Conventions of 2023: Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023

For the length of... one year, retro game fans across the area have been waiting patiently for the triumphant return of the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo at the Cradle of Aviation. As it is currently the only game convention among the lineup of main events I attend yearly, I was quite eagerly excited myself, so much so that I decided to attend not one, but two days worth of the event. While traditionally a two-day event in the 2010’s, a third day was added for the expo’s return in 2022, featuring shorter hours and a limited number of activities on Friday. For 2023, Friday was expanded into a full proper Day 1 for the event, albeit only with afternoon hours from 4 to 10 PM.

The event kept the same presentation with a few small additions, changes, and expansions taking place across the expo’s three floors. Entering the convention, attendees are placed in the middle of the vendor’s area, which expands out into the back next to the cafeteria. Here, one can purchase game consoles and their associated games, along with gaming-themed merchandise of both official and homemade varieties. There were a few artists present, but as the event has historically favored vendors over artists, the amount of the latter can be counted on a single hand. As much as I like artist alleys and cute the lack of one as one of LIRetro’s missteps, the venue clearly isn’t big enough to have all the vendors it wants to have alongside a full, feature-rich artist alley. That, and Long Island has no shortage of events with healthy and thriving artist alleys, considering the likes of CradleCon and EternalCon. The vendors were open from the start of each day till 7, and everything would be covered in tarp and closed up.

The various consoles, arcade games, and computer games all returned, and were available for all of each day until closing time. The console timeline exhibit on the second floor got a few new machines, most notably the Wii U at the very end as the only machine of the 2010’s. I’m certain the 3DS would have joined it if they could secure a good unit to demo live, and by next year the base PS4 and original Xbox One will be 10 years old, giving them a fair shot at becoming the tail end the timeline as well. The selection of console games to play outside of the timeline exhibit was pretty strong, bigger than last year’s even, and this time the games were put into themed categories (i.e. platformer games, fighting games, racing games, and… art games) complete with standees describing each game and its history. Even a few Game Boys with Game Boy Cameras/Printers set up, letting attendees take selfies in 4-color greyscale monochrome and print them out on the accompanying printers. The arcade machines were, once again, spread into two different arcades on two different floors. The first floor arcade was mostly 90’s and some 2000’s titles set up into candy cabinets, mainly one-on-one fighting games and SHMUPs, though there were also a small collection of modern rhythm games set up and a few pinball machines were lined up for people to play (sadly only six, but what can you do when they’re kind of hard to transport and take up a lot of space). The second floor’s arcade didn’t change much from last year and featured the same focus towards earlier arcade titles, including the legendary Computer Space, but still had a very solid lineup of machines. Not all of the arcade games in this part of the venue were in the best condition—some of the monitors didn’t look all that great for example, but they were all CRT’s and modified to support free play through a button placed somewhere on the machine. And finally, all the way up on the third floor was a whole area dedicated to the history of Tetris, with many variants that were released over the 80’s and 90’s being open for all to experience.

For the rest of the free play areas, the classic PC gaming section returned, once again including some of the most notable PC and DOS titles of the 90’s and early 2000’s for people to play on. There was a free-play PC set up to house a collection of Windows games, letting one experience the look of a Windows 98 desktop and play games that weren’t able to get their own stations in the section. And for those that wanted to experience multiplayer games over good-old LAN, attendees could play nine-player Quake III Arena or OG Unreal Tournament all at the same time. It was a great lineup, perfect for anyone that grew up with consoles to see what people were experiencing on computers, considering retro gaming these days is usually more closely routed with consoles than computers. There was even a PC set up and decorated with Barbie Fashion Designer; obviously a tie in with the Barbie film that recently hit theaters a few weeks prior but it was a great look into one of the most significant and memorable pieces of software released for computers. Opposite of the PC freeplay section was the return of the Museum, a section housing rare and “exotic” consoles and computers. This year, many more machines joined the Museum, some with a rotating selection of games (like the Sharp X68k and the Commodore Amiga, which both swapped out games every half-hour). Many through not all of the machines also included their own standees going into the background history of all these different machines not commonly seen in the current era, or in the USA for that matter. One of the new rooms the Museum expanded into was sort of empty, but when you only have so many computers available to demo in a public space, you’ll understandably run out machines. As someone that always likes seeing the odd and obscure of the video game landscape, the Museum was a treat, and I’m looking forward to see it get bigger and better in the next few years.

