Bangkok Interactive Game - Festival 2008
- Ethan Cole

Even at 50 baht; this was still one hell of a rip off; quality: falling somewhere between Thailand Game Show 2007 and 2008 – the trouble being it’s essentially a rehash of ThGS 2k8; a half-assed “for those who came in late” riding the gimmick with a new captive audience of the rich and trendy with an influx of fools and saps ready to shell out their dough misguidedly.

The flashing lighted plastic tunneled entry lead into the first hall; consisting of mostly of sales booths demo-ing their products and sold for a wet cock slap to the face styled pricing – which should come as no surprise.  The first hall itself, was fairly sparse; with a significant section of space to allow inbound traffic - direct to the end of the hall where a sloppy tacked on shit-pile of degrading arcade booths sat adjacent to the main stage.  The stupidity of both ThGS and BIG, is the lack of 2Spicy (Too Spicy) although it seems there are only a few units about the city to begin with.

The stage itself; a general purpose setup, but ready for a ‘final match’ general event.  Also featured; an onstage auction; the EEE PC: the bid hit 17,500 THB.  “Let’s give this guy a round of applause”.  Yes.  Let’s give this fucking retard a giant round of applause for paying 7,500B more than the official retail price – without the choice of O.S. no less.  Following this; the last players in the Warcraft III tournament play their final match.

A Spore booth to the left of the exit – a dozen or so units running a Spore demo; the players seemed to be digging it – matching much the desired intent of reaching non-gamers and gamers alike – the latter being ranged and debatable, but we’ll leave that to the marketing types to tell us who we are and how we should play.

the Wrighteous path

The other EA booth: the exact same one from ThGS minus the Burnout Paradise specific section set up with eye-toys, its omission is peculiar but not wholly unsurprising.  Much like ThGS was the second hall, sullen; a flashback of boredom; hiccups of mediocrity crusting: for this second hall held the same content as ThGS 2k8 – but less, yet a few more options for the kids.  Unlike ThGS, it wasn’t dark, but rather the lights were just dimmed; in addition the Hip Street (an online multiplayer PC DDR styled game) booth was no longer shut off and shared a stage with Special Force.  For what it is, it’s a nice set up with demo-units in orbit fashion around a sparkly vehicle – it’s almost like an N-gage commercial; better than the worth of the actual product.  Speaking of which, there was also an N-Gage booth present; with a series of TV’s set up like slanted Tetris ‘L’ block.

freebie frisbees

A series of knock off products were on display, though nothing quite as exciting as the Vii.  Yet another DDR clone, with its own tacky dance-pad peripheral “Super Dance Online” – I’ve seen better plastic lining the floors of stripper/Go-Go joints.  Additionally milking the sore nipples of counter-strike comes a similar clone; they’ve taken the initials “C.S.” and added an “O” which doesn’t mean much in the way of a whiff of shit here since they refer to Counter Strike as “cown-teuh” (yet some still refer to Winning 11 as ‘win-ning – there’s some cultural learning for you: smile).  C.S.O. stands for “Crazy Shooter Online” – as opposed to Cock Smokers Online; which was somewhat disappointing given the chick on the poster; although a “I’ll show you a crazy shooter” joke doesn’t translate to well, you yellow-fevered-freaks can feel free to fly a kite.

lost in translation: gloryhole

For more, read the Thailand Game Show 2008 coverage and imagine shittier speakers controlled by idiots that don’t know how to adjust audio levels.  Or check out the video below.

HALL 01 - Duration: 04:52

HALL 02 - Duration: 04:45

Overall: it was a decent cash-in; enough to captivate the saps, the ignorant and the curious into its half-assed two staged adjoining bowels, and within it; a series of left over ThGS 2k8 freebies still undigested. Better luck next year.