Mario Kart DD LAN, and other tourneys we've organized

Get ready for a big post!

tl;dr: pictures of events I've organized with some friends back home.

Back in the tiny hellhole I used to call home (Uruguay) I ran a website with @z_killemall (www.start-game.com) which is centered on retro gaming for the local community. We still publish some stuff from time to time, but dedicating it almost 0 time now (last update was in July).

Anyway, with the excuse of Start-Game, we had the chance of organizing some (free!) tournaments with cool prizes!

2012 - Punta Anime
In 2012 during an Anime Convention in a city to the east of the capital, we did a Mario Kart Double Dash tournament with 2 Gamecubes in LAN mode. Pretty cool, although no one much appreciated the fact they were in LAN... and the hurdles I went through to get the second LAN adapter - which included @kiff lending me one sending it over from the UK to Uruguay... and Royal Mail misplacing it and sending it over to Ukraine instead, then back to UK, then to Uruguay O___O



We gave a GBA with carrying case and Mario Kart Super Circuit (boxed!) as prize:




2015 - Montevideo Comics
Earlier this year I went back in May for a few weeks, we were invited to have a booth at the biggest comic convention in the country, on it's 11th edition. This was huge for us, and we had 2 full days to do pretty much whatever we pleased, which was super fun.

I already had all my games and consoles boxed and stored away in storage, which made it easy to move around for this purpose. We set up shop on a Saturday morning, and here's the result:

Just finished setting up - Day 1:



Setup Day 2:




We did 4 tournaments, 2 raffles, and had games and consoles on display and to play during the weekend (all for free).

Tournaments:

• [GC] Mario Kart Double Dash LAN | Prize: Boxed GBA + Boxed Mario Kart Super Circuit
• [SNES] Killer Instinct | Prize: GB Pocket (Yellow, loose) + Boxed Killer Instinct for GB
• [GC] Super Smash Bros. Melee | Prize: Brand new GC Smash Brawl controller
• [DC] King of Fighters Dream Match 1999 | Prize: NeoGeo Pocket Color (loose) with Sonic Pocket Adventures (loose)

During the tournaments we had a dedicated screen with Challonge showing the brackets for the tournament.

Raffles:
Mario Amiibo & Link Amiibo

In between each tournament (2 tourney & 1 raffle per day) we gave away an amiibo to everyone who had registered to that day's tournaments. We took a list of names from Challonge and put it in a randomizer on the screen for everyone to see.

Consoles on display:

• Panasonic Q
• Sharp Twin Famicom

Consoles to play:

• N64DD w/ Doshin and F-Zero Expansion Kit
• Dreamcast w/ KoF, Marvel vs Capcom, House of the Dead 2 (one of my poor lightguns died due to hyperactive kids)
• Gamecube w/ Mario Kart, Smash, XIII, etc.
• SNES w/ Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Starfox, etc.
• NES toploader w/ Mario Bros., Megaman, TMNT, and many others.

It was tough to organize and be constantly minding all the stuff (it was all from our personal collections), but it was a blast and people had a great time, and they were very impressed with the prizes and the fact it was all free (you never see that in UY) - entrance to the convention was around €20.


2015 - Pixels Movie Promo
Finally, we were invited to hold some promo events for the release of Pixels, the crappiest movie of them all, lol. I was already back in Ireland so z_killemall took care of all of it, he set up a small area in a shopping mall with a couple of arcade cabinets and set up an online ranking scoreboard - people came to play and we logged the points, at the end of the month the finalists played again but this time hooked to one of the cinema screens, and got Pixels swag and tickets to the movie as prizes.





The end!

 

LOL

All the events were quite nice, the one at the comic convention being the best, second time we ran Mario Kart DD on LAN with lots of lessons learned from the first time , like for example: force random character select.

 

I would have went crazy for Double Dash!! through LAN. I'd really like to be able to play online, but it feels like that ship may have sailed. Either way, very cool.

 

There's a DC racing game you can play versus with a link cable, forgot the name of it. We used to do that at these sort of events and there'd always be two hardcore racing fans playing it non-stop. Wish I didn't sell the cable.

 

Well, you still can play the LAN games online with tunneling software like XLink Kai or Warpipe!

Sega Rally? Never had the chance to try it on linked Dreamcasts unfortunately! Would love to try it.

 

Hmm, is there a community of players online?

 

No, it was something more simmy. Never could get into the game, but always appreciated that others enjoyed it. Quick search online reveals it was F355 Challenge:

Q. What games support the Dreamcast serial/link cable?
Aero Dancing F & i,
F355 Challenge
Sega Tetris
Virtual On : Oratorio Tangram.

Source: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/916412-dreamcast/46758892​

Oh how I tried to get a second Virtual On stick. It just wasn't as fun in single player for me.

 

Well, I'd doubt there's many players, but if there's somewhere to find them it's in onlineconsoles.com, there's even recent activity in the MKDD forum:
http://gamecube.onlineconsoles.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=8

If you are interested in other GC games, Homeland can be played without the need of tunneling software, but you need a couple of people to make it interesting, and one to host the game on their GC.

Phantasy Star Online can also be played relatively easy to this day, with a few private servers online I believe.

I'd love to play some GC online but I have all my consoles packed across the Atlantic in Uruguay

Ha! Interesting, I'd thought Sega Rally 2 was compatible with the VS link cable as well. I'd love to play some Virtual On Oratorio on VS!

 

I have the GC broadband adapter, but I've never actually used it for anything. I would like to trying playing online, but it seems like it would be a lot of work.

 

I've got 3 myself, I want to acquire five more for a 8 gamecube setup.

 

Well, if you have Homeland and find some other folks, you can play it out of the box without tunneling software or anything, I'd say is the easiest one.

Wow, that'd be sick! 3 BBAs already is impressive, I've got 2 and it was hard to come by them at good price.

 

Very cool to see F-Zero X Expansion Kit in the rotation. How often does the opportunity to play something like that pop up?

Always wanted to get a Gamecube BBA to play Smash Bros. Melee online:
http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/1629/t637663-how-to-play-ssbm-online/

 

What is an average price for a BBA? I'm seeing around $60?

 

I'd say $60 is a pretty good price, brand new retail price was $34.99 iirc.

When I purchased my second one back in 2012 it was thanks to someone here who pointed me to a guy at gc-forever who was driving all across the US going through all Gamestop stores looking for NOS BBAs and other accessories, which due to Gamestop policy they had to sell them at very low prices. He then re-sold all BBAs through the forum at the original retail price, unsung hero!

 

Megalomaniac. He sold me two as well.

 

Yep, that's him, great guy!

 

Cool with the GameCube LAN. I actually setup an 8 cube LAN at magfest last year and I might do that again. They have a ton of cubes so I just had to bring the 8 adapters, a hub, cable, and copies of the game. I have the cube LAN setup in my house all the time so pulling the adapters is a bit of a pain, but not too bad. 8-16 player Mario kart is pretty fun, people were on it almost all the time I checked in on it,

 

Do you keep an 8 GC LAN setup at home? That's sick.

I'd love to, but I don't have enough friends to even fill one Gamecube , now on a more serious note, I bet that was extremely fun! I wish they'd polished the LAN mode just a bit more though.

 

Yeah I have an 8 cube LAN, 10 360s, 8 ps2s, bunch of original xboxes I need to setup. I collect console LAN/system link games. I like how the DD LAN mode just goes but yeah it would be better if there were more options.