Conventions of 2023: AnimeNEXT

As I elaborated on in my Castle Point Anime Convention 2023 blog entry, I decided this year to give each convention I attended its own dedicated post so I could voice my full opinions while the conventions were still fresh on the mind. And this time, AnimeNEXT was back from a three-year-long hiatus to bring together anime fans in the tristate area and beyond. However, this year would mark a major change for the event, and it’s not exactly one that was entirely welcomed by attendees based on comments that I’ve seen online and live on-site. Due to various circumstances including rising costs for the venue and not being able to enforce rules about masking up and being vaccinated (since 2022 was still swamped by waves of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time), AnimeNEXT abandoned their previous home at the Atlantic City Convention Center and instead set up shop at a different, but smaller and less expensive location, once again intending to have masks as a requirement before suddenly removing it before the convention started.

The event would find a new home at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center, and while it has a decent layout, it would serve as the root for the main issues with the 2023 incarnation of the convention as a whole. First and foremost, the quality of the convention center was leagues behind that of the Atlantic City Convention Center and it did not have the pleasant and inviting atmosphere of its former home, feeling less clean and more like most other older convention centers I’ve been to in the past few years, mostly Castle Point’s current venue since 2018 and Eternal Con’s former venue before the 2020’s. It also was just not big enough to have the grand scope of a convention its hosts wanted it to have especially coming of the heels of the Atlantic City Convention Center. The new location ultimately forced the con’s hosts to split the experience between two different buildings: the aforementioned convention center, and a hotel (with paid parking!) that’s 20+ minutes away. To try and alleviate this and make transfer between the two places seamless, you could grab one of three shuttle buses and travel there, but even with that aspect you still need to wait for a shuttle bus, then wait 20+ minutes for the bus to get there, and when you’re done at the hotel with a panel or a console/board game, you have to wait again and then travel for another 20+ minutes just to make it back to the convention center. Not to mention the convention center was located in the middle of nowhere and it’s quite the drive if you want to get food outside the convention’s cafeteria or return to your hotel room.

And if you’re wondering what the shift to two separate venues feels like to someone that went there, I’ll give you a brief snippet of how it was laid out: At the convention center, you had the vendors and artists, the main stage for live performances, the car show, the arcade games, the charity auctions, the card games, and several different cosplay-themed activities and events. Then at the hotel, you had all the convention’s panels, video and tabletop games, tournaments, karaoke, AMV’s, the manga library, and cosplay repair. You can tell that they tried to give each venue equal importance but in reality it makes it even more time consuming if you want to see a panel, play some console games, or, if you’re a cosplayer, repair your cosplay. Add on that this information about the convention being split between two different locations not being made clear to attendees until literally the week of the event, and you can see why people were understandably critical to the decision to divide the convention. And sure, Castle Point Anime Convention would also divide its features between two different buildings, but at least they’re within walking distance of each other and they still managed to fit the bulk of the event’s panels inside the main building and kept all the main activities in said main building.

So as you probably would have expected, I stayed under the roof of the convention center the entire time, never once considering the idea of driving or taking a shuttle bus to the hotel to see a panel and play some console games. The artist’s alley continued to get the bulk of my attention as it does in most other conventions as I met several new artists and encountered others that I have not seen since the end of the 2010’s and the start of the pandemic. It was honestly an exciting artist alley filled with great talent, and it helped alleviate some of the poor design choices in regards to the convention’s layout. The vendor’s hall, or the dealer’s room as this event calls it, was pretty much the same as ever, though their policy on “no photos in the dealer’s room and artist’s alley” was very inconsistent. I was able to snap pictures of cosplays all over these oh-so called “no photo zones” (ironically, there was literally even a photo booth at one of the booths in the vendors area) and pretty much nothing consequential happened, aside from one staff member saying they would have to remove people from the event. In comparison, whenever or not the rule exists at other events I’ve been at over the years, the staff in those venues aren’t as strict or blunt with reminding people to be careful where they point their cameras in the artist’s alley. As for me, I avoid snapping cleanly-visible art at people’s tables and the artwork of said tables when I take snapshots of commissions and pose with artists for selfies out of respect for the people that make them.

The rest of the main venue was the food court, cosplay wrestling, the arcade, and the car show. The cosplay wrestling was thankfully not as loud and obnoxious as the concert stage at CPAC (in fact, AnimeNEXT saved their music performances for after the vendors and artists’ areas closed for the night) and it was fun getting to see people get in character as various different Nintendo properties, though it got too clustered around the ring that I wasn’t able to watch up close except from a distance. The arcade was reasonably small, especially since the console games were in a whole different venue, but it had some proper candy cabs of both the retro CRT and modern flatscreen variety, the latter mostly for fighting games, alongside the expected rhythm game cabinets that populate every anime con and the not-so-expected pinball machines. One game sadly spent most of Saturday being repaired while one of the pinballs broke down in the middle of the day, and a lone Ms. Pac-Man machine pretty much spent the entire event unable to be played. I was actually surprised when it was announced that the arcade would be closing at the same time as the dealer’s room and artist’s alley, considering at most events I’ve been to, the gaming areas usually close much later into the day (for reference, CPAC’s arcade and console games could be played on until the day ended, and the same was true for Long Island Retro Gaming Expo last year).

Overall, AnimeNEXT 2023 was a fun, albeit flawed convention. I’d say I preferred the artist’s alley of this event over that of Castle Point Anime Convention’s and this event had the benefit of not taking place during very bleak and miserable weather, but CPAC did everything this event did and did it better, using the limited space of its location much more wisely to offer up everything one would expect from an anime convention. The convention definitely has a chance to improve and/or find a better venue more suitable for housing everything the event wants to do and so much more, but the location it ended up with feels more like a temporary bandaid from losing the ability to host the event at the Atlantic City Convention Expo than the exciting new home of a great convention that everyone likely wanted it to be. If they wanted to stay where they are now, maybe if the main attractions that people associate with anime conventions (like the panels and video games) were at the convention center while the more niche activities that don’t have large audiences were at the hotel, and if the shuttle busses were quicker in bringing guests between venues, it would lead to less frustration to those repeatedly trying to move between the two.

