Themed Gaming Sessions?

[wayultratech]

Wondering if the fine folks around here ever have or do, for lack of a better term, "themed gaming sessions/nights"?

I often find myself wanting to pre-select a grip of games to play for an evening, all with some sort of connection. It can be a vague connection or a bunch of direct sequels one after another.

For example, playing all the launch titles for a particular system (the European N64 launch title list sounds like a pretty fun evening), playing as many different TMNT games as you own, playing both versions of games that were released for SNES and Genesis back to back, only playing SNK fighters, playing only movie-licensed games, etc etc etc.

Personally, i dig Umbrella Corp-themed nights every once in a while, popping in each Resident Evil title chronologically and selecting a random typewriter save and start doing some "split second game immersion", as (at least for me) it's fun to compare and experience the similarities/differences within a series.

So, anybody here do anything similar when selecting titles for an evening? What and how do you select the games to play in a single chunk of time? I'd also be interested in hearing about any epic themed gaming sessions, like maybe you and your crew sampled every TG16 game in one afternoon, or maybe you played every LJN game released on NES in one night (brutal and sadistic, but i bet somebody's done it!!)

[JSoup]

A year or three ago I had a pile of sports games that I hadn't played. Genesis, SNES, NES...I think that's all. Ended up contacting a few sports minded friends to spend an afternoon working our way through all of them.

[Ro-J]

Last year at some point I had two large CRT's next to each other with a 2600 hooked up to one, and a NES to the other. My son and I played every game I owned that was released for both systems (Kung Fu, Qbert, Mario Bros, Double Dragon, etc...) to see if the 2600 could actually beat the NES alternatives. For the most part, no, although my son really preferred the 2600 version of Popeye over the NES. He felt the NES version was too easy and therefore not as much fun, graphics be damned. I preferred the 2600's Millepede, but only because of the waste of screen real estate in the NES version.

At one point I thought of making a master list of all games released for both systems and trying them all, but that never materialized. Maybe one day.

[SpaceHarrier]

Ain't no party like a Mega Man party!

We just try to beat the 8 master robots, then move on to another game in the series. Poor Wily never gets invited, but I doubt a doctor has time to party anyway.

[sloan]

Best ones I have been to involve larger groups and multiple CRT's side by side. One Christmas, we set up three CRT's with three NES consoles and played all the new games received on Christmas morning. When some would get tired of playing a certain game, they would trade CRT's with another pair and try another game. I realize this isn't themed, but loads of fun all the same. Maybe it was a NES-themed session.

[wayultratech]

That megaman session sounds awesome!! It's cool the CRTs next to each other is another popular method to get a themed experience, and the NES version vs 2600 version sesh sounds super interesting / fun!! Out of curiosity, did NES have the large majority of better versions, or basically who which hardware won the comparison (i suppose it's alot of personal preference too)