Category Archives: propaganda

A weekend at the Evo fighting game championships

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on July 25, 2013

On July 9th, just days before the start of the world’s largest fighting game tournament, a call came down from Nintendo, stating that the organizers did not have broadcast rights to stream Super Smash Bros Melee, a recent tournament addition as a result of a fan-funded charity drive. While thousands of attendees spectate at the event itself, most viewers, including the majority of those who’d donated to see Super Smash Bros Melee join the mix, would watch the matches from home via live online video that in previous years had surpassed over a hundred thousand concurrent viewers.

The announcement added to the pre-show chaos as organizers struggled to reschedule events, removing Super Smash Bros Melee from the streaming lineup and shifting start times of others in order to fill the gap. Enthusiast sites caught on to the news immediately, and players and fans went ballistic, further cementing the view of a doddering and out of touch Nintendo of America.

Less than three hours after the announcement, Nintendo, responding to the sudden and intense negative pressure, rescinded their decision. The original schedule and lineup returned, and everyone involved breathed a sigh of relief. The streams were safe and the game was on.

This week’s column: Evolution Championship Series!

evo2013

“Ooh, the RJ!” she beams, impressed by the business cards we’d just handed her.

“Kind of. Citylife, actually. Same parent company.”

“Oh. Well, here you go.”

It’s Friday, day one of the Evolution Championship Series (known as Evo), and Bally’s Las Vegas is already humming with players in Evo t-shirts lugging about personalized arcade-style joysticks, readying for upcoming matches, discussing strategy and brackets and contenders.

Press badges in hand, we walk through the crowded entry hall and into the half-full Indie Game Dev panel, where four successful independent developers are discussing the process of creating, funding, and marketing their titles in front of a small crowd of eager video game enthusiasts and a handful of established industry folk.

While Evo has always been about fighting games and a passionate community of players, 2012 saw the introduction of the Indie Showcase, a small section of the conference hall set aside to showcase standouts from the independent game development scene. Divekick, one of the seven featured 2012 Showcase titles, was popular enough last year to warrant its own streamed tournament this time around (alongside fan favorite Skullgirls), and the 2013 Indie Showcase, organized by Capy Games’ Nathan Vella (Critter Crunch, Sword and Sworcery), was awarded a larger and more prominent space (and more games) among the vendor and publisher booths of the exhibit area, providing a temporary oasis from the intensity of battle on glowing screens peppered throughout the hall.

Organized by brothers Tom and Tony Cannon via Usenet in 1996, the Battle by the Bay (also known as B3) was a 64-competitor Street Fighter II tournament held at Golfland in Sunnyvale, California. The largest such gathering of fighting game players at the time, the turnout and popularity of B3 led to successive tournaments around the country, and in 2002, with the addition of co-founders Seth Killian and Joey Cuellar, the tournament was reborn as Evolution.

As Evolution grew in size and prestige, players from around the globe were drawn to the event, and publishers and sponsors began to take notice, leading to an even more spectacular presentation and the recognition of international fighting game stars such as Japan’s Daigo Umehara and the United States’ Justin Wong.

Three years later, having outgrown the college ballrooms and arcades of past years, Evo relocated to Las Vegas, Nevada, where the tournament continues to be held.

It’s Sunday night and we’re watching the Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 finals, clutching smuggled beers and cheering at the massive projection screens above with the rest of the audience as Justin Wong and Angelic, nebulous hunched figures in the distance from our seats near the back of the hall, duke it out in the X-Men’s Danger Room.

To the unfamiliar eye, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is chaos, super kinetic boxing with more colors and less sweat and grimacing, flashes and beams and movement everywhere as Marvel comic heroes and classic video game characters leap in and out of play, throwing punches and projectiles. It’s hypnotic, and one can’t help but be drawn in by the fervor of the crowd.

While I’m partial to Angelic’s underdog rise and his fielding of Shuma-Gorath, a Cthulhu-like space octopus from the Marvel universe and a rare sight in top levels of play, Justin Wong’s game is on key and he wins the set 3-1, sending Angelic to third place and securing his own spot in the Grand Finals.

Evo 2013 shattered previous records, hosting 3538 competitors and over 30,000 matches over its three day span. 1.7 million viewers tuned in to the online streams over the course of the weekend, and Super Smash Bro Melee, the Nintendo game that came close to being removed from Evo entirely, drew in an astounding 134,000 concurrent viewers, even more than Super Street Fighter 4 AE, the headliner of the tournament.

If it’s been years since you last placed a quarter on the marquee of a Street Fighter II arcade cabinet, if you’ve never seen a fighting game match with commentary, or if this is all new to you and you simply want to see what the kids are doing these days, head over to evo.shoryuken.com and watch a highlight match or two. And remember, unlike many pro-level tournaments, Evo is open, meaning that anyone can sign up and compete. It’s never too late to pick up a joystick and start playing.