Well… that ended up being a far longer summary of the event than I would have liked. I promise that I won’t have this much to burp out about EternalCon next month, but after hearing “you have to be willing to critique the things you like if you want them to improve” from another source, I figured maybe a long post like this would be necessary. And that leads us to the cosplay photos and the art commissions. This time there wasn’t really any consistent theme or trend among the cosplayers and artist’s alley, but what I was most surprised to see was a sudden influx of Trigun cosplay thanks to the new Trigun Stampede anime that aired earlier this year. The traditional Shonen shows like Demon Slayer, Jojo, and One Piece still had strong showings, plus the continued surge of Genshin Impact. The final count for cosplay photos totaled to 104. Not as many as CPAC due to the strict policies regarding the use of cameras in most of the venue but still a respectable amount at the end of the day.

Anyways, here is where you will find the gallery of cosplays I snapped at the event, and here is where you can find the round-up of convention commissions. I am still looking to get some new blog posts up that aren't event-related but we'll see where this year goes from here. Until then, I will return sometime next month for an in-depth summary of EternalCon 2023, or as much as I can squeeze out.

Offline Singleplayer modes in Fighting Games, an Honest Thought

In 2022, I got into watching tournaments for fighting games broadcast live on Twitch, mostly as means of watching cool characters with crisp, detailed, and diverse designs (aka, those that inspire my own works) duke it out in a slugfest until one of them gets knocked out. It inspired me to attempt to write down concepts for a fighting game of my own design.

But there’s a problem. I don’t really play modern fighting games all that much, if ever. Sure I’ve dabbled in the occasional emulated fighter and a few towards the end of the 2000’s and the beginning of the 2010’s (in fact my first true fighter was… Sonic the Fighters) and I played plenty of Guilty Gear Xrd when it was new and made too many memes to count thanks to the Playstation 4’s sharing features. However, when it comes to the latest and greatest button bashers currently headlining tournaments across the globe, even those that I physically own, I’ve pretty much never laid a finger on them. And for the past few months, I was asking myself, why?

Growing up, I always leaned more towards games that revolved around offline, single-player experiences, and unlike with platformers, action games, racing games, and a few shooters, I didn’t really grow up with many traditional fighting games, with the ones I was most familiar with being the aforementioned Sonic the Fighters as well as Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I quickly learned of other fighting games as the years went on thanks to the internet, most notably Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken (in fact, there was a Tekken 5 cabinet in a local redemption arcade at one point), but never really came to play them myself until the 2010’s, some with my cousin in tow as a local VS. opponent in Street Fighter IV, Tekken 6, and Soulcalibur V.

As the push for more online modes began to take off in the late 2010’s and especially after the pandemic, I noticed that the fighters I was eyeing up and spectating tournaments of, aside from Smash Bros and Tekken, were not really giving those that didn’t like or were driven away from playing online much to offer when it came to game modes. Street Fighter V of course had a story mode, but it was kind of forgettable and linear and I never bothered to play it due to me not using my PS4 all that much and having never played SFV. Guilty Gear and King of Fighters are both kind of in the same boat—Xrd onwards dropped the interactive story mode that had been present in Guilty Gear for years and turned it into a 3D anime movie, and King of Fighters never really had a proper story mode (at least in the mainline entries; I think some of the spinoffs had something akin to a story mode but I can’t really be bothered to check right now). For a good example on how I always liked seeing variety offered in offline modes, most late 90’s and 2000’s fighters on 5th and 6th-generation consoles included an extra mode or two aside form the story/arcade modes to sink into—Time Attack, Survival modes, a mission mode, modes with RPG elements, or even modes where you would train or program an AI. And if you wanted to go further, even a mode that breaks away from the core fighting gameplay altogether would be an interesting experience. As for the story mode, I always thought Blazblue’s approach was a good example, as was, bizarrely enough, the two Bleach fighting games on the Nintendo DS developed by Treasure. And with the release of Street Fighter 6 and its World Tour mode, that'll be another fighting game with a good singleplayer story mode.

Furthermore, I also noticed that the latest entries in these long-running fighting games would launch with a starting roster in the mid-to-high teens and then use a rollout of DLC to bring in extra fighters (amongst other content). I get why, considering this is the age of DLC and all, but some games don’t always seem to get that kind of support right away to bring back fan favorites or get enough characters to surpass the roster count of the game’s predecesor until years later. I guess I had my brain tainted by fighters that give large rosters at the start like later Smash games and nearly every Tekken and KOF title from a certain point onwards. Heck, Smash outright spoils you with so many fan favorites and the roster only got bigger in each entry. For Guilty Gear Strive, it felt like there were lots of gaping holes in the starting roster and even the current DLC characters with certain notable omissions from the XX and Xrd eras not returning. And for Street Fighter 6, despite the starting roster having less “gaping holes” than Strive’s and a very solid collection of newcomers (including a much-improved Luke), I feel there should have been some Street Fighter III representation alongside the new faces and the entire roster of World Warriors from II in the characters available at launch and the first season of DLC. I’m not asking for a fighting game to have a gigantic roster, especially at launch, but I would love for fighting games developed by bigger studios, if they can afford it and if it doesn’t affect how the project turns out, to pack a slightly higher number of starter characters especially when DLC schedules/releases are at risk at becoming inconsistent during a season.

