The Conventions of 2025: An overview

It's that time of the year again. The time to discuss... conventions. Ever since the end of lockdown in 2022, I've made a valiant effort to venture out to many different anime, comic, and video game events across the tri-state area of New York and New Jersey. In 2024, I decided to broaden my reach by adding several new events to the schedule, and this year we'll be doing it again.

For the year of 2025, I have cherry-picked ten events across the spring, summer, and fall. The five usual events that I frequent each year are back in the docket for another run, as is one event that got canceled last year, one event I found myself really liking last year, and three events that I am looking to attend for the very first time. The goal was not to add too many events overall, although the events I did end up choosing to travel to this year would be taking place roughly one after the other.

For those wondering, these are the events from last year that I will not be visiting this year, and a full explanation on why I have decided to skip them:

• EMCon being off the list for the year is for a fairly simple reason: It is competing for timeslots with Castle Point Anime Convention. I always preferred when EMCon had their event in the beginning or middle of April as it is the perfect "warmup event" after taking the winter off to start the year with, but landing on the very last weekend of the year meant I would be forced to choose between it or Castle Point. It is still a great as a small-scale event, but I'm not sure if it's worth giving up one of my longest recurring event travels. And with another event the very next weekend, I am uncertain I would be able to squeeze time into my schedule to attend EMCon on Sunday.
• Believe me, Brooklyn Comic Con is not an event I wanted to shaft in any sense of the world. I loved the artists and vendors there and got one of my personal favorite commission hauls of the year (perhaps second only to NYCC 2024). Unfortunately it had one too many glaring issues that dragged down my personal experience with the event. Lack of options for food, over-tuned loudspeakers throughout the venue, and random amenities with little to no thought or purpose taking up valuable space in an otherwise crowded venue. These downsides, along with some rowdy attendees later into the day dragged down the experience just enough that it made me question whenever or not to return the following year. And with the desire of wanting to spend more of my birthday month at home and not prepping for/recovering from a big event, I decided it was best to axe Brooklyn Comic Con this year and wait and see if any of my issues with 2024 would be addressed in some way in time for Brooklyn Comic Con 2026. That way if I do return to the venue next year, it is hopefully free of any of the stress and frustration I had with the event on my first visit.
• AnimeNJ++ was an event of both ups and downs. It's cramped venue, small artist's alley, and the confrontation with the security guard at closing time dragged down an otherwise solid event with a good variety of artists and vendor booths, plus all of the essential anime con activities. IMO, the event desperately needs a bigger venue amongst other changes and refinements to let it better serve as the AnimeNext successor it wants to be, especially if attendance grows compared to 2024. And like with Brooklyn Comic Con, I want to take a year off from the event to see if it makes any improvements or considers a new venue for 2026. (And in all honesty, I also thought of  taking AnimeNJ++ off from the schedule so I would have more time in November to reflect on the year of events and spend time with my family before the holidays)
• Festival of Games... yeah no, it's not coming back at this point (*dejected face).

Hopefully those are valid enough reasons for wanting to shake up the schedule this year. While I could attend everything, that would be too many events for me and my body to handle. I am already pushing my limits with three events in August alone, plus three almost back-to-back events in the span of late April to early May. I made sure that the new events that are new or returning to the schedule will be of similar scopes to the ones I took off the schedule. As for the events new to the schedule...

• NJIT Minicon will be taking EMCon's place this year as the warm-up event of the season. Its Persona 5 theme absolutely gripped me, and you can kind of see that on the schedule image above with me using the Joker-like original character Domino to represent the event. It'll also be my first time going to an event on a Sunday (the only day of the event) in years.
• Garden City Anime Fest is the weekend after Castle Point Anime Expo, and from what I've seen its very much another anime event. Since it's also a New Jersey event, it makes me wonder if there will be any overlap with CPAC in terms of which guests and vendors will appear.
• EternalCon, while not "new" in the general sense, finally back in the lineup for real after a year of hibernation. You'll recall last year it was on the schedule until I got conformation that it was skipping 2024.
• Defend the North is a new kind of event for me, and one I likely would have put onto the schedule last year if I had known of its existence sooner in the year. That's right; after years of watching fighting game events and being unable to attend them myself as they are all hours away, I have finally found one that is happening relatively close to my own turf! The one downside is that it is the week before the Retro Gaming Expo, which makes me wonder if I'll have enough energy and stamina after Defend the North to give the Retro Gaming Expo my full attention.

