It was Day Two of PAX East. Actually, it was Evening Two, and we were all playing Mario Kart Wii. My lead was untouchable, and I was enjoying myself immensely. Alex had gone off to watch a Giant Bomb panel, and Jared was watching some kind of tournament. At some point, Neal received a text from Jared that made him pause the game. “The tournament is over. They’re doing free play. Let’s do that.” Everybody nodded in agreement—even Chris Johnson from the Player One Podcast (name drop). I didn’t know what we were doing, but like an obedient sheep, I followed the crowd out the door, mildly disappointed that my unbreakable streak had come to an end.

“What exactly is this?” I asked nobody in particular, as we walked down the hall to our destination. “It’s Joust,” said Neal. “It’s really cool.” He tried explaining it to me, and it sounded stupid, but he assured me that it was tons of fun, and I should just try it, and then I’d understand. Since this “Jousting” room was only a few minutes’ walk from the Console Free Play room, we were there before I knew it.

The room was crowded—standing-room only—but that’s because there were no chairs, and everybody in the room had gathered against the walls. It was also very dark; the lights had been dimmed considerably, but there were six or seven small round lights of different colors in the middle of the room. They were moving around, because the people playing Joust were holding Playstation Move controllers. They appeared to be dancing around each other, slowly. Classical music was playing. Before long, one or two players’ Move controllers would flash red, they’d look dejected, and they’d take their place along the wall, passing their Move controller to somebody else.

At one point, Neal and Jared were playing at the same time. Once Neal was “out,” he handed me his Move controller and more or less shoved me into the empty circle with six other strangers. I quickly realized that, when the classic music (turns out it was Johann Sebastian Bach) was at a slow tempo, you had to move slowly—too much motion would cause your Move to jostle, and you’d be out. When the music speeds up, that’s when you have more leeway to move quickly, but the fast-tempo intervals tended to be short, so you have to make the most of them. Sometimes the music would freeze, and you’d have to stop moving.*

The goal of Johann Sebastian Joust (or just “JS Joust” or “Joust”) is to make your opponent jostle his or her controller. This can be accomplished by directly slapping their Move, or shoving their arm, etc. It’s a balancing act between getting them to make a sudden move and not making one yourself. It sounds stupid when you explain it to somebody, but Neal was right: you have to experience it to understand the magic. But once it clicked, I was hooked. It was the most fun I had at PAX East. We also played Joust on our last day, before Neal had to drive back to Jersey. We played in a front of a window, so it was sunny, and that definitely changes the game, as you can’t really see your Move’s colored bulb.

I found out that JS Joust is a part of a Kickstarted game called “Sportsfriends,” and it was set to release on the PS3 and PS4 in May of this year—about a month after PAX East. I knew what I had to do.

I got home, back to Anchorage, and started going to every store with video game stuff I could think of, trying to find Move controllers. Here’s an entertaining list of the stores I went to that didn’t carry Move controllers anymore: Fred Meyer, Target, Best Buy, Sears, Wal-Mart, and most of the Gamestops in the city. It was explained to me that the Move was such a sales disaster that Sony basically stopped producing them, and retailers didn’t want to order them anyway since they just sat on the shelves collecting dust. One Gamestop I called actually did have four used Move controllers—unfortunately they were on the other side of town. However, they were selling for $20 a pop. I bought all four.

I then found a random Move controller our local comic shop, Bosco’s. It was $10.

I tried to haggle with a guy on Craigslist for the other two, but he wanted like $50 for both and I wasn’t willing to do that. I can actually buy Move controllers on Amazon for $22 apiece, new. And I was all set to resort to online shopping when my wife, on a brief trip to Fairbanks, found two Move controllers at a Gamestop up there. Finally, I had seven Move controllers. I was ready for Jousting. I should mention here that the PS3 version of Joust, er, Sportsfriends, is by far the way to go if you can manage to collect a bunch of Move controllers: it supports seven players, whereas the PS4 version only supports four. Now, if you can’t find seven Move controllers, you can substitute Dualshock 3 controllers, but it’s not the same. Also, if you buy the PS3 version, you get the PS4 version for free. Eventually, Joust is coming to PC’s—we played it at PAX East from a laptop.