For the longest time, fighting games have always had this lingering issue of being tough to get into, and some fighting games have since been attempting to rectify the issue in one way or another. Though some have resorted to making fighters simpler by scaling back and removing mechanics or offering easier controls that are more accessible but nerf your damage and/or HP, I found this to be the wrong direction to try and attract new blood since it can alienate seasoned competitive players by taking away entire features people have been used to and took for granted or make people want to forego the easier control schemes in favor of playing with the standard controls to avoid the nerfs. And by this point, long-running fighting game franchises aside from platform fighters are pretty much stuck with these more complex control layouts created in the early days of the genre, meaning only new fighting games would be able to work with a completely new control scheme designed to be easy to learn and figure out, yet still give enough options for controlling a fighter to lead to highly fluid and diverse movement pro players can achieve

Personally, I always saw the lack of replay value aside from playing the arcade modes for each character’s ending and, while a minor point in comparison, the smaller character rosters before DLC as bigger contributions to me not wanting to pick up most modern fighters, though the controls being on the complex side and command/super inputs not always being the most easy thing in the world to figure out and memorize and pull off consistently is certainly a contributing factor. Of course there are also online modes to fix the limited replay value, but what drive me away from fighting random players online via matchmaking or ranked systems was that most fighters with online modes track win/loss records, and, depending on the game, lets other players view them if they see you in a lobby. If these stats weren’t a thing, I would probably be less reluctant to jump into online games, since the way Guilty Gear Xrd and even KOF XV presented their menus made me think that people would end up peeking at my versus records after matches or if I were to accidentally reveal them in a theoretical game stream.

Well that took me a little longer than I would have liked, but that should probably give an idea on what drives me away from modern fighters and what I would like to see in both new fighters and new entries in long-standing fighting game franchises. Hopefully I wasn’t too negative with expressing my thoughts that have been building up for a few months and I may revise this slightly later on should any part feel mean-spirited or wrongly written. And well, don’t get me started on the concept of free to play, live service fighting games…

Conventions of 2023: Castle Point Anime Convention

The year is 2023. It’s April, and you’re in the mood for a good anime convention. After about five months on break from AnimeNYC 2022, the latest Castle Point Anime Convention arrived to gather anime fans across New Jersey for another event celebrating Japanese animation and beyond. Normally in the past, I waited until after two larger events before writing up a big summary of the spring (CPAC and AnimeNext), summer (EternalCon and LIRetro), and fall (NYCC and ANYC) conventions. However, this time, I wanted to see if I had enough to say about Castle Point Anime Convention to give it and the rest of the bigger conventions one giant breakdown post while they’re still on the mind. It might not happen for EternalCon but for now that’s the goal I’m setting so I can at least keep life on this blog as healthy as I can make it.

So anyways, Castle Point. As you all know, April was somewhat of a busier month than usual, with me continuing to work on some leftover projects from Winter and resolve some recent tech issues I was running into with my computers. The month also brought some very unusual weather patterns, including early Summer weather for one week after Easter weekend before the temperatures suddenly dropped afterwards. Then, the weather conditions got gloomier towards the end of the month, with large amounts of clouds and rain in the skies for most days of the week... and then it rained, rained, and rained. Pretty much the entire convention took place under a heavy storm that ran through both the 29th and the 30th, forcing everyone to stay indoors and deriving attendees the chance of enjoying the sunshine and being able to wander the exterior of the complex. Thankfully, with the move to the Meadowlands Expo Center that occurred in 2018, attendees were able to stay under one roof where the convention’s main attractions and almost all the panels and live performances resided, with cosplay meetups, some panels, and the “Maid Cafe” being in the Harmony Suites building right next door.

The layout was identical to Castle Point Anime Convention 2022. Walking into the main building, you had four distinct regions: The Gaming Area on the southwest corner, the Artist’s Alley on the southeast corner, the Dealer’s Room (Vendor’s Hall) on the northeast corner, and finally the photo booths and live stage on the northwest corner. The first thing the jumped out when looking at the schedule was that the artist alley was set to close an hour later than usual: 8PM instead of the usual 7PM. While it did give attendees the chance to finish up their vendor and artist shopping without being rushed, some of the artists were exhausted by the final hour and a few would close up anyways up to 30 minutes earlier. The Gaming Area was pretty much the same as well, just with a few shakeups in the arcade and console game lineup (some of which were genuine surprises while others, like the rhythm games, were mostly expected). Unlike last year where I was able to play a few of the games following the closure of the Artist’s Alley, this yeah I didn’t bother because I would leave not that long after the closure of the vendors’ and artists’ respective areas.

Because of the size of the venue compared to, say, the home of NYCC and AnimeNYC at the Javits Center, transitioning between each area was short and seamless. You could go between the gaming room and artist’s alley in no time flat, access all the panel rooms (sans the one located in the Harmony Suites next door) whenever, and if you needed to get some food, the dining area in the back end was easily accessible, even if most of the attendees didn’t want to travel out in the rain to access the food trucks. However, everything being located in a large, open room meant that whatever performances were at the live stage drowned out most of the audio throughout the event, making it harder to chat with people. A similar issue occurred at CPAC 2022 as well, and I’m wondering if it’s even possible that the audio could be turned down slightly so other parts of the convention aren’t as affected by the loud music blasting everywhere. At least they saved their loudest performance for the very end of the day right when half the con was closed up and the only things still open were the gaming area and the live stage. 

Now let’s talk about convention cosplay shoots, because boy do I have quite a collection. Owing to the smaller venue size and me going into two panels throughout the day, one for 30 minutes and another for a hour, I didn’t make cosplay photos a priority (especially with exterior shots not being remotely possible due to the rain). After going all out at AnimeNYC 2022, I felt like it was a necessary procedure so I wasn’t overexerting myself looking for more things to photograph. In the end, I wound up with a total of 124 different cosplay photos, each representing different popular series in the anime scene when also taking the artist’s alley into account:

• Genshin Impact still has the strongest showing of all, with most of the artists in Artist’s Alley carrying one or several pieces of merchandise for it and there being quite a few Genshin cosplayers roaming the venue. I couldn’t tell if it got more or less cosplayers this time around, considering the complexity of the outfits and how much other anime franchises got support this year.
• One Piece got a very strong showing, especially amongst the cosplayers— so much so that several medium and large crowd shoots occurred with a bunch of One Piece cosplayers out in the main hallways.
• Pokemon was also a favorite amongst the cosplayers and the artists in Artist’s Alley, some of it having to do with the “Castle Point Pokemon League” where you could collect badges from certain Pokemon cosplayers and challenge a Champion attending the convention in a real Pokemon battle in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.
• Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure was almost right behind Genshin Impact, having a fair number of cosplayers and a healthy dose of artists supporting it to boot. Parts 3, 5, and 6 received the most rep.
• Demon Slayer had a good presence at the convention, although not as much as I remember it having when it was at its peak back 2019.
• One franchise I was surprised to see make a resurgence this year was Naruto, which is impressive considering the series’ heyday has long passed by now, yet it still remains relevant in anime culture and I wouldn’t be shocked if more Naruto cosplayers appear at AnimeNext and AnimeNYC.