So now that I gave you all a run down of the layout and some of the things you can experience at the event, let’s discuss the various activities of Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. Like any good convention, there were panels and guests all over the conventions, spread out into two panel rooms and some booths in the vendors respectively. I was only able to attend one, and the other panel I wanted to attend was sadly timed out in a way that I would miss something I singed up for—more on that later. Music performances once again occurred on the second floor next to the timeline exhibit, and thankfully they never accumulated any large oversized crowds of spectators clogging the area, even towards Saturday night when most of the rest of the event was closed up for the night and the third and final music guest performed at 8PM. It was still kind of loud, but the audio wasn’t blasting across the main area of the expo as it did in years prior. The indie gaming section returned, offering up free demos of indie titles as well as boxed copies of both modern and retro consoles. The NES Maker booth also returned, and new to the convention was Opcode, a group dedicated to keeping Coleco’s ColecoVision console alive through new hardware that expands its memory and lets it play new aftermarket games and arcade ports. I would have purchased one, but my ColecoVision is currently on standby for various reasons. Back down near the museum, there was the “Pokélab” (Pocket Lab), where if you brought an old-generation Pokémon title to the Expo, you could acquire various old and long-gone event Pokémon from past distributions up to the end of Generation V. It wasn’t every event distribution up to that point, and I didn’t feel like digging out my old carts, but if you have an old Pokemon game and missed these event distributions back then, this would be a good opportunity to acquire them again. That said the only thing that felt like it was missing from the Pokélab was a Celebi distribution for the Generation II games. With most of the other games covered, I’m surprised that was left out, but maybe there was no time to get one prepped and ready for the event?

Now where was I? Oh right, competitions. Like last year, many classic games were part of tournaments or other competitions. A slew of classic and modern fighting game brackets were held on the same grounds as the main first-floor freeplay area, along with a few other competitive multiplayer games that weren’t all head-to-head brawlers. Racing games, sports games, and even some puzzle and rhythm games had full tournaments ran. And to ensure even the younger attendees could get in on the competitive fun, various “Kid’s Tournaments” were held. Numerous High Score challenges were held for various other classic games that did not feature direct head-to-head gameplay; players were free to enter as they wish and try to go for the best score or time on a particular retro title, taking turns with other contestants to grind out for the best score possible. For me, one of the standout attractions for the competitive-minded was the EON Gaming section, including full 16-player LAN lobbies for Halo 2 and Mario Kart: Double Dash. While the PC LAN games in the PC game section let players drop in and out freely, players were required to sign up on a list for these, and were then assigned stations and put into teams if they didn’t have a squad lined up. Since I wanted to try my hand at 16-player Mario Kart, I signed up and got accepted into the very last shift of the day at 6:30 PM. With me as the driver and my teammate as the one throwing items and assisting with drifting, I channeled forth my skills at kart racing and led us to victory, scoring the most points out of every participant and getting to pose with the gold trophy. I didn’t get to keep the trophy, but it was nice to win at another competition at LIRetro, even if I didn’t necessarily aim to win, just place good overall and enjoy the experience since I won’t have another chance to play a massive 16-player session of Double Dash until next year.

And with that, that’s pretty much how Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023 went. I met lots of new people, played and learned about some new games to check out in my free time, and came home with a big smile on my face and a huge desire to come back the following year. LIRetro 2023 sits comfortably aside Castle Point Anime Expo as part of my top 2 favorite events of the year, and after the following week’s Long Island Tropic Con, it’s safe to say that I can finally take a well-deserved rest until October and enjoy all of what’s left of the summer season. In terms of what could be improved, there isn’t really much I’d say needs improving besides what comes up first in my mind: More games in the arcade and freeplay areas (mainly to fill in some empty spots in the venue, especially in the PC Freeplay and Museum sections), more vendors with maybe a small artist’s alley somewhere in the building if enough artists were to sign up, and maybe for Saturday, an evening panel or two for those attending the convention towards the end of the day. These are all very minor points and even if the game section only changed a small bit, I would still come back the following year for the premiere retro-gaming event of the
area.

