If there's one thing Philadelphia's vgXPO last weekend proved to me beyond a shadow, it's that I'm still horrible at Zaxxon.

In fact, 20 years haven't improved my skills on Berzerk or Defender either. They're still tough games, even if they are snubbed by today's gaming youths as prehistoric and dumb. I'm just glad the arcade games were free, because I would have been dumping quarters in them the same way I did back when I was 10 years old in 1981. I guess some things never change.

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As you'd expect, the expo, which was held at the Fort Washington Expo Center on November 12th and 13th, featured numerous vendors and exhibitors selling classic games and displaying, for sheer nostalgia, beloved dinosaurs like the Atari 2600, Colecovision, and Intellevision, among many others. AtariAge.com probably had the best setup, with several different units and games sitting ready for playing, including a few of the "home brew" variety - new games being made specifically for these old systems.

For a thirtysomething ex-gamer like myself (I never really caught on to the New Wave of video games after Nintendo), this was a chance to walk down memory lane and uncover classic gems I had completely forgotten. It's one thing to see an Odyssey 500 system on display - but a Vectrex unit, still in its box, for sale! Tandyvision! Where has the time gone?

Of course I had to buy something, so I headed for the NES cartridges, and there were many for sale. Most were in the neighborhood of $5-$10. It's hard for me to regard the NES as a "classic" system, since it was the first to truly bring the arcade look and experience into the home, at least for me. I chewed up entire weekends in high school on the NES playing Zelda, Metroid and Castlevania. So you can imagine my delight when I found Castlevania for sale at the Expo. My weekends are about to change again.

There were also vendors selling trading cards and action figures, and running concurrently with the event was a separate consumer expo sponsored by local NBC 10 news which had little to do with gaming but provided a diversion for anyone possibly suffering from fantasy overload.

Because I came on the second day of the two-day Video Game Expo, I missed some of the more noted speakers expected at the event, including the "father of video games" himself, Ralph Baer. I did happen to catch briefly Tommy Tallarico of Video Games Live address a young audience of gamers. One asked what traits he would need to be a game tester. "Passion is what they look for first," he said, adding that communication skills were also important.

While the tournaments on the Xbox and Gamecube, as well as the Dance Dance Revolution-style games, were drawing the crowds as the afternoon wore on, I found myself gravitating back to the 50 or so free arcade games in the back, on loan from the Videotopia exhibit. This one guy was really tearing it up on Tempest. He was about 40 years old.

I went into the expo praying to find Moon Patrol; it was there. So were Tron, Joust and Berzerk. The roller-skating rink when I was a kid back home had Robotron, but I could never get on it because it was so popular. After 20 years I finally got my shot at it. It looked hard to play when I was a kid. And, as I found out last weekend, it really was.

Rob Heyman
theLogBook.com Staff Writer