Overall, the event delivered, though a part of me feels like I enjoyed 2022’s event a bit more in comparison. Probably because of the hype of it being the first main convention I attended since the start of the pandemic and not being stuck in poor weather. With the review concluded, here’s a direct link to this event’s cosplay photo gallery on my Facebook as well as this convention's round of commission scans. As for where I'll be next? Well, none other than AnimeNext next month.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Anniversary Bash 25: The Recap

Last year, I wrote a small blog entry on the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Anniversary Bash, an annual community event for Epic Games’ long-forgotten late 90’s run-and-gun. I took part in the 24th iteration of the Bash due to being in the right place at the right time, having just bought the game through GOG (including its expansion pack, The Secret Files, for free). And this year, the community was returning with another four-day weekend of rabbit roasting on Easter weekend. This time, it was a milestone event, celebrating 25 years since the launch of the original Jazz Jackrabbit 2 in 1998.

The game’s small but dedicated community hopped online to experience the Anniversary Bash early Friday afternoon (in US EST at least). The format was similar to the year prior: Day 1 was pure (Death)Match, Day 2 was Capture the Flag, Day 3 was various alternate rulesets with a focus on Free-for-All (Last Rabbit Standing, Zombies, Randomizer, and Spaceships), and Day 4 was a variety of team-based objectives (Deathflag, Multi-Flag CTF, Ruler vs. Ruler, and Team Spaceships) that would end with one final surprise: the free-for-all survival game mode Ground Force, where players must destroy structures and platforms to ring-out opponents without falling off themselves. It was part of the third day of last year’s Anniversary Bash but was initially not set to return for this year until player feedback caused it to serve as the event’s finale until the server would empty out (or what actually happened: everyone getting kicked due to the server crashing at the last minute).

The map set featured in the Bash contained a mix of new and returning maps, some being instantly recognizable from Anniversary Bash 24. When it comes to the maps themselves, there weren’t really any that I’d say I disliked playing on, though there was a few maps with pretty strong chokepoints, especially in the Capture the Flag map set. Other maps contained the rare setpiece that seemed to be designed with Spaz Jackrabbit in mind thanks to being far and away the most popular Jackrabbit of the trio of playable characters. That doesn’t mean the other Jackrabbits are completely unviable picks; I played as Jazz and managed to score a few wins and high placements, and a few other players were able to bring similar results with Lori.

Server latency was still very much an issue in Jazz Jackrabbit 2, causing actions to not exactly match up with how the the server was seeing and displaying the action. Understandable considering I was playing on a server from across the Atlantic Ocean and without serious rewrites to the game’s net code there’s pretty much no chance that we’ll see something that works better for players playing from long distances. That said, I believe my new, more powerful computer was able to mitigate the latency issues to an extent and I was able to use this to my advantage in a few games to score some surprise hits/frags and escape the bottom half of the rankings every now and then.

Overall, the event was fun and it was nice being able to experience a game I don’t end up playing that often nowadays with a community I’m mostly new to, especially when it comes by only once a year. Maybe in 2024 there will be more shakeups and fun surprises on Anniversary Bash 26? Only time will tell. 

Soundtrack Double Feature: Christmas in Springtime in Hell

This post came a little later than I'd like- my Mac had a sudden hardware failure and I had to rush it to the Apple store at the mall for repairs... thankfully unlike what happened three years ago I had a backup at the ready so nothing was lost in the long run. It still put me out of being able to work on my stuff until today, and before I was forced to bring my computer in for repairs, I had ripped two new soundtracks (or at least put them into a format one can easily put them in their music player of choice). But of course, I like to offer a little background on each respective soundtrack. 

Since 2009, retroUSB has created special NES cartridges themed around the holidays to sell on their website. While I never had a personal interest in purchasing these cartridges, they are pretty neat novelties--including a (sometimes interactive) Christmas visual with 8-bit renditions of holiday songs you can leave on in the background during a Christmas gathering and a Christmas themed game or mod. The cartridges also aren't your standard grey plastic: these come in clear white and shine internal LED's like a Christmas tree when plugged into an NES and powered on. Several of the 8-bit Xmas cartridges, including 2015 and 2016's, were showcased at the Festival of Games, a retro gaming-themed holiday event from the same hosts that brought you Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. One of these special cartridges was even used to command a literal quartet of ROB's to dance to Christmas songs.

Of course, you can also get the ROMs to plug into your favorite emulator, and that leads me to 8-bit Xmas 2021, an extensive mod of Excitebike that swaps the bikers with ducks on snowmobiles, adds four player support, and widens the track to six lanes over the original four. It only runs four (music) tracks long: the three songs that play on the title screen, and the theme of the game itself, Exciteduck, which shifts in speed depending on the speed of the ducks. The latter steals the whole show and I would recommend giving the OST a listen if only to hear the Exciteduck theme alone, though that's not to say the title screen tunes aren't worth it if you're in the mood for something a bit more relaxed and fitting for the season... in nine months from now anyways.

Grab the soundtrack for 8-bit Xmas 2021 here. Of course, this isn't the only game soundtrack I have prepped for today, as I have one more treat for everyone.

