This month we returned to M-Sparc on Tour’s location on Bangor high Street, as our theme for this year is collaboration!
Charlie opened up the venue at 10am, and we didn’t arrive too long after that. Dylan had to run to the printer, and Jen had to go and get the refreshments, but people started drifting in closer to 11am, the official start time.
Some of the group got on with a warm up for the first league session, which was due to begin on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
A few others fancied a practice on Goldeneye 007 via the Switch online port.
The big table in the middle of the room started as refreshments, but ended up being for casual multiplayers and single player games throughout the day.
There became a designated area at the front of the shop for our enthusiastic dancers too!
the order of official play was round 1 of our 2023 league: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Vs. Random tracks. 150cc
Auto steer/assist was on for the youngest members.
It was nice to see some families with younger kids attending. If we have regular groups of younger children attending, we would be happy to set up an exclusive “kids” tournament in the future 🙂
The Goldeneye tournament had 12 entries, and scores were quite close. The controller method was set to more modern times, so those who were used to playing inverted were a bit confused at first! (Apparently we forgot to take pictures of the actual goldeneye tournament, sorry!) The hosts were busy chatting to the newer people and the families. Em took the victory though, so well done!
There was some Zelda spotted, and the smaller ones had plenty of time on a smaller screen, practicing their mario kart skills. There was also a bit of Tetris Effect: Connected later on in the afternoon.
The second round of the Mario Kart League was on Mario Kart 7. Why?
Because back in the first year we ever did a league as StreetPass North Wales back in 2014, we had an entire league (with 3 rounds) of pure Mario Kart 7!
It was a great way of getting everyone involved, simply because Mario Kart is one of the most age accessible games that Nintendo has made.
When we started this community, the first handful of members were generally students, but the generations have moved on since we’re now over ten years old. Going forward this year, we want to make ourselves more known locally, so that we can extend our safe space for families too.
Of course, because of there only being two rounds these days, this leads to the inevitable tie breaker.
There were three in the tie breaker, and Drn seemed to have the worst luck!
The set items were Blue shells, triple red shells, Horn, boo, golden mushroom, and crazy 8 (8 red shells)
One race, Drn was hit by 5 blue shells in a row, and another race there was a boo echo! (A boo stole from another player, and a second boo stole from the first one!) 8 red shells was manic too!
Em came out top, winning themselves a mario hat and £5!
Our raffle was nicely distributed, and we finished with our group photo. Although two people were missing, then when they joined, the people at the edge got chopped off!
Note for next time: The camera can be zoomed out at 0.5 for a wider angle! 😛
Our next event is Saturday 18th March in our usual venue (The Wheldon Building) – Keep an eye out on our socials for more info! Ft. Animal Crossing themed special raffle to mark 3 years since New Horizons came out!
