#mag2024

[the-iron-shoulder]

Home from MAGFest!

Gonna ramble for a while about MAGFest 2024, which was this past weekend! Feel free to mute the tag #MAGFest2024 if you don’t wanna see it.

I’m gonna go stream of consciousness so it probably won’t be too organized and I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong, so if you were there too and you’re like “hey, X didn’t play that song, Y did,” well, my bad

Anyway! Brought my bf along, and I’m wild about VGM and he knows nothing about it, but he wanted to come because he wanted to see me being excited and passionate about something and he’s just a real sweetie that way, is it any wonder why I love him? Before we went, I made sure that he at least knew what Megalovania sounds like, since it’s replaced One Winged Angel as the de facto “if you don’t have a specific theme this conflicts with, there’s a good chance you’re gonna end your set with this” song (and I’m here for it, I fucking love Megalovania, I don’t care if people think it’s overplayed, it’s super dope). We heard it 3.5 times over the weekend (one time was when Don Palombi’s Game Night played sans. but they mixed in some MV, so that’s the 0.5).

And yes, we did refer to our hotel room as the MAGFest Fag Nest 🏳️‍🌈

[dieseltyrese]

gusto ko na agad mag2024, para malaman ko kung kinaya ko ba ang BS Bio under this environment

[the-iron-shoulder]

THURSDAY PART 1

Thursday is the ramp-up day, most of the big guns aren’t playing that day, but we did see Kara Comparetto, who is a magnificent solo pianist (and vocalist!)

her set was great, no crazy deep cuts but that’s pretty much to be expected for what I believe to be someone’s first time performing live at MAG. Beautiful vocals on Still Alive, some excellent pieces from Symphony of the Night, a Mega Man medley that had me absolutely giddy with joy (Air Man, Elec Man, Wood Man, MM3 title, Top Man, Shadow Man, Storm Eagle, X2 Sigma Stage 1, Spark Mandrill, MM2 Wily Castle 1) because I am such a Mega Man fanboy—I mean come on, Wily Castle 1 is my go-to warmup song on my guitar and it’s one of the first pieces I usually try to play when I get my hands on a new weird instrument!

She played a Yasunori Mitsuda medley that included Millennial Fair, and she had the crowd do the “HA!” part, which was just excellent audience participation.

She performed in cosplay as Aerith FF7 (don’t see that many performers in arbitrary cosplay unless that’s part of their bit, so that was cool) and naturally she played Aerith’s Theme, which is always heartbreaking and wonderful. I don’t even like FF7 and I don’t care about the character per se, but the song is a classic for a reason.

Her finale was, like I said is to be expected, Megalovania, but she brought a compatriot in to duet with her on the same keyboard, and maybe that’s a thing among serious pianist circles, but I’d never personally seen it before and I was impressed. Excellent stuff all around.

Before Kara, there was a kind of casual jazz/funk group at the Belvedere (which was also Kara’s venue); we got there too late to hear their introductions so honestly I’m not sure who they were, but they played a mean Stickerbush Symphony (I’m such a sucker for a good Stickerbush Symphony) and some other stuff that was good, even though I forgot what it was

Home from MAGFest!

Gonna ramble for a while about MAGFest 2024, which was this past weekend! Feel free to mute the tag #MAGFest2024 if you don’t wanna see it.

I’m gonna go stream of consciousness so it probably won’t be too organized and I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong, so if you were there too and you’re like “hey, X didn’t play that song, Y did,” well, my bad

Anyway! Brought my bf along, and I’m wild about VGM and he knows nothing about it, but he wanted to come because he wanted to see me being excited and passionate about something and he’s just a real sweetie that way, is it any wonder why I love him? Before we went, I made sure that he at least knew what Megalovania sounds like, since it’s replaced One Winged Angel as the de facto “if you don’t have a specific theme this conflicts with, there’s a good chance you’re gonna end your set with this” song (and I’m here for it, I fucking love Megalovania, I don’t care if people think it’s overplayed, it’s super dope). We heard it 3.5 times over the weekend (one time was when Don Palombi’s Game Night played sans. but they mixed in some MV, so that’s the 0.5).