Some of you may be familiar with Doom, the legendary FPS from the 90's that spawned a million different mods providing new levels, gameplay tweaks, and soundtracks composed in midi instruments. During the end of the front half of 2022, I ended up in a sudden classic Doom phase, playing dozens and dozens of mods throughout the year and even into 2023, and one of the mods I played was the Plutonia MIDI Pack, a music mod that replaces the stock Doom/Doom II soundtrack with new compositions designed for use with The Plutonia Experiment, one half of the commercial mod compilation Final Doom, which initially lacked music created specifically for it.

The soundtrack quickly grew on me throughout 2022, and while the raw midi files were included as extras in the mod download, not many music players support midi format music. This music rip converts them to the more universal mp3 with all the appropriate tags so you can easily listen to them at your own leisure. Of course, I always encourage you to give the MIDI pack a try if you like the songs and want to see how they transform and complement the atmosphere of the Plutonia Experiment.

The Plutonia MIDI Pack's soundtrack can be found here. The MIDI version of the soundtrack (as well as the mod itself) can be directly downloaded from here.

And that's all I have for today- Next month should be pretty packed, with prepping for Easter and the first big convention of the year, and I still have some blog posts I'd like to write to fill the void while I grind out projects in the back. That said, I bid you farewell for now.

The Conventions of 2023

It's that time of the year again. With March now almost over I figured now is a good time for a new convention schedule to set up the next few seasons of the year.

Since I still don't really feel like venturing outside my general area just yet, I'll be keeping the lineup of conventions to what I've attended per year since 2018 (disregarding the two years I skipped due to the pandemic). Most notable is the grand return of AnimeNext, which was skipped in 2022 due to ongoing issues with the Atlantic City Convention Center. Thus, the event was moved to a new home--the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center, which thankfully is much, much closer to my home than the previous location was by a whole two hours. That said, I will miss the aesthetics and atmosphere of Atlantic City- watching the sun set through the windows of the convention center and the beauty of the main lobby area lit by tons of lighting (and the stampede of Jojo cosplayers descending down the escalator at AnimeNext 2019) will forever be a local memory of mine.

For this year, I also decided to mark a few of the "side events" taking place on Long Island that I will be attending. EMcon is a smaller, warmup event the weekend before Castle Point Anime Convention with a few local artists and crafters and an all-ages approach with its presentation, Cradle Con and Long Island Tropic Con are two comic and general fandom events towards the end of Spring and Summer respectively, and Festival of Games is a holiday-themed offshoot of the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo themed around holiday shopping and Christmas-themed games and events. This isn't all of the side events that take place but these are the ones that I figured have enough importance to me (especially after Anime NYC left me too sore to attend one particular side event that was occurring the very same weekend).

For main events on the other hand, there are certainly some I would be interested in attending in the future; however, they would be currently too long of a drive or are too close to other events that they would not likely go onto the schedule without cutting out others. Events like PAX East, Thy Geekdom Con, Anime Boston, and Otakon have been on the radar as events I could realistically attend, but with my physical conditions not being at their best and me only having so much money to spend at big conventions like these, I cannot possibly attend everything even if it would give me more excuses to get out and socialize with more artists and content creators. For now, expect the six events pictured above to make the cut each year for the foreseeable future until I feel adventurous enough to add some new events.

The Super Ultra Big Bad Fighting Game Tournament Turbo, a Concept

 Hello everyone. Before I jump into what I decided to write up today, my plans to get back into doing art got sidelined due to this Winter being a bit more of a mess than I would have liked. Plus I got a bunch of WIP's still on the fence that I wanted to knock out some more progress on before adding on more to my agenda.

Anyways, here's what I decided to write up, and it's something you likely wouldn't expect from this blog at the end of the day. Last year I made a post on Combo Breaker, a yearly fighting game event that, alongside Frosty Faustings and CEO, excelled in showing a large variety of modern and retro fighters with thriving communities of various sizes--all as main tournaments. And well, after witnessing one of the tournaments offered in both Combo Breaker 2022 and Frosty Faustings 2023, the "Mystery Tournament", a Warioware-style mashup of random head-to-head games that sometimes broke away from the grounds of a fighting game, I suddenly began to brainstorm something which combined the strange and often forgotten (sometimes for good reasons) fighters featured in the Mystery Tournament with the absurdity and... some of the "badness" of Games Done Quick's Awful Games and Silly Games blocks.

And after some experimentation and further thought, I landed on the idea of a fighting game event that centered around two types of competitive brawlers: One would be for the main roster, featuring "kusoge" fighters that have obvious mechanical flaws, poor balancing, and overall lots of "jank" but still feature enough redeeming qualities and amusing aspects underneath to make for a thrilling and enjoyable player and spectator e-sport that can excite crowds and provide a serious competitive match in spite of the issues surrounding the game. Comedy fighters designed to be silly by their nature, and weaker installments in otherwise well known fighting game franchises would make up the remainder of the main list.

The other, more interesting category of fighters would be for the "Awful" roster: fighting games that suffer from even more design flaws compared to the main selection and are infamous among the FGC for how bad they are but can still result in good, dumb fun with players, commentators, and audiences coming together to hype them up like a serious competition in spite of their sheer lack of quality. However, anything that is so broken and reviled that nothing good can possibly come out of it would not be featured, and I did make a small blacklist of games that would have no shot of appearing, either for just not plain working in a competitive environment (Rise of the Robots) or not offering a two player option (Human Killing Machine).