And there you have it, ten total events to look forward to this year. As for my coverages of each event, I will likely use the same two-a-time approach as last year, so the first post will cover NJIT and CPAC, the second will cover Garden City and Cradle Con, and so on. I wanted to keep this post short and sweet so I could really sink my teeth into discussing each event in greater detail when they occur one by one, so I'll wrap things up for now. If I do attend any further events aside from the ten mentioned, they will not get full coverages but I will give them passing mentions when possible.

Multicartverse Original Soundtrack

It was yet another normal Sunday evening in the lair of Superjustinbros and after a delicious homemade cheeseburger dinner with baked fries on the side, I decided to tune into one of my favorite Twitch streamers Vinny “Binyot” Vinesauce for his weekly Sunday stream. The theme of the first segment was on fan-created ports, remakes and re-imaginings of popular games, ranging from silly memes/jokes made for a good laugh to genuinely fantastic efforts that I would personally recommend to anyone. One of the games featured in the segment would catch my attention, and not for the reasons one would initially think.

Enter Multicartverse, a SMB1-style crossover game starring Mario, Sonic, Link, Pac-Man, and various popular characters from the bootleg gaming community. Somari is there. Kung Fu Mari is there, and who else but 7 Grand Dad in his iconic caveman garb to round out the roster. As for the game itself, Multicartverse is inspired by the likes of Super Mario Bros. Crossover and Super Mario Boil, featuring Mario level design mixed with Sonic gameplay, although the level design doesn’t give you much of an opportunity to really experiment with high-speed platforming. Audio-wise, everything is based wholesale on the Genesis and the famous Yamaha YM2612 that helped it produce many-a-soundtrack during its heyday, featuring custom Genesis remixes of various different Mario and bootleg songs. The game also has something of a sense of humor: beyond the NPC's hanging out near the closed-up warp zone in the second stage, three of the five options on the main menu are essentially jokes: "Watch a Movie" plays a clip of Mario in Garry's Mod firing various weapons with all sorts of silly sounds/effects, "Fart Button" is, well, take a guess, and "Play a Better Game" loads a joke game re-creating the "SO RETRO" meme.

In spite of its large roster of characters, colorful spritework, and potential for further development, the game didn't really take off and only had a single beta titled Ver. 0.0.1. And you can kind of feel this in the gameplay itself: Around half the roster are clones or skins of existing characters, others are missing moves that one would expect the characters to have (Kirby has no inhale feature and "Fred" cannot use his club to attack as examples). The Sonic characters and Somari's extreme speed and floaty physics can find themselves at odds with the Mario-inspired level design (it's really easy to trigger a dash and launch yourself forwards, then wall jump repeatedly off walls trying to maintain control). And the Tetromino (yes, the Tetromino is a playable character here too) has no way to interact with ? blocks and will find itself taking damage trying to hard drop onto enemies to stomp them. My Windows 11 computer also caused other performance hiccups during my time playing Multicartverse, lagging the game if played on too high of a resolution and making Stage 4 pretty much impossible due to speeding up the autoscroller to the point no character can traverse it fast enough. The game's developer, now known as Mtgames, acknowledges many of Multicartverse's shortcomings in a blog post on the game's itch.io page describing why the game never made it past the Ver. 0.0.1 demo. In short, losing the game's files pretty much did the game in, dooming it to obscurity until the “Sauce Man” discovered it and exposed the game to several thousand people. And even with its newfound time in the sun, there is no interest in continuing development, all for understandable reasons of course.

