And so we’ve come to the end. The end of a whole years worth of conventions. It was quite the experience if I must say so. From the Span of April all the way to December, we attended various conventions around New Jersey and New York including my homeland of Long Island. 2025 was a great time to be a fan of anime, comics and video games. And while I will say that I have not fulfilled my wish to attend more gaming-focused events in the future, this year was an overall improvement compared to last year when judging the events as a collective whole. However, as you can judge by the title, there is one more event that I would like to put the spotlight on before we draw 2025 to a close and begin preparations for next year’s lineup. Any regulars to this blog will probably recognize this event from the amount of times I’ve spoken highly of it for several years after it suddenly got canceled… and remained canceled the next year. For me, it’s an event that I would say is the perfect sendoff before the holiday season fully took over. It may not be a large event by the scale of many of the other events that I attended this year, but it still meant something to me and I was overjoyed when I caught the announcement that it was revived.
That’s right: the Festival of Games returned. After two years straight placing the event in my 2023 and 2024 schedules only for them to pass on with no announcement, the holiday spinoff of the Retro Gaming Expo made a grand return for December of 2025. It’s very much a smaller-scale version of its summer counterpart, taking up only about half of the event space and featuring a smaller selection of games set up for play. Unlike in 2022, the event was two days long, extending to that Sunday in addition to Saturday. This made the event more worthwhile to table at as a vendor, since you’d be getting two days out of the event to sell at. And for attendees, well, there was far more to offer this time around, and you could immediately feel the atmosphere being a lot more lively once you step in through the front door into the Cradle of Avation, being greeted boy four ROB the Robots dancing to chip-tune Christmas carols as you entered through the front doors. Vendor and artist booths populated both the first and second floors of the building, large Christmas trees were pit up, and Christmas decor adorned the main lobby. It felt very chill and inviting, almost like your best friend coming back for the holidays after a long trip out in another state or country. All of this made the return of the Festival of Games even more special, and I was ready to bask in all the festive joy for a few hours.
The featured vendors and artists were a general mix of the material you could find at Cradle Con and the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, including booths dedicated to selling comics, video games, and other hobbies across two floors. Gaming vendors could be found on the first floor selling their leftover wares from LI Retro and other gaming events, while artists and craftspeople set up booths on both floors. Contrary to Cradle Con, few pure comic artists tabled to sell their original self-published indie comics. This was a gaming-focused event after all, so perhaps gathering indie comic artists to sell their comics was not one of the primary goals as it would be for Cradle Con. As for me, since this was the last event I would attend for quite some time and there were only a few artists offering commissions, I was a bit more willing to purchase stuff to open later for Christmas. Granted, only a few extra goods were bought, given I had made some really expensive purchases for the holidays in the weeks leading up to the event. Perhaps if I was able to come on Sunday as well as Saturday, maybe I would have been incentivized to buy a few more things for the holidays, but well, I’ll take what I could get for this year.
Of course what would an event billed as the holiday offshoot of the Retro Gaming Expo be without the games? And with the festive theming of this event, everything you could find out of the show floor’s free play area was holiday-themed: Elf Bowling, Ski Free, Christmas NiGHTS Into Dreams, Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare ‘95, Xmas Doom, Santa Claus in Trouble… Chances are if there were a game released before 2010 that was either winter or holiday-themed, or a tie-in to some popular Christmas product like a movie or a cartoon series, it would be somewhere on the show floor and running on original hardware or close to it. The move from the second floor did give the games a space away from the vendors all to themselves, allowing for a much bigger selection of console and computer games. In total, I estimated around 30 total unique games from looking at my photos of the event, some of which were expected inclusions, some being out of left field picks. Probably the highlight of the Freeplay area, to me, was the appearance of RetroUSB’s 8-Bit Xmas series of NES homebrews. I talked about the 8-Bit Xmas games briefly when I ripped the soundtrack for the 2021 cartridge three years ago, but the history of these festive homebrews goes far deeper with a history spanning almost 20 years of annual releases since 2008. And this year, the cartridges’ appearance at this event felt more important than it did in 2021 and 2022 since it was announced in the fall of 2025 that the eighteenth 8-Bit Xmas cartridge to be released later that year would be the final release in the series and the RetroUSB online store would cease operation after the holidays.