While certainly not a finalized list, these were some examples for the main roster of games:

• Breaker's Revenge (Arcade)
• Castlevania Judgement (Wii)
• Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Ranto Hen (SNES)
• Da Kyanta 2 (PC)
• Dive Kick (PC)
• Dong Dong Never Die (PC)
• Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring (PS1)
• Guilty Gear: the Missing Link (PS1)
• Hokuto no Ken (PS2)
• Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire (Arcade)
• Mortal Kombat 4 (PS1/N64)
• Bishojo Senshi Salior Moon S (SNES)
• Shrek Super Slam (Gamecube)
• Sonic the Fighters/Sonic Championship (Xbox 360)
• Street Fighter the Movie: the Game (Arcade)
• Street Fighter I (PC, via a recent compilation)
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
• Tekken 4 (PS2)
• Warpath: Jurassic Park (PS1)

And then for the Awful Fighting Game roster:

• Balls 3D/Scultor's Cut (SNES/3DO)
• Brutal: Paws of Fury/Above the Claw (Genesis/32X)
• Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls (SNES)
• Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu (GBA, use Link Cable)
• Kart Fighter (NES) (Super Kart Fighter mod)
• Kasumi Ninja (Jaguar)
• Mortal Kombat Advance (GBA, use Link Cable)
• Pit Fighter (SNES)
• Rise of the Robots 2: Resurrection (PS1)
• Shaq Fu (Genesis)
• The Simpsons Wrestling (PS1)
• Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi (PS1)
• Ultra Vortek (Jaguar)
• Way of the Warrior (3DO)

Of course neither of these lists are final, as I don't have enough experience with every game from this list to form a completely fleshed-out and polished game roster since I'm going off of others' coverages and retrospectives for the most part.

With that said, and now that you have an idea of what kind of event I'd be interested in organizing, how exactly would a tournament like this even work? As much as I would love to see it done live, I think the most realistic outcome would be a online event, if only because an event like this wouldn't be able to achieve the playerbase or audience of a real fighting game community event in a strictly local environment because it doesn't have any of the big-name fighters currently on the market as part of the tournament lineup. And to be fair, they would have easily overshadowed the main games of the event if they were hosted and stick out like a sore thumb.

If I was closer to the FGC and knew more about tournament organizing, I would be a lot more interested in possibly getting an event like this going as a yearly tradition celebrating the weird and janky fighters of an era long-passed. Until then, this wound up as yet another addition to the ideas pile and with nowhere else to put it, I decided to post it here. Who knows, maybe one year if I ever get into streaming, I might do a grand showcase of these fighters on my Twitch channel, but a full-blown tournament may be simply too much to ask just one person to organize and manage on their own.

The belated "Welcome 2023" post

Holy crud, I am so sorry this took me longer than I would have liked to write up and post. Considering I spent New Year’s setting up a brand new gaming/productivity PC, I was quite occupied with my time over the weekend downloading a bunch of games and software and I neglected most of my other pastimes as a result.

For those that didn’t catch the last major blogpost I wrote, I had announced that I’m beginning 2023 in a brief hiatus period, hopefully one of the final breaks from major productivity I will take, to focus on the holidays, my own health and, perhaps most importantly, changing my setup up to better benefit the various ventures I wish to take later in the year. Now with the holidays ending and the days getting longer, my plans are to slowly climb back into a productive state over the next few weeks/months. This includes resuming or getting back to grips with some hobbies of mine that I fell out of as the years went on for one reason or another, but one of those is of greater importance to me than the rest: Good ol taking a pencil and paper out and drawing.

Yeah it’s safe to say that I become a lot slower at drawing since 2018 or so and even my latest art from last year took me a whopping six months to complete. Using a mouse to make art may be good for precise strokes or lines and I have made it work in the past, but to make my art feel more organic and less time-consuming, I had to explore other options to bring myself up to speed and get some of these ideas I’ve had for art out the door. Of course I may still make some art the way I once did, mouse and all, but in a much faster process that doesn’t leave me zoned out and looking for frequent breaks and distractions, and I want to start making an attempt to break away from these old, bad habits of mine so I can feel more accomplished with my content and not feel like I have to rely on posting the same old art many times over the years or commission artists to fill the gaps. At the same time, breaking away from just drawing my original characters, a trait that ended up being bolted to my brain by an artist I follow back in 2012 or so, is another objective of mine, if only to give me more subjects to draw and represent a combination of well known and obscure fandoms and try my hand at adapting characters I never thought I would ever make fan art of into my style.

While art is not the only thing I want to get back into, it is by far the biggest thing I want to be the most known for aside from programing video games and maybe becoming a video game live-streamed, and being an artist is the one hobby that I feel like I can do decently with my current skillset and with all this equipment I have lying around and plan on setting up, I should be in a better position to experiment with returning to art, traditionally and digitally. I also would like to make a return to creating sprites and forming full sprite sheets using new techniques and tricks that I learned in the past few years and from observing game assets over the 2010’s and early 2020’s now that I’ve been figuring out Aseprite, a program that is much more strongly fit for creating custom sprites than recent versions of Photoshop (though I still do use Photoshop for a fair bit of sprite-making).

Over the holidays, I thought really hard about what was stopping me in my tracks and preventing me from committing to finishing projects in a short time for so many years. While there are certainly other factors, I think social media and the many distractions it has provided may or may not be the one defining contribution to my continued boredom and unwillingness to draw art and finish projects. In fact, last June, I made a new artist Twitter with the intent of using it in the off-chance I regained the confidence to draw more regularly, especially after my main account, Superjustinbros, became flooded in retweets and the occasional meme as time went on. And with twitter’s busted algorithm and other recent changes from the past year, it does not feel the same and I wouldn’t mind scaling back on using social media when I'm at home and could be getting creative in my free time.

Speaking of Twitter, even if I do want to limit my interactions on social media to improve my mental health and drive myself to be more productive, I do intend to make my main account, Superjustinbros, art-focused as well to an extent. That said, AozoraJustin (as well as my currently neglected DeviantArt account) will be the prime stop for anything I create, as the name would strongly fit as a professional alias if I ever expand my horizons into new ventures (and I may open a new YouTube account under that name for bigger projects while rebooting SuperJustinChannel into a channel for smaller, more personal projects).

I did create a Discord server as a form of future-proofing but it is currently not ready nor intended to be opened to the public at this time. As for my other sites and social medias, I began to use the Aozora blog as a showcase of convention commissions as I don’t exactly have any other use for it for the time being and if I wanted a blog focused on Aozora, I would prefer to make a website focused on Aozora and my other game concepts from scratch rather than use Blogspot. Of course Super Justin the Blog is a more casual space to give updates on personal life, events, and miscellaneous content I create that doesn’t really have a place on these other sites, and while I do plan to give this blog small updates (especially a new banner with updated render) the current state of Super Justin the Blog will likely be carried over into the future and beyond (and because I really miss 2000’s era websites in this day and age).