Playing Multicartverse for myself, I was fascinated by the game's jank and all of the ways you could mess around with the movesets of the characters and the game’s very wild movement and jumping physics to blaze through entire levels and smash through enemies along the path. Of course, the game not being optimized for Windows 11 prevented me from getting the full experience until I pulled out my Windows 7 and downloaded it there, and in that case it was mostly to slow the autoscroller in Stage 4 down to manageable levels so I could get a taste of the final boss. All of the levels were fairly short overall and semi-remakes of SMB1 levels, but Stages 1 and 2 were probably the best levels of the package as they worked perfectly with the faster characters while still giving the slower, more balanced cast members some obstacles to platform around and enemies to stomp. Practically the only character on here that I’d say was “missing” on the roster was The Hummer, the horse mascot of Hummer Team and the original creator of Somari, though the game already has enough Sonic clones as is.

But we all know why we’re here: The soundtrack. You know it was the reason I got invested into this game to begin with, and I know I cannot turn down some good Mega Drive/Sega Genesis-style music whenever it be original songs or remixed from other sources. So later in the week that  I discovered Multicartverse, I downloaded the game and grabbed recordings of all the songs I could, migrating to my Windows 7 for a brief period to grab the boss theme as there was no way I was recording it on my main machine. The final result is a 16-track soundtrack featuring song rips of all the menus, the four main stages, an extra bonus stage, and several joke modes/screens. One song (for one of the joke modes) is taken wholesale from the bootleg Genesis game Sonic Jam 6, but since it still fits with the theme of Multicartverse, I included it as a bonus track. Since credits on the game and who made what are mostly non-existent, I opted to simply credit the album’s songs to “GreenSun Games” for the time being.

With all that said, here is the download.

I should make it clear that this rip was done with incomplete research so the actual song names and artist tags are not 100% set in stone. If the true names for each song/song author are supplied, I will update the download with updated tags. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some conventions to prep for...

Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch, Twelve Years Later

Back in the year of 2012, I discovered the Mega Man fan game Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch: a competitive first person shooter built on the engine of Doom II: Hell on Earth. It takes the many characters, locales, and weapons of the Classic series and puts them into fully-modeled 3D environments, giving you and many others the ability to jump and shoot together as the Blue Bomber and his lineup of friends and foes through arenas from all across the series. What started as just representing the original six NES games would grow and evolve over the next 10 years to include Mega Man 7 (SNES), Mega Man 8 (PS1), Mega Man & Bass (SNES), Mega Man the Wily Wars (Genesis), Mega Man V (GB), and Mega Man 9 and 10 on then-modern platforms, all with their assets downgraded (or colored in the case of MMV).

Despite first getting into the game in 2012, I didn’t start playing online until a year later—around when Mega Man 8 content was first added to the game in Version 3. I made friends (and rivalries) with the Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch community of the era and got to partake in the development of a few mods that were being worked on at that time. Nowadays with many more games coming and going and the modding scene for 8BDM changing drastically over time, 8BDM became a game I wouldn't revisit as much in spite of it now being a fully complete game as of 2020. What happened? Why did I fall out of hanging with and playing matches with the Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch community? Well, there’s no better answer than to pull out the Super Justin: the Blog’s finest tradition: “The List”:

• By the time I had first experienced Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch’s online multiplayer, many vanilla game modes were steadily riding out of popularity and saw little play, including the titular Deathmatch mode. It got to a point where for a time, the only way to play Deathmatch regularly was to play in servers running the “Roll’s Chaos Generator” mod, which injects random events and gimmicks into each match.

• The idea of creating new weapons for players to pick up through weapon packs, due to needing to create new maps to house them, was being overtaken by the concept of class mods—picking a character and getting a unique moveset based on them without having to scout the map for weapons and ammo. Essentially, the concept of transforming MM8BDM into a hero shooter would have a lasting effect on the modding scene for MM8BDM, leading to many others creating class mods of their own.

• In addition to classes, another type of controllable character would gain ground in the early to mid 2010’s: The boss character. One player, as a boss, has to run around and frag all the other players in a server with their bloated health and attack power without dying themselves. If they defeat everyone, they win.