Crowd-sourcing a Resurrection

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on June 12, 2013

Joey Vanas, Michael Corthwaite, Rehan Coudhry and a team of dedicated volunteers want to save the Huntridge.

If you’ve spent more than a handful of years living in Vegas, you’ve heard this story before and can skip straight to the interview bits below. If you’re new in town, let me toss out some Google searches to get you caught up on the last couple decades of history: Friends of the Huntridge, Save the Huntridge, and Mizrachi Huntridge. I’ll wait while you look things up.

There, now you should be up to speed.

This week: the crowdfunding column!

I spoke with David Anderson, coordinator for the newly-launched Save The Historic Huntridge Theater indiegogo campaign, about the project’s methods, goals, and how the team is taking to crowdfunding and the Internet to get the Huntridge revival off the ground.

Funding the first stage of a historic building restoration is a novel use of crowdsourcing. What led the team to go down this route versus more traditional funding methods?

A few reasons. Covenants restricting the Huntridge from being torn down are set to expire soon, and it’s very important to get this off the ground before that happens. Joey, Michael, and Rehan are not rich people, and they exhausted their own financial resources putting down the first deposit on the property. Crowdfunding the second deposit both enables the project to move forward while showing potential investors (who would be required to foot the remainder of the restoration costs) that there is in fact massive community support to see the Huntridge revived and back in operation.

Why indiegogo over Kickstarter, local startup openfi.re, or other crowdsourcing options?

Kickstarter was a no-go because it expressly forbids raising money to buy real estate, given its “short term artistic project” focus. That restriction wasn’t the only one in their guidelines that disallowed us, but it was the obvious one. Openfire, a site I founded, is unfortunately too early in its development to support a project of this size, otherwise, the model we’d developed for openfire would have been perfect for this kind of multi-stage, long-term, socially-valuable project. Indiegogo, with its solid history and less restrictive terms, ended up being a solid fit for the Huntridge campaign.

How were the pledge levels determined? What percentage of the final indiegogo tally will go towards fulfilling pledge rewards?

They were determined by the team’s estimates as to what would entice the widest possible cross-section of people to happily contribute to the campaign. Note that contributions are not donations, as they are not tax deductible, and we want our contributors to feel that they are receiving direct value from the money they’ve granted the campaign.

Most of the rewards have lower hard immediate costs, since many of the big ones are dependent on a successful reopening, and many of the smaller ones are being donated by local artists or businesses. It’s impossible to say for sure without knowing which perks will end up being the most popular, but I’d guess that our fulfillment costs for this campaign in particular will run an exceptionally low percentage, probably <5%, preserving a great majority of the funding for the project itself. The outpouring of offers for in-kind contributions of time and services as we've spun this thing up has been incredible. One of the perks offered is what the campaign is calling a Speak Up! vote. How will Speak Up work, and what do the votes mean?

Our goal is to allow for the maximum possible level of local input on shows and programming once the Huntridge reopens. We want the community funders to have a voice in its direction, and to feel invested and excited to continue to support the Huntridge once it’s up and running.

We’re currently working with local development studios who’ve offered to help us design a platform to facilitate Speak Up and community input, and will reveal more about the system as it progresses and goes online.

The Huntridge was a fixture in Las Vegas for many decades before it fell into disrepair. Right now, we’re focusing primarily on securing the Huntridge to ensure that it will remain standing to serve the community in the decades ahead.

Interested in supporting the Huntridge Theater revival? Visit thehuntridge.com, pick your favorite perks, and throw ‘em a few bucks. I’ll buy you a drink on opening night.

Downtown Parking Gets An Upgrade

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on May 29, 2013

Parking downtown! Calamity!

Where are we gonna put our cars once the Odgen’s own guest lot is stuffed to the gills with borrowed Teslas, sitting in waiting while their drivers awkwardly nurse microbrews as they plop up and down on the seesaw behind Park on Fremont, talking pivots and disruption and burn rate?

Were it not for the Good Doctor’s makeshift parking lot over on 6th Street soaking up overflow, folks might be forced to walk over a quarter mile, or God forbid, park on 7th Street. Who knows what hell will break loose once that misused patch of dirt is fenced off!

Oh, did you hear that we’re getting new parking meters downtown?

This week: The Parking Column!

downtownmeterremoval

The whole “let’s modernize the old school parking meters downtown because who still has change these days since the homeless took over the intersections” debate has been floating around for some time now, but in February of this year the Las Vegas City Council finally approved an initial $1.45 million contract that will allow industry kings Parkeon to install 233 Strada Rapide meters (painted Magic Blue) throughout the neighborhood. As a single Strada can manage multiple spaces, 1,216 traditional meters will be removed in the process.

In a gracious boon from on high, 125 of the existing metered spaces downtown will become entirely free.