Oh look at the time. It’s late and I got a speed running marathon to check out next week. I’ll be back with more content when the time comes to do more writing.

Happy Holidays from Superjustinbros

Hey everyone. With Christmas rapidly approaching and Hanukah coming up a few days later, I wanted to make a small post to wish all my friends that celebrate the holidays a very jolly Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, and overall a great holiday season.

I'll be back in a few days with one more post to close out the year, whenever it lands at the end of the month or the first week of the month, so stay tuned!

The final hiatus… maybe.

With only a few days before the new year, you would expect a new year’s blogpost to be around the corner. This isn’t exactly that blog post, but it does kind of come pretty close to the end of 2022 so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was mistaken for the end of the year update I’ve done on this blog for a few years now.

For those of you that didn’t tune into my posts across the year, this year was a big, stressful mess. Even after doing what would become my only big art post of the year, my attempts and plans to do more art and big creative projects beyond that one post fell by the wayside as I focused on smaller projects and documents. I attribute this to some pretty bad physical health issues I was running into since the end of January, in addition to my mother’s back to back surgeries in the summer and me still struggling to get into a healthier sleeping schedule. There’s other parts that have been stressing me out but I think you can paint a pretty good picture about how this year was to me. Thankfully the year was still good, but considering what I had to deal with and my inability to focus on my passions beyond some game concepts, it could have been a lot better.

This was also the year, especially during the summer, where I noticed a lot of my current tech was either outdated or going on the verse of being labeled as such, and it also made me ponder if my current workstation, which has remained the same since about 2013 or so, is even suitable for creating the content I wish to be remembered for. Considering I’ve been struggling to get back into drawing art (and pixel art/sprites) regularly for years, even before the days of the pandemic, and now with there being no big events until next April, I thought maybe it was time to give a refresh to “the lair” so I can acquire try out some new tech that may or may not help with my creative output. I also decided to go on a small break and temporarily scale down on what I’m working on since it’s the holidays and Christmas is next weekend. I have no say on when exactly the break will end, but I’ll be spending most of it setting up the new workstation and whatever equipment I and up with.

In short, this is what I’m hoping to get into, or resume doing, in no particular order:

• Traditional Artwork and Concept Sketching.
• Digital Artwork and Graphic/UI Design.
• Sprites and Spritework
• Live Game Streaming (slightly less priority, we’ll see when/if I feel like streaming)
• Game design and conceptualization (with some programing on the side?)

There’s more, for sure, though with everything on the plate these four seem like the most realistic possibilities with my current/forthcoming tech, programs, and equipment as well as my current skill level. I promise I will not be leaving everyone hanging as much as I did this year but I will need some time to get to grips with everything and I don’t think it’s worth sharing every little thing I create anyways. Plus my last attempt to return to traditional works in 2017 did not end in a way I would have liked (the drawing desk being too big for my room and ultimately discarding it a few months later) and that made me hesitant to return to it until earlier this year. When my attempt to go back to digital, as awesome as it turned out, didn’t last as long as it did thanks to what would happen in the middle of the year.

So that’s what I plan to do for the rest of December and the first few months in 2023 before the next season of conventions begins. As I hinted at I’ll have a followup post of sorts out sometime around New Year’s since there’s quite a few days left in December, and while I’m not quite done with chatting I’d rather save the rest for one final blogpost to cap off 2022 so I’m not confining it all to one somewhat anticlimatic post for everyone to take in all at once.

The 2022 Convention Update: New York Conic Con and Anime NYC

Greetings everyone. Since the final batch of conventions have come and gone and I finally have a few months on break, I think it’s only natural that I write up a blog post on the final two events of the year, as well as some looking back on the other events I’ve attended since April this year.

With the pandemic loosening it’s grips on society, the experience you all know as “the convention” could resume after two years of being affected gravely by the virus that resulted in said pandemic. While some conventions did happen towards the tail end of 2021, I was still in hiding from the virus and didn’t become fully boosted until February of this year. And by then, all six conventions that I had attended in 2019 planned to make a grand return in 2022, to varying results.

Castle Point Anime Convention 2022 was the comeback to cons that I had long, long dreamed of. Meeting artists and seeing my buddies and several other artists for the first time in years was a welcome experience, and the convention was just big enough to where there was enough to do without feeling too large or overwhelming. The same can not be said for AnimeNext, as they were forced to bail out for another year due to schedule conflicts with a concert that was happening in the same timeframe and the venue’s total disregard for COVID-19 safety procedures. As for the local conventions that took place on my home turf, Eternal Con was a slight disappointment, as the new venue the con was forced into didn’t really bring much new in with its somewhat confusing layout and a reduction of artists in the artist alley compared to the pre-pandemic era, making it feel emptier than usual. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo gave some of its smaller components a much needed expansion, resulting in a much meatier event overall with its only downside being the lack of an artist alley somewhere in the event space.

And after taking September off, New York Comic Con arrived guns and blazing in all its corporate, advertisement-filled glory, still being by far the largest event I attend year round. Maybe a bit too big, as I’ll elaborate later. Without a doubt this was a big event with lots to do, and like most modern incarnations of NYCC, there was a decent amount of Eastern media present front and center at the show- One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Gundam had entire booths set up, and other prominent franchises of Japanese origin had presences at the event. Of course the bread and butter of New York Comic Con was, well, comics, western TV shows, and films. I’ll admit, back in the day, I never thought I would gain an appreciation for comic conventions, but after various past NYCC’s genuinely entertained me, especially NYCC 2018, I welcomed the event into my yearly schedule with open arms. That said, this year’s NYCC felt a little too overblown for me, especially since my mother, whom I brought to the event to experience it with me, was still in the mist of recovering from the surgery that out her out of the summer conventions, so it made the event more tense and stressful for the two of us, combined with having to survive the typical crowds everyone that has attended the event (or any big show for the matter) is familiar with.