• Any attempt to create a big singleplayer/co-op experience structured like the classic Mega Man games ended up abandoned or cancelled before they could get past the first few stages—MMSP was only able to get half of its planned Robot Masters implemented, had an expansion that added an extra four characters, and was the inspiration for an even bigger mod that planned to have a separate campaign for each Mega Man entry until that got canceled as well. In a related scenario, a mod designed to make the main singleplayer campaign a co-op experience only managed to progress through the first seven chapters (completing the main tournament plus the Mega Man 7 chapter) before it was shuttered.

• Lastly, there’s “Classes Team Last Man Standing” (or CTLMS for short); taking the class mod starring the entire core cast (CBM, or Class-Based Modification) and rebalancing it through constant updates to create the closest the game has to a high-level competitive mode. Pick a class of your choice and try to cause as much damage as you can before you’re eliminated. It would rise to become the community’s most supported mod and perhaps the most played online server in not just Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch, but all of Zandronum itself.

As you can tell by the tone of my words, I have a very mixed feeling on the current state of Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch’s netgame servers. Outside of specific events hosted on the game’s current Discord server or the release of some big mod/mod update, the only active server you will generally see is a Classes Team Last Man Standing server or a boss mod server. And to be fair, CTLMS is an enjoyable experience if you can get past its high skill barrier, helped by its community being very friendly whenever I pop into the server to go a few rounds before going back to working on projects. Although matches playing out in a best three-of-five format can cause some maps to overstay their welcome, considering the slower-paced, more defensive gameplay of the mode. As for boss mods, they too have provided moments of hype, especially now that the two most common boss mods, Saxton Hale (an 8BDM take on the Vs. Saxton Hale mode from Team Fortress 2) and Unholy Bosses have taken strides to make gameplay faster, turning the bosses into monstrous killing machines while the other players are equipped with tools to team up and fight back. But what if you don’t want to play CTLMS or a boss mod? What if you want something more traditional? That’s where things get complicated.

The lack of game mode diversity in active servers, as well as my inability to drum up interest in the game’s multiplayer amongst friends killed most of my drive in playing 8-Bit Deathmatch in the 2020’s after the hype for Version 6’s release subsided post-2020. Even the most recent versions of the game, which added quality of life enhancements and automated most of the process for joining net games through the Doomseeker server browser did little to introduce new people to the game that weren’t already there for one of the more common, routinely-hosted mods. In my personal experience, 8BDM seems to be more popular for its expansive singleplayer campaign where you fight against AI-controlled bots and the giant laundry list of bosses that conclude each chapter. Some would talk about the cool story serving as an alternate re-telling of Mega Man 7 through 10 and the side entries Capcom typically doesn’t acknowledge in compilations as well as rave to the original songs composed for the game’s major boss battles. Of those people, very few, if any, would bring up and sing the praises of MM8BDM’s multiplayer, even after years of the game being held as one of the best Mega Man fan games and having one of the most dedicated modding communities still actively creating content for the game. Whenever it be maps, custom skins, or full expansions based on official Mega Man products, ROM hacks, or fan games, there’s pretty much something being worked on at any moment.

For the sake of comparison, 8-bit Deathmatch is not the only game that I occasionally turn on and play rounds of multiplayer where the singleplayer absolutely demolishes the multiplayer in recognition, usually only standing on the grounds of a small but dedicated community. Classic Doom and Doom II, which run on the same engine as Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch, has historically been more well-known for being a singleplayer game due to the setup one would need for multiplayer back in the 90’s with the original DOS releases. Using the aforementioned Doomseeker server browser in the modern day to play multiplayer Doom… sure it’s easier than on DOS but is still a complicated process that involves fetching specific files from your Doom installation and dropping them into your Doomseeker folder. Once you set up everything, you’ll find a similar gravitation towards non-vanilla modes, with no head-to-head modes among them. Most Doom players, at least from my perspective, are perfectly fine with the recent Doom + Doom II remaster that launched last year for their multiplayer fix, even if the net code is something of a mess and the lack of modes means you’ll only be able to play Co-Op and Deathmatch. Outside of Doom-engine games, there are other classic PC games that have survived on modern hardware thanks to their own dedicated fan communities creating new versions or patches of those games, and many of those games only have the backing of those dedicated communities keeping their respective games’ online multiplayer alive.