And yes, we did refer to our hotel room as the MAGFest Fag Nest 🏳️‍🌈

[the-iron-shoulder]

THURSDAY PART 2

I’m not going to focus on the couple other musical acts we saw that day because they weren’t my favorites and I don’t want to spend too much time badmouthing performers, but I WILL spend some time badmouthing the one panel we saw, because it was legitimately the worst panel I have seen at any convention in my entire life. This is probably the most negative post I’m gonna make for a LONG time…

the theme was “Vocaloid and its ever present place in rhythm games.” Now, I’m thinking to myself, I like rhythm games, and I see the term Vocaloid a lot but I’ve never really learned about it, this seems like a good place to do that, right?

so. fucking. wrong.

the panelists did NO preparation. The presentation was just a white-on-black powerpoint. One slide had some pictures (Hatsune Miku and some other Vocaloid characters) and that was IT. I shat out better I-Forgot-About-This-Presentation-Until-Before-Class-Started-And-I-Threw-This-Together-During-The-Break when I was in grad school in the classes I really hated, let alone for fucken MAG.

they half-assed a slide about what makes a song good or bad for a rhythm game, but they didn’t actually put together a coherent explanation of anything and they were just flailing.

their “what is Vocaloid?” section, you know, which I was hoping to benefit from, was literally the first three sentences from the Wikipedia on Vocaloid, Jesus Christ how lazy do you get (they did at least ADMIT it was the first three sentences from Wikipedia, but STILL, it’s bullshit even if it’s not straight up plagiarism)

and then the bulk of the presentation was their “examples” slide, which was… literally just the word “examples.” They didn’t, you know, cue up videos ahead of time, or even put videos on the screen (so we could, for example, see the beat charts they were complaining about and why they didn’t flow nicely). They did, occasionally, go to YouTube on another screen and play us a snippet of a Vocaloid song, but more often they would just, like, reference the song by name and then rant for a minute about how XYZ rhythm game cut it short and that was bad. God help you if you didn’t intimately know the song already. I mean, even when I’m just rambling at my roommate over dinner about miscellaneous VGM minutiae, I’ll bring up what I’m talking about on my phone so he has some idea of what’s got me all worked up, and these fucking MAGFest panelists couldn’t even do that much!

meanwhile, this is the first panel that my bf and I saw this year, and it was like only our second activity at MAG at all, and I was basically just so embarrassed that my bf might get the impression that all of MAG is like this… thankfully he believed me that this is an outlier adn should not be counted, but wow, fam, it was bad.

The only bright spot in this panel was five minutes in when an individual in a Hatsune Miku-themed fursuit (not so much “what if Miku was a furry?” but more “what if a furry was Miku?”) came in and sat down in the front row, that was awesome, hats off to this person in this excellent suit

Home from MAGFest!

Gonna ramble for a while about MAGFest 2024, which was this past weekend! Feel free to mute the tag #MAGFest2024 if you don’t wanna see it.

I’m gonna go stream of consciousness so it probably won’t be too organized and I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong, so if you were there too and you’re like “hey, X didn’t play that song, Y did,” well, my bad

Anyway! Brought my bf along, and I’m wild about VGM and he knows nothing about it, but he wanted to come because he wanted to see me being excited and passionate about something and he’s just a real sweetie that way, is it any wonder why I love him? Before we went, I made sure that he at least knew what Megalovania sounds like, since it’s replaced One Winged Angel as the de facto “if you don’t have a specific theme this conflicts with, there’s a good chance you’re gonna end your set with this” song (and I’m here for it, I fucking love Megalovania, I don’t care if people think it’s overplayed, it’s super dope). We heard it 3.5 times over the weekend (one time was when Don Palombi’s Game Night played sans. but they mixed in some MV, so that’s the 0.5).

And yes, we did refer to our hotel room as the MAGFest Fag Nest 🏳️‍🌈

[the-iron-shoulder]

FRIDAY PART 1

Friday was probably the best day? Didn’t see any more panels, just concerts, but I’m fine with that.

the one disappointment is that the Instrument Petting Zoo got removed from the schedule, but oh well, that probably saved me SEVERAL hundred dollars

first act that we saw was Abandon Quest, never heard of them before but they were awesome—they’ve got a good electronic metal sound (I’m always a fan of that) and they played a really solid list of songs. Set list I remember: POP/STARS, Mining Melancholy (god I am SUCH a sucker for this song), Smash Bros medley, Gran Turismo 3 medley, Those Who Fight, Holy Orders, Ballad of the Goddess, Xepher

Abandon Quest’s big gimmick, though, is that they had a set of two dance pads (DDR-derived but not literally DDR, I forget the specific breed, but they’re the ones with five arrows including the middle spot) on stage and they’d set up these blisteringly difficult step charts to go with each of their songs, and they’d bring people on stage to dance to those step charts live in real time as they played, and it was BANANAS. Absolutely phenomenal athleticism on display, 10/10, loved it all. Sometimes it would be two people next to each other, sometimes it was one person playing both pads, it was always incredible

weirdly enough I didn’t see any Abandon Quest albums for sale at Rock Island, which was a shame, because I totally would have bought them

Home from MAGFest!