Usually in comic and anime conventions, I easily glance over the vendors hall (or dealers room as I sometimes call it) in favor of the artist’s alley, but New York Comic Con’s vendors easily steal the show year by year. Gigantic booths full of spectacle spanned the front of the vendor’s hall and had gigantic lines with unique experiences and free goodies for grabs. There were so many big booths this year that it all just blew past me and I ended up missing a good few of the larger booths, but then again I come to conventions more for the social aspect and the views, not the “experiences”. Thankfully the vendors’ hall was not as swamped with people as you would expect in a big event once you got past the booth closer to the front, but the same can not be said for the artist alley. The artist alley was just chaos at New York Comic Con and remained mostly so even into the final hour. Large industry vets with history working with the biggest names in comics were shoved in alongside indie artists and other local talent, making everything feel overwhelming and, dare I say, claustrophobic. Simply put, having all these artists in one place was too big for just one of the exhibition halls on the lowest floor and by the time I left, I had only seen half of the artists in  the artist alley.

Overall the experience was alright, though having to rush between the vendors hall and artist alley and make sure my mother was alright made things a bit more stressful than I would have liked, and having to divide the artist alley on a separate floor, while understandable due to the sheer number of artists, contributed to the rushed feeling I was experiencing as the sun dropped outside and the place slowly began to close in the evenings. Considering how disorganized everything was on my end, there were no cosplay photos for this event and I didn’t shoot any videos (to be fair, the place was packed and my phone doesn’t have the greatest camera, being several years old and all). I packed up my belongings, said goodbye to the people I met, and left, wishing I had an extra day to take in more of the event and the artists crammed into the lower floor.

Luckily for me, Anime NYC returned in a blaze of glory the very next month. With the crowds not as dense as New York Comic Con, it was much easier to get around the lobbies and the openings into the vendors. The convention had expanded gradually over the first three years it was held—the vendors’ hall easily seeing the biggest jump in booth quantity once it re-opened in 2021. The artist’s alley, spending the first two years on the fourth floor and getting shoved behind the vendors in 2019, now has its own section off to the northern side of the venue. This easily solved the crowd problems the artist alley suffered in 2019 while still making it easy to access and walk around, compared to the severe congestions of NYCC’s artist alley. As for the vendors, I didn’t really pay much attention to them. Some of the major vendors had really neat setups, including the return of the giant blow-up Luffy from the Toei Animation booth and two giant Gundam statues for the Gundam booth, which was presented as its own expo within the convention. Most of the other vendors were typical anime convention vendors, though being a bigger venue there was at least more to offer, too bad I don’t want to lug rare anime merch around for ~10 hours…

Ticket prices went up this year compared to prior events, and access to panels and autographs were done through raffles instead of just simply being there at the right place at the right time, so there was quite a bit of controversy before the convention had even started. I wasn’t planning on attending panels this year (I only attended a single panel during this year of conventions) and I never went to conventions for the special guests anyways; plus that would have been even more crap to carry around for an entire day (and my backpack is only so big, do I need to plan for a camping trip here?). Still, a seemingly unnecessary price hike and having to use raffles for something as trivial as going to a panel seems like an attempt to combat the ever-ongoing pandemic, considering Anime NYC 2021 was one of the big spreader events towards the end of 2021. Maybe by 2023 things will go back to normal and people will be able to go to panels and see their favorite guests with no tickets required? And if people cite “the line”, every con has lines whenever you like it or not, though some are far worse than others.

In the end, I enjoyed the event a great ton, it had a better artist’s alley but a downgraded vendor hall compared to New York Comic Con. I would say that it was a better time due to being less overwhelming and less packed than NYCC, but considering an explicitly anime convention would mostly only attract anime fans, it would be unfair to compare it to NYCC and the multi-genre approach it has taken in recent years. The lack of massive crowds did make it easier to take cosplay photos, and you all know where this is going…

Yup, cosplay time. Since AnimeNext didn’t happen, I ended up going overboard with the cosplay photos. Demon Slayer was still the top dog when it cane to representation, and fellow Shonen superstars Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and My Hero Academia still had a grand presence in the venue. The new flavor this time around was Chainsaw Man thanks to its very recent and hugely sucsesfull anime adaptation, and Bleach cosplays would make a surprise return in part due to the comeback of the anime. The hype of doing all these cosplay shots after resulted in a gallery of 199 photos, and considering the massive pain my legs were in, I don’t know if was worth the physical trauma or not. I doubt it’ll be a number I’ll ever top in the future especially when it only beat the previous record by 9 photos, but hey, quality over quantity they always say. That said it does make me realize that I could go for a new phone/camera for a bit of a picture quality and resolution boost sometime in the future.

You can find the gallery of event cosplay photos here.

And that’s pretty much it for 2022’s season of conventions. Where do I go from here, and what are my plans for 2023? The resulting soreness from Anime NYC made me cancel a trip I had planned to a local con on my home turf that took place the same weekend as Anime NYC. Thankfully I do have two other local events besides that, including a small local comic convention and a winter-themed one-day spinoff of Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. I don’t consider them major enough to widely post them—especially when they’re both only one day long, hence why these smaller, local events have stayed off the schedule image I’ve used all year. In terms of new, bigger events, I briefly considered something to fill the void of AnimeNext’s cancelation, but nothing came of it. For potential new ventures, MAGFest, Thy Geekdom Con, and Otakon have all made an impression on me, but it would either make the schedule too over-bloated in events or take too long to drive to (especially when AnimeNext, back when it was at the Atlantic City Convention Center, was a four hour drive the way there and back). Never say never, but at the moment I’m sticking with the main six cons on my platter (with hopes that AnimeNext’s new venue choice will still deliver and EternalCon will be able to re-grow most of what it lost next year).

As for this blog, as well as myself, I think I need some time to think of what I would put into a new blogpost, especially since I still have an overall end-of-year blogpost to write up. Until then, I'll see you later.