Since I did the same thing last year, I’m grouping these two conventions into a single blogpost especially since my coverage for one of the cons is undoubtedly bigger than the other; and there’s several reasons for that, as dumb as it sounds. But first, I need to come out and say this summer has been a very strange and unexpected series of events and it turned out far, far more different that I had hoped. My mother went into surgery in the middle of June, was on the way to recovery, suddenly tripped and broke her ankle, and went into surgery again to the point that she needed pretty much the rest of the season, all the way to the very end of August, to heal. So I spent the summer season of conventions without her, and it casted a shadow of sorts over the first convention of the season: Eternal Con.
Unlike prior years, Eternal Con, usually a late June convention, rescheduled to early July and took place at an entirely new venue… that was also smaller and divided up into two floors. The main level of the venue, the upper level, was the artist’s alley, and the lower level was the dealer’s room. It reminded me of how the first two years of AnimeNYC divided their dealer’s room and artist’s alley to separate floors but with how Eternal Con’s venue was laid out the stairs felt like they were too out of the way if you wanted to shift between floors and there was no elevator either. Thus I put most of my focus on the artist’s alley and only gave the dealer’s room two brief visits during the time I was there. And in the dealer’s room I simply wandered and only interacted with one person who was creating a card game based around professional wrestling. He asked to stay in touch, but by the time I left the building, I had forgotten his name and trying to contact him through the game’s contact form left me with no response.
Since the weekend Eternal Con took place on was also the very same weekend as the final day of Summer Games Done Quick 2022, I opted to go to the convention on Sunday, aka the “shorter, lesser day” typical of conventions, which was fine as Eternal Con was always a 4-5 hour convention for me as early as 2017 and didn’t have enough spectacle to make me stay for longer. Unfortunately for me, I was very disorganized from my mother’s recent injury that I forgot to pack a frozen portable water bottle to bring into the convention, and I was not one to consider using the public drinking fountains because, you know, pandemic. Another factor to my visit being more brief than usual was the absence of two artists that I had a close friendship with that I once could always count showing up from 2017 to 2019. One had moved away from New York during the pandemic after being clogged up with professional work, and the other was simply a no-show even after having already seen them at two other events this year (once in early April, and again in mid-May).
Since they’re usually an integral part of these convention trips for me, you’re probably wondering if I took any photos of cosplayers at the event? And the short answer is… I did. However, because of my general dislike for how local comic conventions with low admission fees invite in cosplay that… usually leaves much to be desired, this easily became my smallest collection of cosplay photos at only 10 photos, beating out Derpycon 2016’s 15 photo count. The cosplay at Eternal Con was still pretty good, but when your con doesn’t pull in the same numbers as larger conventions do, your options for good cosplays that I enjoy can get kind of limited. And the only reason I usually dodged taking cosplay shots at New York Comic Con in October was because there were so, so many cosplays to take note of and the huge crowds made it difficult to get good cosplay shots until attendance begins to shrink in the later hours of the event.
So that was pretty much Eternal Con 2022; not as great as it was back then, but it was still a good time and I hope next year it’ll grow to work better in this new venue, especially since it’s more than just vendors and cosplay the drive conventions for me.
With that said, onto Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2022. Right off the bat, I was much more prepared for this convention in comparison to Eternal Con, packing some actual water to bring with me into the convention and as a result the stay was a total of 8 hours. The main lobby where the vendor hall was located was much of the same and was easily the most crowded area until it was closed late into each day. Instead of large booklets, attendees were handed small pocket schedules- they worked for what they did but they lack the charm and care put into the usual convention booklets and the background information they would provide on the venue, the special guests, the panels, etc.
The east side of the venue that previously went unused in past years (at least, for gaming content) was now used to house four distinct sections, including two relocated from the second and third floors and greatly expanded. I’m of course talking about the museum and classic PC gaming sections, both of which returned with many new additions and offered a great variety of games to play. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the museum section was a fully-operational Sharp X1 with Super Mario Bros. Special. The other two sections in this area were for console free play and competitive tournaments; the former felt kind of barren despite the number of games available, and the latter had tournaments for modern games when their predecessors that received ports at some point would have fit in more closely with the convention’s retro aesthetic. The tournament area was also very, very small and not spectator-friendly, especially with the lack of any projectors or larger screens to showcase the current active tournament(s) causing dense crowds to huddle over the small monitors of each game currently being played.
Of course being a retro game convention, you have to have arcade machines, and just like 2019 there were two arcades: one located on the west side of the venue on the first floor, and the other on the second floor just above the freeplay area. The first of the arcades was loaded with Japanese candy cabinets featuring games with no/limited exports outside Japan and a few modern rhythm games, plus an entire small section devoted to pinballs and small is how I would describe the pinball area in general: it had only eight games total and saw very constant use through the event. At least unlike the tournament section the pinballs stayed within the “2010 or earlier” mentality. The second arcade, located on the second floor just above the free play sections and tournaments, contained more conventional and well-known games to American audiences, like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, etc. With how many times I already played these arcade games and with all the other, more unique offerings across the freeplay areas, I generally Ignored both arcades and stuck to console freeplay.
The second floor’s main attraction was the timeline exhibit, a chronological order of various consoles from 1972’s Odyssey to 2006’s Playstation 3. I played a good few of the games in the exhibit and very nearly went for another 1CC attempt at Super Mario Bros. Deluxe until I decided that the time wasn’t worth it. Besides the tournament section and some 16-player Mario Kart: Double Dash!! exhibitions on the first floor, another form of competition was the High Score Challenges, in which players entered to attempt to set the best scores on a given game during a specific two-hour period. One of the games featured was Rock-Ola’s fast-paced arcade game Nibbler, a game I’ve had some experience with before and remember being able to score decently well in when I first played the machine two or so years ago. I gave it a go since it was a fairly easy setup, and scored 63,470 points in one attempt. That one attempt, surprisingly, won the challenge and I got a small medal for my efforts, though the extra prize the win also came with (a mouse and keyboard converter for modern consoles) doesn’t seem like something I would find myself using.
As the day drew to the close, the absurdly loud band I had mentioned in 2019’s review of the event took over the second floor to perform remixes of notable retro game songs while in costume. Make no mistake, it was a very loud performance (especially since all the spectators had to stand) and I only stuck around for a brief bit before taking it as my cue to leave the building after an eight-hour stay. By that point, the vendor’s hall was shut down for the day and all that remained open was the freeplay areas and some tournaments for Guilty Gear Strive, Tekken 7, and King of Fighters XV (although Guilty Gear XX Ancient Core Plus, Tekken 3 or 5: Dark Resurrection, and King of Fighters ’98 or 2002 UM would have fit the convention better, as I alluded to earlier).
And that was pretty much the end of the summer conventions for the year. Eternal Con has seen better days and I hope it finds a stride to improve with a bigger artist’s alley and more things to do. My wishes for Long Island Retro Gaming Expo are similar; get some more games in the freeplay areas and improve the tournament game setup with more era-appropriate titles.
That said, catch you later.
