AIE Video Games Trivia Night in Sydney

Game Event from Luke - Friday, 13 November 2009 @ 2:27pm

The Academy of Interactive Entertainment was kind enough to invite Australian Gamer along to its first ever Video Games Trivia Night in Sydney. Jae and I quickly jumped at the opportunity to test our gaming knowledge, plus it was to be held at a pub so this just gave us another excuse to have some drinks. After recruiting Joaby from GameArena our 3 man super trivia team was complete, we were practically unstoppable! That was until Jae pulled out.... Now down our resident token Asian we required another suitable candidate to answer all the JRPG and fighting game questions. After some scouting around we were unable to fill the 3rd spot and proceeded into the challenge missing a critical part of our crew.

Arriving on scene we found a table with 3 PC gamers willing to let myself and Joaby join them - luckily for us, these guys knew their stuff. The rest of the tables quickly filled - around 50 people turned up, splitting into about 8 teams. After being asked to decide on a team name we came up with FUIW (Fuck You Infinity Ward), a shout out for removing dedicated server support on the PC.

Our night kicked off with the 1st round consisting of 15 questions, a mixture of general (typical questions and answers), audio (a sound clip was played over the speaker while we guessed what it was related to), and visual (a picture sheet with characters and logos provided source material) questions. Smashing through the first set we were confident we had started off well. The results came back and to our joy we were in the lead by 1 point. Wanting to keep this momentum going we jumped into the 2nd round not wanting to drop any points. This round consisted of another 15 questions - all of them sound clip related - and unfortunately a few of them had us stumped. The results were marked and handed back; we now sat tied in first place.

The room awaits for the next round of questions

The 3rd round was presented to us on a sheet of paper with images of 10 video game controllers - we had to label the controllers with the system that they belonged to. Right now is where the internet would have come in handy. After writing down 4 we ran into a big wall, not being certain of the rest we used some handy guess work the rest of them. With our fingers crossed the round 3 results are calculated, and that's when we got our sheet back... 5 out of 10, ah okay not bad considering, hold on, wait a sec.... HEY JOAB, WHY IS THERE A BLANK LABEL UNDER THE ONE I SAID TO WRITE JAGUAR UNDER $&^%!@#^%

FUIW gets advised that we have now dropped down to 2nd place, behind by 1 point to team LPO. This is the point where Joaby is sacked as being the scribe, all respect has been lost for him and I'm left with giving him shit about it the rest of the night.

A 4th and final round starts with the same format as the first 2, the team is focused and ready to snatch the victory. Trouble hits in the first question as we endeavour to find the answer to the massive 4 pointer. It’s okay though, we can hear LPO also struggling over this one as they yell out for some hints. Making our way through the rest of the questions we found that they had definitely ramped up in difficulty, but with such a great team we managed to come up with the goods. Round 4 results were in and FUIW was now tied with LPO, a final 3 question tie breaker round needed to be played by the remaining 2 teams.

The initial 2 questions we nailed, the 3rd, not so well. “What was Lara Croft's character originally going to be named?”... Looks of shock circle our table, no one has clue. After some serious decision making we proceed to write down “Tits McCoy”. Unfortunately for us we were wrong, and to make it worse we didn't get any bonus points for bad creativity! Once again both FUIW and LPO had tied in the results. A 2nd tie breaker round needed to be played and yet again resulted in another tie!

The presenters decided that we would choose one member from our team to go in a face off where the first correct player would win for their team. We come to the conclusion Joaby should be the one represent FUIW, this being his chance to redeem himself from earlier. Both challengers stand up the front watched on by a room full of silent gamers. The presenter beings the question, “In Metal Gear...” At this point I know that we had this one in the bag - Joaby is a Metal Gear fan-boy so nothing could stop us. Joaby's hand shoots up in the air followed by the correct answer and our table erupts into a cheer as we are proclaimed the winners!

FUIW collect the prize's and pose for photos!

Joaby holding the cup of victory

Overall the night was a lot of fun, I got to meet some interesting people while testing some video game knowledge. Currently an annual event I'm hoping AIE might do more of these in the future. If one of these events happens to pop up near your city be sure to head on over and check it out!