Once all of the old meters are ripped out of the sidewalk, where do they go? Is there a parking meter graveyard out in the desert somewhere, or are they simply broken down and recycled? Give a crafty individual a thousand of those things, a blowtorch, and a button of peyote and I’ll bet you’d end up with one hell of a Burning Man project.

The Strada meters are actually kinda slick. Each unit (at $5,695 a pop) incorporates a display, credit card reader, and a 3G cellular modem, all powered by a solar cell and battery setup that allows for placement anywhere, regardless of current infrastructure. 158 of the meters will have a small grayscale LCD screen, while the remaining 75 (at an additional $1200 each) will feature full color 7 inch displays and an extended alpha-numeric keyboard.

Now that the deals have been inked, both the city and Parkeon are moving ahead at full steam and installation of the new hardware is set to begin next month.

But wait, that’s not even the neat part.

Last year, Parkeon partnered up with ParkMe, a data broker specializing in comprehensive real-time parking availability and pricing. As a result of this partnership, the moment a parking space governed by a Parkeon meter is freed up, ParkMe knows.

Founded in 2007 and flush from a round of funding earlier this year, ParkMe (formerly Parking in Motion) has been slowly building up a massive parking database, using it to feed both analytic data to parking providers (like say, the City of Las Vegas) and live parking information to the users of its online service. The ParkMe database currently features over 25,000 locations in more than 500 cities.

Via ParkMe’s service, users can look up a destination and view rates, parking locations and garages, and even the availability of individual spaces, so we’ll always know whether that one particular sweet spot on 6th Street is taken or not.

Once the initial install and testing phase is complete, the city will roll out additional functionality allowing users to pay for and refill a meter directly from the ParkMe app.

If you’d like to try ParkMe before the new meters roll out (most of the downtown garages are already listed), the free service is currently offered as both an iOS and Android app, and online at parkme.com.

Oh yeah, and the new Strada meters? They’ll still take coins, too, if that’s your thing.

Video gaming in Vegas (part 2) – Retro Game Stores

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on May 17, 2013

Previously in Video Gaming in Vegas, I covered the local arcade scene. This week, another subject near and dear to the nostalgia (or curiosity) driven gamer: the retro video game store.

Gamestop, Ebay, and other online venders have made life difficult for many of the mom ‘n pop retro stores (and like arcades these days, retro game stores are almost always a mom ‘n pop affair). Not only do online sources wreak havoc on pricing, both lowering and raising game and hardware values based on national collecting trends, they also drain potential inventory, as a savvy seller can now offload their used wares directly online rather than visiting a local store to exchange their games for credit or a comparatively paltry sum.

While local store owners combat this by building up their local communities, buying bulk lots, and offering warranties, repair services and other goods (such as the ever popular collectible card games), a retro video game shop is not one of the more lucrative business ventures one can get into. In many cities, having just a single quality retro shop in town can be considered a lucky break – Las Vegas has been blessed with three.

You can’t go wrong hitting up any of these stores. Each offers merchandise from the entire range of gaming history, from classic consoles such as the Atari 2600, SNES, and Genesis to modern Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo systems and releases, and each has their own specialties and charm. My suggestion? Make a day of it and visit all three.

A GAMER’S PARADISE

Originally known as Sean’s Game Repair, this retro/repair shop has since undergone a rebranding and a mid-2011 expansion, with a second (and larger) storefront located immediately west of the Pinball Hall of Fame.

A longtime arcade and console collector, owner Sean LaBrecque is font of classic video game history, knows what to keep an eye out for, and often seeds his store’s selection with various odds and ends from his own collection, resulting in the occasional obscure encounter or gem of a find that one wouldn’t typically find in another shop.

Both A Gamer’s Paradise locations feel as much like a museum as retail space, with boxed titles and rare hardware on display along the periphery, surrounding shelves full of cartridges, discs, and arcade cabinets set to free play. Visit either location, but I give the edge to the newer Tropicana space due to its greater selection and proximity to the Pinball Hall.

1550 East Tropicana Ave #4
1000 North Nellis Blvd, Suite C
http://www.agpvegas.com/

WII PLAY GAMES

Tucked into the corner of a Nellis Blvd strip mall and owned by Mickey Tenney (who recently returned to the scene after originally opening Gameworld and Gameland Arcade a decade ago), Wii Play Games caters to geek culture in general, featuring a large assortment of video games (both classic and modern), card games, anime, and collectible figures.

The used video game selection is outstanding, and there’s always a crowd in the evenings, with Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Uh tournaments held frequently. Dedicated gaming tables are open for anyone to jump in and play when tournaments are not in session.

Additionally, the Wii Play Games team posts buy & sell price lists for wanted games and cards online, making it easy for the collector to loosely plan a trade or purchase prior to visiting the store.

