a comic shop since Junior High and while I never completely lost interest in the medium, while I’ve read isolated books here and there, enjoyed adapted films and games, I haven’t actively followed the tangled knot of comic history in an age.

Given my ignorance of the scene, I did not seek out much in the way of forbidden lore. Even if, in my wanderings, such lore was thrust into my face, I wouldn’t have recognized it. For such arcane comic knowledge, I was a very poor vessel.

I am much more in tune with videogaming and there were plenty of games on display around the con. For some reason, I was much less interested in playing the games than in watching others play them. Over the length of the con, I variously saw:

• Ghostbusters: There were both now-gen (360, PS3) and Wii versions of the game running. The now-gen kept the graphics real, the Wii cartoony (ala The Real Ghostbusters).

  Would-be paranormal investigators tried and usually failed to trap various ghosts, mostly rainbow colored offshoots of Slimer. I have no idea how the Wii’s waggle controls work or if they work well. Nobody was cursing or hurling the things into the crowd so I guess that’s a good sign. I guess.

• HAWX: Tom Clancy invades the air! Now nothing can stand in his way. It’s a pretty fighter. Very pretty. Arcadey too, at least from the demo, but given the Clancy name, I’m sure some strategery has been shoehorned somewhere. The demo showed a mission over Rio de Janeiro, taking out bogeys and incoming troop transports. Where these heinous invaders hailed from, I have no idea.

• Legends of Wrestlemania: Steroid inflated versions of Hulk Hogan (already in ’80s ‘roided up form) and Andre the Giant battled it out in the squared circle. The visuals were impressive. The wrestlers waddled around mostly well. They still will pull out moves they never used in real life and they haven’t quite solved the skating-on-ice effect when moving in the ring but I’m an absolute sucker for old-timey wrestling game action. It was love at first sight. (Did I mention that the Honky Tonk Man was at the con? I didn’t get a chance to get a picture with the legend but his mere presence lent gravitas to the entire event.)

• Mad World: No other game on the con floor looked anything like this, mostly because, aside from blood red, it’s entirely black and white. It’s also a good looking third-party Wii game. And it’s chock-full of the ultra-violence. How can this not be good? Let’s not list them all. I didn’t see of them, and that’s a hopeful sign.

• DC Online: I don’t play MMOs. They don’t do much for me. This one looked pretty good (points for a super-evil-clown character) for an MMO, not mind-blowing, not World of Warcraft killing. Meh, I say, meh (I’m a Marvel man at heart). If you’re into it, you’re into it but I don’t know what that says about the game or what that phrase even means.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some games that I saw but perhaps the fact that I forgot them says more about them then some half-baked half-remembered recollection could.

There was not enough game-related swag for my taste. You pay your way into a con in full expectation of walking out laden to over-encumbrance with freebies. If there were many being lobbed out of the game booths, I missed them. And if I missed them, surely they could not exist.

This aside now aside, part three of this epic three and one half part series will continue and conclude the author’s flight of fancy through the land of nerd.

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