Festival Fantazie 2012

Festival Fantazie the biggest Czech Fantasy/Science Fiction and many other stuff convention. Held each year in Chotebor. This convention is promoted as the best vacation you can have. 10 days of awesomeness. But well is that so awesome? The entry fee is pretty high, the food is junk and you can hardly sleep there. But there's tons of stuff to do and you can hang out with your friends.

Thanks to Jirka Hes I got a ticket for this convention. I was a regular years ago and I was there last year as well. This time I went there just to have some fun and to slack. I expected to play some (a lot of) magic, music games and some cosole/PC games.

I asked few people around from the vicinity if they don't go there so I could socialize a bit. In the end I went there with Pavel, his brother and Medik.

The trip was quite ok, but we were charged triple for it. So this was the last time I went with these two guys no matter how nice they are. And it is also the LAST time ever that I went there with Medik. But about him later

We arrived in one piece to Chotebor. I went to the board games' room. That's the place I spent most of my time there. I played some board games, magic, deck building games, some angry birds and other crazy games. The first day I needed to accomodate somewhere where it is warm and calm. I ended up at such a place thanks to Jan Safra and I'm really grateful for this.

Music Games
In the morning I got up and went to get something to eat to a local store. I have to say that the shop is really expensive and that I managed to pay 3 different amounts of money for two items that I was buying each day (WTF?). After that it was time for some Music Games. When I came there there was Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Beatmania IIDX Empress Premium Disc, Pump it Up Pro, ITG Quad and Rock Band Greenday (or whatever, the majority of songs were from greenday). I played some pump first realizing that the panels are of different size than on an arcade machine. I also burned my skin due to the carpet surface. But it was nice to play few pump songs again. Soon the DR panel on P1 stopped working (I realized that after I started playing on NM). I failed all the songs I played on nightmare difficulty.

Then I tried some Guitar Hero. I wasn't really sure when to confirm the notes but later I realized that the game is actually on sync. The controller I had in my hands was malfunctioning though. The Green and Yellow buttons were sticky and ghosting and the controller was getting disconnected from time to time. The other controller was fine though. I played GH2 but it wasn't unlocked so I couldn't play the songs I liked from the game. I didn't manage to play GH4 for quite some time, but later I managed that and played some funny charts. It was nice. I was surprised that I could still play the game. ^^

IIDX was another issue. The sync was off and it took me ages to get used to it. Changing the offset wasn't really helping either. The controller keys were sticky and it was difficult to play 8s and 9s on it. It was almost impossible to survive them. But when hitting the keys from right angle it was almost playable. It was nice to hear the songs clearly, here the keysounds and play the game. It felt awesome. I miss the game^^

I also tried GH drums. I was asked to be the fourth member for a tourney but I wasn't sure if I can still play the drums. It was quite difficult. My hand was aching and my leg was on fire^_~. I pulled off some ok results though.

I was asked to play in Rock Band tournaments. They couldn't find someone else so they asked me. I said yes, but I think that I should have joine someone else or not play at all. These guys did not really deserve me.

Anyway playing with these guys meant for me one thing though - I met and shortly talked to Vitek and Brumla. The guys seemed to be nice and it was nice to meet them. But I wasn't the center of what was going on and no one was really paying much attention to me anyway. It was a pity. Wish I could talk to them more.

In the afternoon I met Xsoft. He showed me pump it up pro 2 (really nice!) He played some routines with me. I have to admit that I really like the idea and that some charts are awesome! The theme is kind of cheesy but in overall I like it. The menu is a bit chaotic for me too, but well...it was designed this way so be it.

Later I found out that there is also a DDR stand. Some old Stepmania was usually running there but from time to time there was DDRX-2 and DDR Extreme. So I was playing doubles and having fun^^. Also I forgot what the difficulty scale of DDRX songs is so sometimes I almost killed myself on some 14-15 level song on double. It was really difficult to play on the TX pads. It just did not feel right. Arcade machine platform is something completely different!

While playing people were watching me and some of their reactions were funny as usual^_^. Anyway I always had to map the pads and connect them. I'm not sure who was the one taking care of the stand but certainly he had no idea what to do to make it work. This could be applied to other stands as well. Only GH and Rockband stands were usually running correctly.

Console Games
In sokolovna there were many console games that one could try out. The level of interactiveness depended on the console. Star Wars seemed to be fun, some tennis game was played all the time and Just Dance for Nintento Wii was popular as well. Most of the time there were people playing the games. I was too lazy to wait in the line. So I went upstairs and either played Mortal Kombat or Tekken. Xbox controller was quite a problem for me but still I managed to play the game quite ok. Unfortunately there weren't many people who would want to play against me and if they played against me they usually did not know how to play the game. How come? No one knows Mortal Kombat or what? Tekken was more known to the people there as it seems. Lady Boskonovitch is nice^_^.

Board Games

I mostly played Magic: The Gathering so it wasn't much about board games this year. I played Kaleidoskop which is a nice, simple game. You have a hexagon board on which there are several symbols. Then you have pieces with two symbols each time. You are connecting pieces with the same symbols to earn points. The more same symbols is there when you put another piece the more points you get. There are six symbols and in each you need to collect points because the symbol with lowest points is being used to determine the winner. This game was quite ok to play but I doubt the replayability of this game.