And it looks like I’ve finally ran out of stuff to say about LIRetro 2023. Sorry that activity outside of these event coverages has been light and dry around social media and such; on top of wanting to enjoy the summer until it becomes too cold out, I’ve been going through some rough times and an internal re-structuring of sorts and figuring out what projects to make a priority, along with finishing up what I already started and steadily develop the world (and theoretical video games) of Aozora’s Adventure and the big cast of characters that inhabit it. I’ll likely make a follow up post sometime soon in September or October going into greater detail for my plans for the rest of 2023 and going into 2024. Until then, I’ll be taking a well-deserved hero’s rest until I re-awaken for New York Comic Con this October.

Super MAYhem 17: Super Mario Doom Patch

Heads up, this game is kinda on the violent side, being a mod of Doom and all, so please keep that in mind before you continue reading.

Also I promise Doom will not become a super-recurring topic of this blog, it's just hard to put down for long because of the infinite replay value the dozens and dozens of mods provide.

Anyways, now that I have your attention, what do I have in store for everyone today? Well, if you’ve been following me for quite some time on various sites over the years, you might have clued in that I’ve always been a pretty big Mario fan (especially in the 2000’s and early 2010’s) considering the name of this very blog. However, I cannot say the same for id’s legendary Doom franchise, which I got into somewhat late, in 2015 to be exact, from a combination of a friend in the Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch gifting me a copy out of the blue and… a custom mod from late 2012 that replaced all the characters and enemies with Mario equivalents, fittingly titled “Super Mario Doom”. Doomguy of course became the famous man in red with an arsenal of Mario and Nintendo-themed weaponry, the Zombiemen became different ranks of Koopa Troops, Demons became Chain Chomps, and the mighty Bowser himself would replace the dreaded Cyberdemon. Five years later, another Mario-themed mod would surface, doing the opposite of Super Mario Doom: place Doomguy and pals (as in, the demons you) into Mario’s world to turn the Mushroom Kingdom into a literal hell-hole. This mod was known as Super MAYhem 2017, and it included 28 new Mario-themed maps to shoot through.

But what if you were to mix the two mods together to make it a complete Mario experience from head to bottom, with some modifications to make it work in older versions and source ports of Doom? Well, in 2020, modder Doomkid would port Super Mario Doom into the Vanilla Doom format with the original Doom color palette, allowing it to be used on a greater range of source ports from old to new. It was from there that I, out of sheer curiosity, decided to test the vanilla edition of Super Mario Doom with Super MAYhem 2017. It worked great, but I did notice that some of the converted assets didn’t look their best when thrown directly into Super MAYhem 2017 since it used a slightly different palette and a custom final boss with its own set of sprites. And thus, during a brief break that I was taking in November/December, I recreated the Vanilla Edition of Super Mario Doom using sprites from the original Super Mario Doom mod but converted to Super MAYhem 2017’s palette and with some small touches and cleanups here and there.

The result is what you see here: a custom version of Vanilla Super Mario Doom made specifically (and only for) Super MAYhem 2017. At the moment, it’s mostly just color changes and restorations while maintaining vanilla Doom compatibility. I do have plans to make further changes, but for now I have my hands full in too many pies to be finding room to slot this project in, especially when I'm still mostly alien to Doom modding.

Anyways, you can grab the download for the initial version here. All relevant information is tucked away in the attached readme file, including the links and associated credits mentioned above. 

