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I'm sitting here in my hotel room, and as of this writing, PAX 2010 kicks off in about nine hours. I have a stomach full of corn chowder and Post Tandem Double Ale. I should be sleeping, but I'm nervous. Not because I'm afraid of lines, or mean people, or lines filled with mean people, but something more basic and paralyzing given my current environment:
I really suck at playing video games at conventions.
Is this ridiculous? I have a feeling it is. I play a lot of games at home, and I wouldn't really say I'm bad at them. But for some reason when I'm out on the floor of the Expo Hall, and a PR representative hands me a controller and says, "Check this out," I immediately revert to a level of sucking I have not possessed since I was five or six years old.
Last year I had to stop playing Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time because I couldn't do the platforming sections as Clank. Why couldn't I do them? Because at the instant I picked up the controller at the demo kiosk, I forgot that Clank can double-jump. And it's actually worse than that because Clank can, in fact, triple-jump. I had played every console installment of this series up to that point, and Clank could multi-jump in every damn one of them. Why would I forget just then?
Clank took a moment out of saving the entirety of space and time
to be very, very disappointed in me.
Was it the lights? Was it the noise? Maybe it was because I was standing in front of a screen instead of sitting on my couch? Or was it my girlfriend standing just over my shoulder with a camera?
When I tried out Army of Two: The 40th Day last year, there was nobody around to play with me so the booth attendant took up the second controller. We shot some guys, took cover behind dead hippos, and were doing generally alright until we got to a boss-type encounter.
"Okay," the booth guy said. "There's gonna be a boss up here, and he's wearing armor. He's vulnerable if you shoot him in the head."
"Right," I said, and then proceeded (for unknown reasons) to send my character sprinting at top speed in the opposite direction. The booth guy just sighed and killed the boss, as he had doubtless done dozens of times before.
At PAX East I played Calling and was actually doing okay because I'd seen the demo already and was pretty familiar with what I needed to do. But then this happened:
In the split second in which Jeff Grubb snapped that picture, the image itself flashed in my head, and I realized the following: I am playing a Wii game, in front of people. Furthermore, I am holding a bit of plastic to my ear and pretending that it's a phone. This is visible to everyone, and that guy in the Coke shirt is totally judging me right now.
Luckily I was near the end of the demo, but the damage was done. I didn't touch another Wii controller the rest of the convention. Except for this other one, but that was an accident.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to hitting the show floor tomorrow, but I'm equally nervous about playing so poorly in front of so many. So if you're at the show and you catch me walking sheepishly away from a demo kiosk with defeat plastered over my (likely beet-red) face, know this: I don't try to play terribly. Sometimes it happens all on its own.