Gonna ramble for a while about MAGFest 2024, which was this past weekend! Feel free to mute the tag #MAGFest2024 if you don’t wanna see it.

I’m gonna go stream of consciousness so it probably won’t be too organized and I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong, so if you were there too and you’re like “hey, X didn’t play that song, Y did,” well, my bad

Anyway! Brought my bf along, and I’m wild about VGM and he knows nothing about it, but he wanted to come because he wanted to see me being excited and passionate about something and he’s just a real sweetie that way, is it any wonder why I love him? Before we went, I made sure that he at least knew what Megalovania sounds like, since it’s replaced One Winged Angel as the de facto “if you don’t have a specific theme this conflicts with, there’s a good chance you’re gonna end your set with this” song (and I’m here for it, I fucking love Megalovania, I don’t care if people think it’s overplayed, it’s super dope). We heard it 3.5 times over the weekend (one time was when Don Palombi’s Game Night played sans. but they mixed in some MV, so that’s the 0.5).

And yes, we did refer to our hotel room as the MAGFest Fag Nest 🏳️‍🌈

[the-iron-shoulder]

FRIDAY PART 2

ohhhhh man this night was incredible

so I knew she was going to be good, she’s a phenomenal performer, but omg. Lacey Johnson. Lacey fucking Johnson! She’s an absolute BEAST

if you’ve never heard of her and you have ANY interest in VGM, for the love of god, go look her up, I’m completely obsessed. She is inhumanly good on the keytar AND she sings—she has incredible stage presence, absolutely knows how to grab the audience’s attention and not let go

she started with some Metroid pieces while in Zero Suit costume, which was sick, and then she disappeared off stage to change into her normal performing attire. While she was changing, the screen was basically going through the start-up-and-select-a-song process for DDR X, and it was teasing us with looking like it was going to pick this song or that song, and then it went to fucken BUTTERFLY and the crowd just exploded. She gave a great vocal performance while just shredding the keytar, incredible stuff

I’m trying to even remember what else she played… some Guilty Gear, some Persona, some really excellent Castlevania (Young Nobleman of Sadness! Which I will maintain is a better name than The Tragic Prince), the Chocobo theme

my favorite moment from her set was when she just said “gamers, please rise for the national anthem” and then launched into ESCAPE FROM THE CITY, I just absolutely lost my shit, such a fabulous bit (and such a good song)

her finale was also Megalovania but she did a fake-out with making it look like it was going to be some Guitar Hero thing before cutting into the real thing, so much fun

I think Lacey was the best performance we saw, and that’s including the one right after her, which was ToxicxEternity and FamilyJules performing THE SHREDVENTURE

I saw the original Shredventure in 2021 and this was almost exactly the same, just with a couple songs cut for time (totally expected and reasonable). Spoilers, I guess?

So the conceit, the story I suppose, is that there’s a wizard who says that VIDEO GAMES is in trouble (he always says it like that, VIDEO GAMES) and that Jack and Jules need to solve these riddles to play the right music to recharge these crystals. The riddles often have multiple plausible answers and so they’ll usually play the “wrong” song first before playing the “right” one, but the wizard would bully them and call them nerds when they got it wrong and it was very goofy and funny

eventually of course the wizard turns out to be evil and they have to explode his dick by overcharging the last crystal (via Jack’s death metal lyrics)

fabulous set list: Tal Tal Heights, Aquatic Ambience, Super Mario World Castle, Gourmet Race, Lavender Town, Green Hill Zone, Green Soil Brinstar, Bloody Tears, Otherworld, and always Megalovania as the finale

Jack and Jules are individually two of my very favorite musicians, and so of course I was happy to take a trip to go see them perform together when they put the first Shredventure together a few years ago, just like now

they also teased us with the prospect of “Shredventure 2 Battle,” and okay, A, excellent joke, and B, omgomgomgomg please yessssss

my bf and I wanted to stick around for Bit Brigade but we are old men and we needed to go back to the nest to sleep, sorry Bit Brigade, maybe in a future year

Home from MAGFest!

