[Community member Senisan82 went out to the very first GameUnicon convention in New England and gave us his impressions on how the event was. — CTZ]
If you’ve been reading the Dtoid New England posts lately, you would know this past weekend was GameUnicon 2009, New England’s first gaming convention. It was set up at the Best Western Hotel and the whole lobby was pretty much rented out to hold the event.
When I arrived Friday night, I met up with HeyRicochet. He gave me a tour of the place since he arrived before hand. Each room was full of a variety of games ranging from ColecoVision to the PlayStation 3. We entered a vendor room and looked around for a bit. It was pretty awesome to see so many old games and accessories for cheap and 30% off to boot! HeyRicochet jumped on the chance earlier to get himself a top loading NES really cheap as well as some NES and SNES games.
It was almost concert time so we headed outside to the concert tent and made it just in time for the first performance by The Megas. They play Mega Man stage music and the lyrics are sung from the bosses perspective. For instance, there is a song about Bubbleman and how he wants to prove to the other robots he was good enough to take out the little blue bomber.
The next performance was by an awesome band by the name of Konami Kode, which is around the time when Rawnewdlz arrived and stayed for the rest of the performances including Freezepop. When the show was over, we went back to the hotel and just jumped from room to room playing different games like Soul Calibur 2, Battletoads, Tetris Attack, Initial D 4 etc.
Later on that night we entered the main function room where the games being played were mostly Super Smash and Street Fighter. Two of the corners in the room were dedicated to Harrison’s Comics and an Anime shop. The room had 80 plus TV’s and around 70% of them were devoted to Super Smash and two projection screens for Livestream events. We went to the SF section to scope out my competition and saw some Empire Arcadia members going at it on the projection screen. After being thoroughly terrified of what I was up against, I decided to retire in order to wake up early for my tournament in Street Fighter II HD.
Saturday morning Rawnewdlz and I woke up later than I wanted but it didn’t matter anyway because the 10AM Street Fighter II HD tourney wasn’t ready until around Noon. I guess they were trying to find more PS3’s with Street Fighter II HD on it. The tourney ended up being held on just one PS3. There were only a few competitors in this tourney, two of which I knew were Justin Wong and one other Empire Arcadia member. After losing miserably to a local player who played a mean Bison, I was thrown into the losers bracket to fight someone from EA who also uses Bison … an even meaner one.
Since the Street Fighter II HD tourney was late, the Street Fighter 4 tourney got pushed back to 3PM. This gave me just enough time to get a bite to eat at Five Guys with HeyRocochet and Rawnewdlz. Soon after we returned from eating, the brackets started being formed. I was pretty amazed to see that it was comprised of at least 50 players. The way they went about calling the fights were kind of ridiculous. The room was loud with chatter and I was thinking how is anyone going to hear their names being called through all this noise. Well, this discovery of becomes sort of a foreshadowing of events for me because I didn’t hear my name being called. This was the reason why I hadn’t entered a match in so long as I was DQ’d for not showing up. I complained that I was there the whole time and the staff did see me. So, they apologized and after much discussion tried to get me to replace a no-show for the next bracket (Which didn’t happen) After giving me a refund they still let me enter the losers bracket and I actually made it the finals but lost to an extremely good Sagat.
Utterly defeated, we went to the Powerglove concert and that was really awesome. They play heavy metal versions of videogame and kid show themes like John Quest and Power Rangers.
I’ve never seen moshing at a videogame concert and now I can say “yes, that just happened.” We then went off to eat Chinese food, returned for some gaming until HeyRicochet had to depart and I stayed with Rawnewdlz to support his Tetris bout.
At the Tetris tourney it seemed like the EA guys thought the DS version was going to be played but the owner said he specifically put Tetris for the NES. So, the owner created two separate tourneys. One for Tetris NES and one for Tetris DS. Rawnewdlz made it to the second round but lost his match.
The hotel almost closed down the con Saturday afternoon because some cool kids thought they would shoryuken a hole through the hallway wall on the third floor. Besides that, overall, the convention was cool, the tourneys were a bit of a mess and the concerts were awesome.
So that about sums up my weekend and I hope more Dtoiders can come out next time and play with us!
I give this con a 3 out 5 plantains.
Also, Jesus.
