Saturday, 28 July 2018

CoxCon 2018: Part 1, which is Mostly Fangirling


Last weekend was exhausting, but also one of the best experiences of my life - I went to my first ever gaming convention! CoxCon 2018 was held at Telford International Centre on July 21-22, the fourth time the convention has been held there. I’d been aware of CoxCon in the past, having followed Jesse Cox’s channel for two years; but since he and his collaborators are almost all based in Los Angeles, it never occurred to me that CoxCon could be held anywhere else - like a random UK Midlands town an hour’s drive from my house, for example. I remember watching the videos from the 2017 con with a mixture of amazement and horror, because it was happening right now and so close by and I was missing it. So six months ago, for our anniversary, my partner bought us both tickets; and last weekend, we finally got to exchange those e-tickets for our fancy lanyards and attendee passes. It was a weekend of twelve hour days, and we weren’t bored for a minute. Here’s a rundown of the highlights.

Meet & greets
One of the main attractions of visiting any convention is getting to meet your favourite creators, and I was fortunate enough at CoxCon to get to meet, at various points, all four members of Scary Game Squad, one of my favourite internet shows. I don’t want to get too caught up in starstruck ramblings here but I will confirm that they are all really lovely guys who take the time to chat with their fans even when they must be dying of jetlag. You genuinely get the sense that, even though you’re there as their fan, you’re also all there together as fans of the video games you all play. I found that there’s a lot more to talk about when you’re meeting YouTube presenters who are as passionate on their subject as you are than, say, an actor from a sci-fi show you love who doesn’t really like the genre but needed the work. (No shade on the amazing job done by those actors, but as a recovering shy person I appreciated having some shared interests to keep the conversation going!)

I am now the proud owner of an autograph book signed by Alex Faciane, Jirard Khalil, and Michael Davis; and with this very special dedication from Jesse Cox:

My favourite anecdote of the con, however, might be Davis’s reaction to Jesse’s comment on my book - “You can touch my hand too if you like. I just put vaseline on it, so it’s really soft” - which is simultaneously the sweetest and creepiest thing a celebrity has ever said to me. Thanks, Scary Game Squad, for making my day.

Panels
What is a convention without panels? (Answer: EM-Con 2017, or at least that was my experience of it.) In our intensely packed weekend we managed to make it to all six panels we were interested in, which is a testament to how well the organisers had planned things: no overlaps, minimal over-running, and built-in breaks between panels made the whole weekend run very smoothly.

The opening ceremony wasn’t a competition, but nevertheless was definitely won by Davis, who almost missed the entire thing and arrived just in time to run across the hall, across the stage, and out the other door in perfect time with his intro video reaching the moment in Resident Evil 7 where he accidentally coined his catchphrase (“I’M A FUCKIN’ MAAAAAN!”). You could not choreograph a moment like that. In an inspired move, the ceremony was rounded off with a reverse Q&A, where Alex Faciane was invited to pose some of his questions about England to the audience, mostly composed of actual British people, in the hope that he would stop bothering all the other Americans with them. We learned so much about ourselves that morning.

Next up on Saturday was a pretty cool live episode of Super Beard Bros., who were playing Conker’s Bad Fur Day with two guests who were members of the original development team. In addition to learning some interesting history behind the game’s development, and hearing one of the original voice actors sing along with his character’s big musical number, we were treated to the trailer for an upcoming game, The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup. This is a steampunk-y platformer starring an adorable doggo that one of the Conker devs is working on now and which looks very cool. Visually it’s quite reminiscent of Little Nightmares or Inside - dark, threatening, and spooky. We only saw a brief trailer, but I’m hyped.

Saturday night was, for us, the main event: Scary Game Squad Live, which we’d happily have paid the full ticket price just to see (making everything else, I suppose, a delightful freebie from our point of view).

The main thing I learned about SGS from their live show? Davis really does look terrified when they’re playing. That’s not acting you’re hearing. When I went to get autographs the next day I genuinely felt the need to ask the poor guy if he was feeling OK.

The Squad played three games:

  • Inflicted, a heavily P.T.-inspired demo for an upcoming game, with the drawback that it didn’t give much information about the game itself - about half an hour long, pretty cool, and perfect for a live show.
  • The Theater - a Creepypasta inspired horror game that delivered one perfect jump scare (during which I swear I pulled a muscle in my back) but honestly didn’t do much after that. A little research the following morning (which we were lucky enough to share with the Squad later that day) revealed that we probably didn’t miss much by not seeing it completed, though it was great to watch them play it for an hour.
  • Faith II - another demo, this one a sequel to the very cool retro 8-bit game Faith that the Squad played late last year. It still amazes me that anything this heavily pixelated can be so genuinely creepy - I can’t wait to see SGS play the full thing.

Episodes of Scary Game Squad Live are being uploaded onto Jesse’s channel now, so you can watch it knowing that one of those laughing and occasionally screaming audience members is me - putting my back out and, at one point, being accidentally punched by my partner, who was flailing in alarm. Very good times indeed!

On the Sunday we attended the only promotional panel of the convention, for Prison Architect: Escape Mode DLC. This was one of the games at the exhibition that we didn’t get a chance to play, so it was great to see it being demonstrated on the big screen as part of a competition between the developers and the players. There’s some potentially dangerous crossover with The Escapists here, but with the USP that you get to design the prison as well as break out of it; and I personally thought the Meeple-inspired character art was adorable.

On Sunday afternoon we attended the Picto Party panel, with the SGS guys getting to do something slightly less stressful for an hour (as long as you consider playing online Pictionary in front of a thousand people with the WiFi occasionally cutting out as “relaxing”). This served as a nice preamble to the final panel of the convention, JackBox Party, which featured every guest who had attended the con (or aimed to feature them all - a few had already left and one self-deprecatingly sat in the audience for half the panel before realising he was meant to be onstage). The JackBox Party was memorable for the level of audience participation it allowed for - upwards of 600 audience members, mostly in the room but some who were watching the live stream on Twitch, were observing and chipping in using our smartphones. I’d played several JackBox Party games before, but never on anything like this scale, and I hadn’t ever used the 2017 edition, JackBox Party Pack 4. Three of the four games played - Fibbage 3, Civic Doodle, and Bracketeering - allowed active audience participation through a voting system; while Monster Seeking Monster, though not interactive for spectators, was still a very entertaining just to sit back and watch. So I can honestly say that I’ve played a bunch of games with the Scary Game Squad, plus a bunch of other very cool people! I’m quite satisfied to be able to boast of that.
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