I recently got a group of five people (including me) together for JS Joust in my living room. In order to create enough room to move, we had to move all my furniture into the kitchen or hallway, and even then, it was a little cramped. Still, we all had a blast, and played for almost two hours. I kind of want to start a community Joust club, but I’d have to find a venue. I would like to take the game outside, but that’s where the trouble starts. See, because it’s only on the PS3/4 right now, I’d have to drag the console and a TV outside. My plan is to find or borrow a small flatscreen TV and set the whole thing up just inside the door to my garage. Then, we can play outside the garage while still being “in range.” It’s gonna take some experimentation until the PC version comes out.**

But Joust is totally worth it. It’s the best multiplayer game I’ve played since Wii Sports, and it’s by far the best excuse to own and/or use a Playstation Move controller (or seven).

Also, as this will be my only PAX East-related post, I thought I should leave you with this picture of Neal and I parting ways downstairs. I miss him already!

Zach and Neal in the moooorning!

Hey, how are the other Sportsfriends games? Well, the problem is that, unlike Joust, they’re video games, so they’re best played with people who are familiar with the basic concepts of a video game. BaraBariBall is a weird combination of water polo and Smash Bros., with two teams trying to throw a ball into the other team’s goal. You jump, attack, and dash to steal the ball. It’s a fun game for people who know what they’re doing, but the problem is you have to know what you’re doing. It’s not for everyone. Similarly, Super Pole Riders has two teams trying to shove a ball suspended on a wire toward the opposing team’s goal. The trick is that everyone has flexible vaulting poles. You can try to vault and kick the ball, kick your opponents, or nudge the ball with your very-obviously-phallic pole. This game was easier for my group’s non-gamers to get into, but the gamers won every round by a long shot. Like BaraBariBall, it’s probably best played with other gamers.

The last game, Hokra, is hard to describe. The players are represented as numbered squares on a white field. They are either red or yellow, depending on their team affiliation. There are largish red and yellow tiles on the field, and a small black ball that flies around. The goal is to grab the ball (by touching it) and taking it to your like-colored tile. The longer the ball is in your tile, the farther it fills up. When it finishes filling up, that team wins. You can dash around the stage, knock the ball out of opposing player’s hands, and pass the ball to your teammate. This is the most minimalist of the non-Joust games, but, again, it just didn’t click with the non-gamers in our group. They had trouble distinguishing who was who (this was also an issue with BaraBariBall), and even on my big TV, the individual player avatars are too small.

The beauty of Joust is that you don’t actually press any buttons (except to start the game), so anybody can get into it. It’s actually simpler to understand than something like Wii Sports, which requires some amount of game theory to understand. At the end of the night, we all decided that Joust was bar-none the best game in the collection. However, was I to get a group of veteran gamers together, I imagine that BaraBariBall and Super Pole Riders might win the day. The trouble with Joust is that you need a large area to play, and it’s pointless to play with any fewer than four people (I would recommend five minimum).

So if you have the wherewithal to find a bunch of Move controllers, the room to play, and a number of people willing to do so, Joust is absolutely one of the best party games money can buy. I’m ever in debut to Neal for shoving me into that circle because that’s where it clicked. I stand by my theory that you cannot describe JS Joust to somebody; they have to experience it.

*One of the people playing Joust that night was a tall, beautiful, buxom woman who was cosplaying as, from what I could tell, a “busty cop” (see picture below). It’s not obvious from this picture, but her bosom was spilling out the top of her bra. While I was appreciative of her wardrobe, I did play one round of Joust with her and she was very distracting. I lost that round pretty quickly, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. After the match, I asked for her picture and she was happy to oblige.

PAX East was great. For a lot of reasons.

**This problem was just solved. We bought a new monitor (the old one kept shutting off randomly) and it has an HDMI hookup, so it’s small, portable, and works on the PS3. Voila!