We tried also different Dominion expansions. The latest one adds not only new cards but also new 'victory point area - colony'. The game ends when either Province or Colonies are all bought. The cards in this expansion are pretty expensive and thus there is also a new card producing 'money' - 'platinum piece'. It felt like playing the first Ascension's expansion. But to be honest Ascension is still the better game out of these two (and out of any other deck building game I played).

We also played some Ascension. If I go to the convention next time I need to take Storm of Souls with one of the previous games. There were always players who wanted to try the game out but I did not have cards for more players. The players who played the game for the first time liked it. Yeah, they were saying that it's similar to Dominion so why play this, but later even they said that they like Ascension more.

Many of those who were quite desperate about the choice of a board game or there wasn't any good game around anymore tried Cesko, otazky a odpovedi (Czech Republic, questions and answers) or a Slovakian version or US one. The Slovakian one is an overkill for Czech people and the Czech one is difficult as well. From time to time there are really easy questions but still the majority is quite difficult for everybody. The American version though has questions like 'In which TV series the main characters are Spock and Kirk?'. In these games it is each player for himself. But there are also games in which teams compete against each other. There was a game called Alias and Time's Up. Both games are fun and even though you don't know the answers for some of the questions you are able to find that out during the game. These games are more casual and more fun and well... they also require a bit more imagination from the players. I prefer these games than the ones I mentioned first in this paragraph. But it's difficult to find players for these games as many people prefer games in which they don't need to guess or play with someone else in a team.

The game that also caught my eye was Ubongo. The game is from year 2003 and has quite a lot of variations. It's rather family game. Each player gets a board with a shape and some randomly assigned paper pieces. Each round each player has to solve the puzzle (put the pieces together according the shape on the board). The first player gets the highest chance to collect different colored gems. 9 rounds are played and the winner is the one with most gems of one color. It is quite fun to watch the either really tired people to play this game or people who are drunk already and can't concetrate well on the puzzle. ^_^. Anyway the game is fast and simple and anyone can play it.

When entering the hall there were roll ups with ads for certain games and one of those games was 'Angry Birds'. I guess that majority of you played the game already on your cell phone or ipad or whatever. And if not played then you at least heard about it. I was wondering what the game is like. Few groups of people tried it out. They took out mat on which you have score zones depicted. They took out also a wooden pole and put it on the mat. On top of it the pig was placed. The player took his pack of angry birds and tried to hit the pig. The first player tried to hit the pig but was unfortunate. Another try, more force was used but the pig was still sitting on the pole. Later one of the players used such force that the pig ended up down the stairs. Another round consisted of three poles and the pig sitting on them. It continued like this but the players soon decided that this game is just a waste of time.
There was one more game which consisted of throwing an object. This time it was a wooden pole and many other wooden poles. I have to say that THIS IS NOT a game for drunk people! We were glad that we survived.

Magic: The Gathering
When at the hall with all those board games I usually played magic. There were always magic players around. Unfortunately I should have takem with me a legacy deck or some homebrew no format deck. There weren't too many players with standard decks. Anyway we played lots of EDH and some legacy. There were even four players whose generals were The Mimeoplasm.

I actually won this game but I have to admit that it wasn't as much fun as it could have been. I was able to reanimate first and got much bigger advantage over the rest of the players.

One of the days when we were already tired of playing EDH, type 2 or legacy we tried playing from one deck. For that a all common legacy deck was used. Here's a short video from one of the games.

This year there wasn't any trading cards specialized shop. We wanted to draft but we did not have boosters. We have to thank those who provided boosters for the first draft ad boostermania for the remaining drafts.

As usual I also build few castles from cards. Tomas Pejsa decided to destroy my little castle of cards. I tried to tell him to wait for me so I could at least take a video of it, but he was too fast. He took out the first card, but the castle was still standing (I missed that). Took out a second one and it was still standing to everyone's surprise. The last card crumpled the whole construction. It was fun watching him as he was taking out the cards. ^^

Other stuff
I went to several presentations. One was about wierd stuff in gaming history. The background image on the presentation sheets was from Katamari Damashi so I thought that this can't be bad. We found out something about the game console and peripherals history and then we had the chance to see videos and photos of some really wierd stuff. I have to say that this presentation was good. It got few hiccups but otherwise it was solid and fun.

This though couldn't be said about some other ones I visited. Some were really bad and the presenting person did not know enough about the topic. I know it can be really difficult to speak about something to a public that is consisted of fans and geeks and nerds^^.

Movecon stuff was usually good as I remembered but for the martial arts/self defense stuff it was pretty boring. I don't know why but many people started with warm up and some stretching exercises. This is good but not if you spent 30 minutes of your 1 hour time. After this quite some talk continued and you did not even get the chance to try the moves out. Usually basic stuff for many martial arts is the same so I found all that quite unnecessary and boring. The dancing workshops were much better as there was usually a routine you went through and in the end there was something you actually learned. That was nice.

Apart from this you could go watch pilot episodes of all kind of series which was nice. The small room was usually full and the series were also well picked. I enjoyed that.

I actually have much more to say but I rather keep it to myself. I wasn't actually that content with this convention. Some debates were a bit too much for me and some people really pissed me of. In overall I'm glad I came there. It was fun but not what I expected. I hoped to talk to some people and meet some new people but this was spoiled because of some other people who had to be the 'king of the universe'.

Thanks everyone who made it possible for me to be there or spent some time with me and notably to Deirh who took me to Prague and Jan Safra who would win the nicest person of FF prize.