SRGE 2012 wrapup!

Wow, what a weekend. I posted a couple of times during the event, you'll see those articles in the archive if you want more, I will try to keep this brief.

This year at Seattle Retro Gaming Expo we wanted to make sure we gave people a reason to visit The Airlock! We handed out several thousand dollars worth of free missions in the form of cards that are good for 2 free missions or %10 off a private event! The people running the Steel Battalion room handed them out all weekend, and we gave some to the charity booth next to us hoping they might raise some money with them.

SpekX helped me all weekend by being somewhat more awake than I was. I was very short on sleep when the weekend started and then it was very long days that did stretch even my abilities to stay awake. We consumed too many energy drinks and talked to lots of great people. Our booth was located next to GameTruck's booth. We got a chance to talk to our friend Didier who brought GameTruck to the Northwest. I suppose he is competition for me, but I don't really care, I am happy to mention them. They are good people, doing a good thing. If you aren't going to book a party with us for some reason then you should book it with them! They will do a great job for you!

We were in the hallway between the vendor hall and the free play room. The free play room was crazy. We didn't get a chance to play in there, but it looked like a lot of fun and I definitely want to fit that in next year! Across the breezeway behind us they had the system link room and a tournament room which I am sorry to say we also didn't get around to.

Steel Battalion on the other hand.... that is another story... I played my first games of that on Sunday, it is a really cool game. The controls are almost as complicated as the pods... needlessly so, but in a beautiful way if that makes any sense. SpekX, as I mentioned in a previous post, is a filthy cheating dropzoner.

The vendor hall was hopping all weekend. You could buy anything from NES games you grew up with, to extremely rare carts for systems I have never even seen before. The atmosphere was more welcoming this year, with less of a battle for shoulder space. It felt more comfortable to wander aimlessly and stare into the cases without people needing to squeeze by you as much as last year.

The vendors seemed to bring a MUCH bigger inventory this year and people were telling us about all the great stuff they found as they walked by our booth on the way out. I will admit to being a little jealous of the guy who landed a TurboGrafx16, but maybe next year. I actually have a pretty good collection of NES, SNES, N64 and Gamecube stuff, there were lots of items calling my name there this year... but I am going to have to wait until next year for the big purchases.

I did have a nice talk with the rep from Hyperkin, the company that is making consoles that play NES, Sega and SNES. They even have a portable SNES system that plays actual carts! Playing StarFox on the SupaBoy was amazingly smooth... from what I understand the FX chip is hard to deal with from an emulation standpoint... but that is fine with these guys, they are not emulating! I picked up a controller from them for $5 that was a somewhat authentic looking NES controller reproduction that is USB compatible. I totally don't intend to use that for emulation... no... really... I swear...

Actually I DO prefer to play the real stuff, and I picked up a fourth controller for the N64 to replace the one that is currently MIA. We have had some fun playing 007 here lately and now we can fill that fourth part of the screen with another person to kill Soto.

From talking with the SRGE guys it sounds like this was a total success this year! I will refrain from outing them on any of the stuff I heard about next year, but I will say that it all sounds pretty good to me!

I hope you will all follow SRGE on your social network of choice, and I hope you will join us for the next SRGE event at The Airlock... which I am sure we won't get around to scheduling until everybody has had a couple weeks of normal sleep!

See you all soon!

--ugh