Perhaps I’ll make a blogpost going into detail on the 8-Bit Xmas cartridges another time, but we have an event to wrap up first. With three walls of holiday-themed titles to play, plus some miscellaneous games elsewhere and a hall full of arcade games, the selection was stacked and I could only count a few things that would have been feasibly possible to include that were “missing” from the lineup. Such as a few ROM hacks of games like Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario World, and Banjo-Kazooie, all of which would have been good fits for the Festival given how beloved the original games are in retro gaming communities. There are also festive-themed level and/or graphic mods for arcade games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, which aren’t as talked about but are still very neat modifications of their source games. The Donkey Kong one in particular deserves special mention for having some neat gameplay twists to differentiate it from the original arcade game. The console game mods would be easy enough to get going, but the arcade mods would have definitely been more difficult to set up, even with the advent of arcade emulation, so I can completely understand their absence from the show floor. There’s also a few PC/Computer games outside of the ones already included that I could name off the top of my head, though most of them land firmly in the “maybe too niche” category, like 3D Maze-Man Winter Wonderland as an example. Maybe a classic Windows 95/98 rig running a holiday-themed activity center with a printer hooked up would have been a nice surprise, though probably not a practical one for this event (especially when having to manage the printer’s paper and ink). I could list more, but I think I named enough for an event that’s of this scale and getting more titles for the main event in the summer is probably of greater importance.
The sun would go down earlier in the afternoon than usual, due to the event’s early Winter date. Like with Cradle Con, the event was set to close for the day at 5PM, prompting me to say my goodbyes and bail from the event. I did consider coming back the following day, but I didn’t see much value out of doing so, and the snowstorm that hit on that day would have made traveling out that day relatively unsafe anyways. The only things I missed discussing were a few miscellaneous activities scattered around the event, such as ornament painting and a slot car track, but I think I covered enough on what were the most important parts of the event for me. But with that all said, and after several hours of games and chats under my belt before the end of the year, In conclusion, returning to this event after years of absence h
And there you have it, 2025 is over. Eleven events in the span of eight months. Seriously, even I don’t know how I was able to attend this many events to a single year and still come out of it all no worse for wear. In conclusion, this was probably one of the stronger years for events overall, if only because of how much time I spent at these events escaping my home for a day and chatting with different creators about our projects. A lot of the events were also pretty close together—NJIT Minicon was early in April, the other three events in the Spring season (CPAC, Garden State, and CradleCon) were one to two weeks apart. Long Island Retro and AnimeNYC took place in the same month, and then in the fall we had NYCC, DerpyCon, and AnimeNJ++ clumped together to round out the year. It led to a very eventful yet exhausting year, and by the end of AnimeNJ ++ I was content with enjoying a nice break from anime/comic events throughout the winter season to catch up on some leftover projects and start a big transition to some bigger ones later into 2026. The Festival of Games was an exception, given it was a more laid-back trip compared to the usual all-day trips I make at these conventions. It also was an excuse to see the crew from the Retro Games Expo one last time, given that it remains one of my top favorite shows each yeah and one of the reasons why I remain as fond of retro gaming in this day and age. You could say the same thing about AnimeNJ++ and the anime artist community, even if it may be the younger of the two events in comparison.
