This weekend the GAME ON! This Spring We're All Fun and Games event kicked off at Chicago's Navy Pier.
The idea was to pack the pier's Crystal Gardens with Xbox 360s and let people play games on the system to their heart's content. They also decided to run a Guitar Hero World Tour tournament. Well, that was the idea at least.
Tristan and I decided to swing by the event to see what it looked like. First disappointment: The organizers decided to charge $5 a head for play time. I was told at the gate that for $5 Tristan could play as much as he wanted all day long. Sure, charging for Xbox 360 playtime seems a little absurd, especially when it doesn't include entry in the tournament, but I bit.
Once we started to wander around though, I was unhappy to discover that the Game On event had a grand total of 11 Xbox 360s. That's 11 consoles for the entirety of Chicago to play on as long as they wanted. Fortunately, very few people were there, so Tristan was able to snag a machine.
The first game he wanted to play was unavailable because someone had parked on it and looked like they would be there for the day. Since the machines all had one game on them, and were organized by rating, he was forced to play some Tennis title. He would have tried a different game, but the Xbox 360 was displaying a read disc error, so they were down to ten machines.
Oh and three of those working ten machines were put aside for the Guitar Hero Tournament.
I'm fairly certain Microsoft had nothing to do with this event, but if I were them I'd make sure that any events using their console isn't so poorly organized, it can't help but leave a bad taste in gamers' mouths.