3310 South Nellis Blvd, Suite 10
http://www.wiiplaygameslv.com/

GAMEWORLD

Another retro game store with a heavy emphasis on card gaming, Gameworld is split into two distinct sections, almost to the appearance of being two completely different storefronts: video games and DVDs in the front room, collectible card games in the back. For card gamers, Gameworld is heaven, with large room filled wall to wall with Magic The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Uh, and other collectible cards.

The shop has either an extremely gracious clientele or a fastidious team, as Gameworld’s selection tends to be the best organized. Individual titles are well maintained and rarely outside their intended alphabetical order.

Like Wii Play Games, collectible card game tournaments are held regularly in the evenings and on weekends, and plenty of space has been allotted for both casual and tournament play.

5620 West Charleston Blvd
http://gameworldvegas.com/

Update! I dunno what it is with retro game stores and alternating primary color logos, but we’ve got a new addition in town. Gamers Center just opened its doors last week, and while the full stock is still being added to shelves, the store will be carrying a range of titles, from Atari 2600 to modern systems, along with collectible card games. The import selection is quite good for a brand new store, and may be what ultimate sets them apart from the others.

3720 E. Sunset Rd #108

Startup Weekend Las Vegas!

Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on May 2, 2013

When I say the word entrepreneur, or any variation thereof, take a drink.

This Friday, dozens of developers and entrepreneurs will be making their way to the InNEVation Center for a three day startup jam with one goal in mind: to leave on Sunday with a viable business.

Founded by Andrew Hyde in the summer of 2007, Startup Weekend has since expanded from a single Boulder, Colorado event to a worldwide entrepreneurial powerhouse, with hundreds of cities hosting and over a thousand projects started as a result.

The inaugural Las Vegas event was held at the El Cortez in 2011, and three others have since followed. This weekend will be the city’s fifth (we’re doing math, ya’ll), and even at this early stage, Startup Weekend Las Vegas has already had several successes under its belt.

“There are a few companies that have come out of Startup Weekend that have survived to become local startups, including ClippPR, the winner of the first Startup Weekend, and LaunchKey, winner of Startup Weekend 3,” said Adam Kramer, SWLV organizer and Director of Entrepreneurship and Vegas Young Professionals at the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce. “Both of these companies are on the cutting edge of their respective industry and are making quite a splash.”

Launchkey is particularly notable, growing from a Startup Weekend concept to being the recipient of $750,000 in funding within months. Other Startup Weekend Las Vegas entrants that went on to become actualized companies include Phone2Action, Rumgr, Counterless, and Coupla.

With that said, don’t think that simply by placing at Startup Weekend you’ll find yourself sewing suits out of hundred dollar bills – in just two short years, the majority of SWLV winners have already shuttered, Twitter accounts and domain names dormant and discarded.

Entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurialism.

So with that said, how does Startup Weekend work?

Friday, Day 1

It starts with a pitch. After introductions and a short speaker session, badge holders with a concept are given a minute and a microphone. No powerpoints, no props, just sixty seconds and an idea.

Next comes the voting. Once everyone’s had their say, all attendees vote for their favorite pitches, and from those results, a handful (based on total attendance) are then selected as the primary concepts to be worked on over the weekend. Teams are formed organically as folks gravitate towards projects that interest them, and work begins.

Saturday, Day 2

Work continues, with the occasional break to eat or listen to a short talk. Coaches (including successful entrepreneurs and instructors from the local scene) wander about throughout the day, giving advice and helping teams sort through and overcome problems. Everyone works some more. The conference officially closes for the night at 10:00 PM, but most will end up hammering away at their keyboards well beyond that.

Sunday, Day 3

Work continues. This is the day where tired attendees panic upon realizing that they’ve only got a few hours remaining before their projects will be on display.

Halfway through the day, focus shifts as teams scramble to tie up loose ends, finalize their prototypes, and prepare demos. The judges arrive and presentations begin, with each team given five minutes to show off their product, followed by a brief question and answer session with the jury.

The jury then selects the winners, awards are given out – past prizes have included cash, a booth at CES, business services, and office space – and then everyone goes on to celebrate and/or catch up on sleep.

There’s still time to sign up!

Feeling that entrepreneurial itch? While this is a bit of a short notice if you’re just hearing about it now (look, this here is a biweekly column, see?), registration for Startup Weekend Las Vegas will remain open until the start of the event, so you’ll still got a day to clear your calendar and register. The entrance fee for developers, designers, and non-technical folk looking to take part is $99. If you’re the voyeuristic sort, Observation passes are available for a mere $15.

Startup Weekend begins at 5:30 PM Friday (May 3) and runs until 7:00 PM Sunday (May 5).

Startup Weekend Las Vegas
lasvegas.startupweekend.org

InNEVation Center
6795 Edmond St