It was very difficult for me to rank these events the same way I did in 2024 as this year didn’t really have any events that I thought had some kind of setback or misstep. The overall ranking you see here is more on how much value I got out of each event and enjoyed my visit on-site than anything related to their quality, given that some events were bigger or smaller than others due to the available space they had to work with. With that said, here’s my personal rankings:
- Castle Point
- New York Comic Con
- Long Island Retro Gaming Expo
- AnimeNYC
- Garden State Anime Fest
- DerpyCon
- Cradle Con
- Festival of Games
- NJIT Minicon
- AnimeNJ++
- EternalCon
If I was able to attend Defend the North Retro, it would have likely been unranked as it didn’t have any proper vendor setups or convention features the same way its full-scale event did in 2024 and earlier. Brooklyn Comic Con would have been somewhere towards the middle, given the improvements made to it this year that I was made aware of by a few vendors that attended that event. The only other stone left unturned is a little event known as EMCon, which I attended in secret the day after Castle Point as a favor to a local friend of mine. However, I got very little out of it that if it did get a rank, it would have either been dead last or off the rankings entirely. Almost everyone tabling there also tabled at Cradle Con and/or Eternal Con, defeating the purpose of spending a day there. And with the event continuing to get scheduled on, or close to, Castle Point Anime Expo, what little motivation there is to attend is almost completely diminished. And don’t get me wrong; it’s still a nice day trip, but not one that I would consider going to above any of the other conventions I go to each year. Especially when the “Animefest” tagline the event keeps getting saddled with is not exactly the most accurate description when attending it reveals a heavy focus towards American comics and pop culture. Aside from that, yeah, I had no real complaints about the events I went to this year. Yes the big and corporate events were still big and corporate, but when you’re like me and go there to celebrate the passion of indie and professional artists and creators, these events take on an entirely different meaning and you get encouraged to give everyone support. And that goes double for nowadays, during a time where everyone is struggling to make a living drawing and designing content to sell at booths.
But what about me? What about your boy Justin in the big year of 2026? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I will be skipping my detailed coverage for these conventions for this year. Compared to 2024, these convention summaries got longer and longer to write and the events got basically the same summary each year, just with some details added and swapped around. The past two years also had some events added to the schedule each year, and that distinction is not true with this year. All my events that I am planning to attend across 2026 will consist only of those that I visited in the past at least once. Part of my reasonings for skipping over doing summaries of my conventions in 2026 is so I can push Super Justin: the Blog back into a general showcase of personal projects and other things I enjoy or am passionate about. While they are fun to write and serve to encapsulate what events I’ve been to over the years, this blog has become almost entirely dedicated to convention coverages at the expense of general updates and project showcases. Contrast this with any of my other non-update blog posts from the past, which don’t require me to put in as much time and effort into them, allowing me to post them more frequently while still ensuring they have enough to read. Especially now that I’m in my 30’s and feel like there’s so many corners I’ve yet to uncover or discuss on this blog and the Internet at large. And that’s without getting into bigger things that have been occupying my mind since 2024 the earliest. Heck, if you want an idea of how dedicated I was to getting this put out at last, I even got a new work computer in Christmas of 2025, only to stall setting it up for when I was able to finish this blog post and move on from 2025’s conventions.
For those that look to this blog to see what I think of each year’s events, I have come to a compromise: Later this year, probably in September the earliest, I will post a general update discussing some of the highlights and key points of 2026’s conventions, then in either December 2026 or January 2027, I will post a Part 2 and then discuss my plans from there. I don’t think this blog is going to get any bigger than it already is in terms of readers, so I’m comfortable with taking the convention blogposts in this direction while I try to bolster the rest of this blog with the variety of content it used to be known for. Each event will get roughly a paragraph or two, which should allow me to get my thoughts on each event across without having to dedicate entire blog entries to them. I will still be posting commissions as I receive them live to my Bluesky (Twitter/X is out of the question for the time being) and will continue to assemble galleries of the cosplay shots I take. As for any potential future adventures in 2027, I am still unsure at this time, given that certain events I’ve taken an interest in take place too far from my living headquarters (such as the gaming events Magfest and PAX East), or conflict with other live/online events. Plus, I am not fully equipped to stay at hotels overnight at this moment, and eventually I may resort to trimming back on my event calendar to attend some of the bigger far-distance events and/or give myself a chance to stockpile funds and work on personal projects.
…Okay, I’m done for now. Thank you all for sticking with me for this journey, and I’ll catch you next time with whichever subject I decide to post about next.