Gonna ramble for a while about MAGFest 2024, which was this past weekend! Feel free to mute the tag #MAGFest2024 if you don’t wanna see it.

I’m gonna go stream of consciousness so it probably won’t be too organized and I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong, so if you were there too and you’re like “hey, X didn’t play that song, Y did,” well, my bad

Anyway! Brought my bf along, and I’m wild about VGM and he knows nothing about it, but he wanted to come because he wanted to see me being excited and passionate about something and he’s just a real sweetie that way, is it any wonder why I love him? Before we went, I made sure that he at least knew what Megalovania sounds like, since it’s replaced One Winged Angel as the de facto “if you don’t have a specific theme this conflicts with, there’s a good chance you’re gonna end your set with this” song (and I’m here for it, I fucking love Megalovania, I don’t care if people think it’s overplayed, it’s super dope). We heard it 3.5 times over the weekend (one time was when Don Palombi’s Game Night played sans. but they mixed in some MV, so that’s the 0.5).

And yes, we did refer to our hotel room as the MAGFest Fag Nest 🏳️‍🌈

[the-iron-shoulder]

SATURDAY

God I can barely even remember now, we saw SO much good stuff

Dom Palombi’s Game Night was fun, a good funky style with an absolutely star-studded lineup on stage (insaneintherain, Skatune Network, the Super Soul Bros…!). Their take on To Zanarkand was genuinely unique and it made me cry, I loved it

Super MadNES was just facemeltingly great, SO high energy, I love that they introduced every single non-percussion member of the band as being on leads (lead guitar, lead guitar, lead keytar, no one isn’t leads, this is hilarious and I love it). Excellent lineup from them, I especially loved their Castlevania stuff, but probably the best bit was a one-two Final Fantasy combo where they hard-cut from Exdeath (FF5) to Those Who Fight Further (FF7) without a clutch and they just completely nailed it, absolutely perfect… I kind of feel like this may be the closest I ever get to seeing The Black Mages live

the finale of the weekend was Metroid Metal, and since the theme of the con was Metroid Prime, they basically stuck entirely to MP1 (only exceptions were Torvus Bog from MP2 and the main theme to MP3), which I’m perfectly fine with. They didn’t talk much, they mostly just played. Tallon Overworld, Phendrana Drifts, Space Pirate Encounter (talk about an adrenaline jolt, that song is SO intense), Wrecked Ship (with 88Bit on the keys, phenomenal), a great boss medley (including Hive Totem, one of my faves), and their finale was the Prime 1 title theme, which they absolutely slayed

I’m losing the ability to even describe these folks, it was just an amazing and overwhelming experience

I love MAGFest so much and I can’t wait for next year’s

maybe later I’ll gush about the incredible cosplay that was all over the con, but I’ve been doing this for an hour already

hope you enjoyed me just kind of splattering a bunch of names and the words “awesome/incredible/phenomenal” all over the page here!

Home from MAGFest!

Gonna ramble for a while about MAGFest 2024, which was this past weekend! Feel free to mute the tag #MAGFest2024 if you don’t wanna see it.

I’m gonna go stream of consciousness so it probably won’t be too organized and I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong, so if you were there too and you’re like “hey, X didn’t play that song, Y did,” well, my bad

Anyway! Brought my bf along, and I’m wild about VGM and he knows nothing about it, but he wanted to come because he wanted to see me being excited and passionate about something and he’s just a real sweetie that way, is it any wonder why I love him? Before we went, I made sure that he at least knew what Megalovania sounds like, since it’s replaced One Winged Angel as the de facto “if you don’t have a specific theme this conflicts with, there’s a good chance you’re gonna end your set with this” song (and I’m here for it, I fucking love Megalovania, I don’t care if people think it’s overplayed, it’s super dope). We heard it 3.5 times over the weekend (one time was when Don Palombi’s Game Night played sans. but they mixed in some MV, so that’s the 0.5).

And yes, we did refer to our hotel room as the MAGFest Fag Nest 🏳️‍🌈