So what happens next? Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t consider myself the voice of Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch in any way, but I do have some desire to bring more people to the community and raise awareness for modes and other mods/projects so they can stand alongside the current longstanding trends of Classes TLMS and various boss mods. The goal would be to make 8BDM’s multiplayer component more noticeable and, perhaps most importantly, accessible and beginner friendly. And even the people run the game’s Discord seem to agree, as starting from the month of February, every Friday would become a community game night of sorts known as “Freezer Bowl Fridays” with the goal of hosting modes that aren’t commonly seen online. The first two would be held earlier this month to quite some success, although a crucial game-breaking bug halted plans for the intended “1-Flag CTF Football” session, forcing a different mod to be loaded so the remainder of the session wouldn’t be stuck bug-hunting for the rest of the night. In the end, Freezer Bowl Fridays are still a step in providing more multiplayer variety for the Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch community, variety that I feel it has needed for a good while.

In conclusion, I'd say Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch has a very promising future to look forward to, even if I'm not as part of the active community as I was in the early to mid 2010's.

Tournament Arkanoid for NES: a history

Happy New Year everyone. Usually I would begin the year with some kind of big update post and a look through some goals that I have in store. This year, however, I didn't really have much to comment on that I didn't already mention earlier in the year. It's too early in the year to really put together the convention schedule and this year I had promised myself internally that I would focus on more than just conventions; and that goes double for my current work force and this very blog.  In addition, there are quite a number of leftover projects from prior years that I wanted to finally get done so I could give them full releases online and move onto other, bigger projects.

Approximately eleven-twelve years ago across the years 2013 and 2014, I would discover Arkalavista, an editor for creating modifications (or "fan games") of the NES version of Arkanoid. Having a Macintosh at my disposal, I was able to download and use the editor to create a plethora of Arkanoid hacks which would later get published onto ROMhacking.net thanks to the help of MrRichard999. The two most notable mods I produced during this run of custom Arkanoid mods were Advanced Edition, Chinese Arkanoid, and Amiga Alternative Levels. I was even able to suggest improvements to Arkalavista to make it more user friendly, making the process of creating and testing these mods more seamless. However, fans of the arcade version of Arkanoid may notice a strange, curious omission from the lineup: the official upgrade known as Tournament Arkanoid.

Last year in late Janruary, during a rather gloomy week and after finding Arkalavista in the folders on my Macintosh, I decided to create a theoretical NES port of Tournament Arkanoid, converting all 32 levels to the NES with compromises to fit the reduced size of the playfield and some of the improved color choices for blocks from the Amiga alternative levels conversion. The hack would sit incomplete for some time as I focused on other things until last week when I finally decided to finish the hack and publish it, adding in three new levels to fill in the final leg of the game before facing DOH and adjusting powerup placements.

With ROMhacking.net no longer accepting new submissions (and myself having having had some trouble trying to submit my Jr. Pac-Man 7800 hack Bleach Pac-Man in the past), I have decided to post the hack here in the meantime as "Release 1". The only elements that I have a desire to change but couldn't due to my lack of hex editing knowledge would be remaking the title screen to better match the arcade version (its background is in the ROM but goes unused) and a few other miscellaneous palette edits that aren't supported by Arkalavista. If a 100% complete mod of the game with the aforementioned changes becomes possible, I will consider publishing this Tournament Arkanoid mod on one of the alternate ROM hack-hosting sites that have spawned in the wake of ROMhacking.net's closure.

Download Torunament Arkanoid for NES (Release 1) here.

You will need a patching utility to apply it to an existing Arkanoid (U) ROM.