CAX is a week away. I've been to many of them. It's held in the Grand Ballroom at the Santa Clara convention center (not the San Jose convention center and not the Santa Clara fairgrounds) which is attached to the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. The doors open at 10am, but if you pre-registered you get to enter early at 9:30am. Sounds great, right? Usually it is, but sometimes things go horribly wrong there. Here's a bunch of stuff that will probably happen that can ruin your morning and how to avoid it:
1) You get there early, like 8:30am to beat the crowd. You'll find that nothing is setup at all and the organizers haven't shown up yet. There will be some tables there that were put there the night before, but nobody's at them. The couple volunteers who are there are ignoring you and doing something else. You might have the idea to form up a line at the badge pickup-table, but you can't do that. You'll soon be told that hotel management says they can't form lines until around 9:15am and to come back later. Well now your plan to show up early has fucked you. The 500 other dudes wearing cargo shorts and black t-shirts all pre-registered and had the same idea. So if you DO come back at 9:15am, you'll find yourself 500th in line trying to pickup your fucking badge instead of 1st like you had planned. Sometimes this line is so godammn long that you're standing there well after 10am and dudes walking in off the street can buy their wristband and walk right in like they own the place. The trick is to meander around the entrance to the grand ballroom until an impromptu line forms. Find a corner to sit down and just stalk the area. The moment you see 3 or 4 guys form up, get in there quick. Soon the line will be so long the organizers will be forced to acknowledge it and start handing out wristbands/badges and you can get in on time. If it's like last year, this line will form outside in the hot sun. You'll stand there an hour cooking until 9:30 when they move the line into the lobby to finally start processing it.
2) Make sure to get in on time. There are so many people who go to this thing that your only shot at playing a new Stern or classic Williams pin is the first hour on Saturday morning. As soon as the good pins are taken up and there's nothing amazing to play, it's time to find the t-shirt table and get your shirt. If you bought one ahead of time all you got was a paper voucher. Make sure you got one if you paid for it, they often forget to give it to you but it should be in the envelope they give you. If you're a medium, don't worry about redeeming the voucher early, you can pickup whenever. But if you're a large or XL, you better jump on it before the "good design" sells out. They usually have
a few different designs at these things. You want the cool black design that looks like Defender, and not a bright yellow design with Pacland era Ms. Pacman on it. The fucked thing about getting in early is that the best panels are on Saturday morning so, in order to go meet the Atari or Williams guys at their panel, you have to miss out on some prime time gaming time. Oh well, it's worth it though to hear Al Alcorn or Owen Rubin or Steve Ritchie talking about the old days. Pick your battles.
3) Between 1pm and 7pm it's a shitshow. You can barely fucking walk around. You end up playing any game you can find open. Mata Hari with a broken flipper? Sure. A bootleg version of Asteroids with EBAY letters instead of regular asteroid shapes? Okay I'll play that. But anything beyond that you're fucked. Time to make friends. Find someone socially awkward who would look visibly uncomfortable talking to people (this is the Bay Area, this is 75% of the population here), and chat them up. Ask to play 2 players. He'll move on as soon as his game is up. The hardest nut to crack is the large 4-up group. All the Sterns and Williams are now 4-deep with people who all know each other. The only way to move in on this table is to either A) wait for all 4 of their games to end and by some miracle they leave (this never happens) or B) group up with 3 other dudes and BE that group. I'm hoping to do this, so hit me up at CAX!
4) During the busy times, any open pinball table you find means it's broken. This is the most maddening thing about CAX for me. You'll see all the same names on these tables. There are guys who bring a dozen pins to the event. But half their machines have something wrong with them. Black Knight 2000 what shorts out and reboots every 2 minutes. Whirlwind with a broken ramp (impossible multiball) and the decal on one of the spinners has lifted up, Dr. Dude with a lazy flipper, etc. I even see the same problems come back year after year, it's uncanny.
5) Midday on Satuday, being the shitshow that it is, just leave. Go grab a bite to eat, check out the other meeting rooms. They have classic console things going on, Airhockey, vendors, etc. If you don't have a hotel room at the Hyatt, the best thing about finding the other exhibitors is often there's a big empty comfy couch outside their meeting rooms. You can just sprawl out on that fucker and recharge. I don't much care to play Conker 64, but if it means I can hangout near that room in peace & quiet, I'll do it.
6) Parking. There is a nice, big, free parking garage for the Hyatt Regency way in the back. Get there early and park in it! Otherwise you're forced to park in overflow parking across the street at Great America. It's a long walk and that lot is really hot so it kind of sucks parking there. Again, if you don't have a room then parking in the garage means you can go lie down for a bit in your car. To park there you have to be pretty damn early. The convention center has a lot going on and those people will fill that garage quick. Usually it's jehovah's witness groups, wedding conventions, black entrepreneurs expo, or Vietnamese lupus survivors, whatever. They fill up that garage and you'll see them wearing suits walking around confused why there are so many neckbearded, cargo shorts-wearing dudes coming in through the back door. Just ignore them and you'll be fine. Eat the stale overpriced food at the bar or walk down the street to Taco Bell. If it's after 4pm, you're probably pretty safe leaving and finding a spot when you get back after a lot of the Harekrishnas have left.
7) Bring quarters and tools. As per usual many cabs that cannot be put on free play will not have a credit button (as per show rules). The only way to play them will be to find the owner with the key and have him coin it up, or to put in a
. Sometimes you can jury rig something if only you had pliers or a flathead screwdriver. Half of these backdoors and coindoors are held closed with a single phillips screw--better bring a Leatherman or something.
Tourneys. I notice every year as I'm elbowing people to try and get a turn at the Joust with the broken joystick, there's several pins roped off for the "Tournament". You might want to sign up for it, because it guarantees you some playtime with these badboys. It's probably the ONLY way you're going to get to play the good Medieval Madness with the LED bulbs as opposed to the broken one where the drawbridge doesn't even come down. Unfortunately you have to qualify for it, pay $40 and have a PAPA World Pinball Player Ranking higher than 1000. So good luck with that. Qualifying is Friday at 7pm-midnight and Saturday 10am-midnight. The tourney is a separate room this year, so at least I won't have to look at the "good tables" just sitting there with nobody playing them.
9)Raffles. Buy a ticket and stick around till Sunday when they draw the winners. It's fun! You might win a Total Carnage CPO or something. But usually, all the winning ticket numbers will be numbered at least 10,000 higher than your ticket which you got Saturday morning, meaning the schlub who walked through the door late on Sunday and bought 1 ticket just won the choice of classic Williams widebody or shitty Arcade Legends cabinet. And of course the idiot always chooses the MAME cab, never fails.
...this turned into a rant. Fuck, why do I go to this thing every year? I could just play MAME and Visual Pinball all day and have a better time, at least I'll be able to hear what I'm playing.