Conventions of 2023: EternalCon

After only a few weeks after AnimeNEXT, another event has come and gone, and here I am to give another summary. I promise that this overview will not be as long and overly written as AnimeNEXT’s, but I still want to give EternalCon the overview that I think it deserves before I end up forgetting about it. Once again, the event would take place at the David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex for its second year in a row, celebrating general pop culture with a very strong focus towards American comics, cartoons, TV series, and films. I enjoyed the event, but didn’t really go all out on the convention activities as I did with CPAC and AnimeNEXT, finishing the event and leaving hours before closure. I would have gone back the day after to explore a bit more of the event and converse more with friends and vendors, but with the weather turning to absolute garbage (pouring rain) on Day 2 and me having already walked several thousand steps and standing for much longer on hard concrete floors, I took my losses and only stuck to attending the first day of the event. In addition, several complications forced me to attend the convention alone, leaving me without one of the crucial tools I had used to endure these conventions longer (a camping chair… more on that in a bit).

Historically, I was never really a comics person. As a kid, I did not grow up with mainstream comics and superheroes, mostly from having never owned any comics in my youth and my lack of understanding for the genre beyond a casual, surface-level analogy. Many other popular media franchises that hit it big in the Americas, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the various early incarnations of Power Rangers also escaped me, as they were all at their peaks before my late childhood (with the former, and the Turtlemania craze it spawned, on its way out by the time I was born) and I wasn’t really able to understand them as I was too young. While I was certainly aware of the plentiful number of mainstream comics, blockbuster films, and the biggest shows of the eras thanks to various YouTubers and them spreading awareness of these franchises through word of mouth (one of the biggest examples for me being the Angry Video Game Nerd and the Nostalgia Critic), I never labeled myself as a close and avid follower of these in spite of any kind of admiration I would develop, whenever it be brief or longstanding, in adulthood. Regardless, I did become more interested in the art styles of American comics as I started to meet and interact more with both indie and professional comic artists at EternalCon’s prior events, New York Comic Con, and a few other, smaller-scale local events in the area. Interacting with webcomic artists in the late 2010’s and the bonds I would develop with various artists in the local convention scene here on Long Island helped with that interest, but at the end of the day, American media was still not my biggest interest or my central focus.

With that explanation out of the way, it’s time for EternalCon. In terms of layout, the event was laid out identically to last year. The Artist’s Alley felt much less empty this time around with the addition of some extra booths and people selling hand-crafted goods similar to craft fair. Below that was the vendors’ area, which was nice and carpeted and had a wide selection of things to buy— unfortunately I would only pay one visit down to the vendors and never got the motivation to return, and the one person down there that I was looking to converse with, one of the guys behind the professional wrestling deck-builder Supershow the Game, who’s I had met at EternalCon 2022, was occupied. They did have various famous cars from pop culture for photo ops, but seeing as I am neither into Batman nor Ghostbusters, I paid no mind to those and simply returned upstairs back into the artist alley, only to be too sore towards the end of my visit to the convention to give the vendors one more look before ultimately departing. This was, in essence, a reverse of my experience with NYCC 2022: At that convention, the vendors stole the show from the artists, but at EternalCon, the artists did. And while vendors typically don’t grab my attention as I’m not at conventions to go shopping (even at anime conventions), paying very little attention to EternalCon’s and not bothering to snap any photos down there was probably my biggest regret of the entire event, and I do not like leaving conventions feeling like my visit there was either rushed, half-assed, or otherwise incomplete.

Perhaps my biggest issue with the event was the lack of available free seating. I’ve brought up multiple times in the past and across the years that convention centers and other venues that host big pop culture events like these should strive to fill their event spaces with readily available seating in just enough of a quantity that people aren’t fighting or otherwise continuously waiting for available seats. With the exception of panels and game rooms (of which this event didn’t have any, to my understanding), most events or the venues hosting them have done very little to address this problem, especially if an attendee has weak legs that are not able to last hours standing upright on hard floors with no breaks. The lack of seating is bad enough to where I would bring a camping chair to each event in order to sit down and take occasional breaks, but various circumstances have led to me forgetting to bring the chair to EternalCon, and for that I ended up strained in pain for most of the event towards the late afternoon, running a marathon through the artist’s alley with no breaks. The only event that I attend regularly that manages to circumvent this issue unless you deliberately seek out lots of panels is Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, since it needs so many seats for all the gaming options available (but with so many games and activities you’re not really encouraged to stay put in one seat for too long).

Other than that, the convention was good, on par with the local pop culture cons I attend across Long Island each year. The event had a really strong artist’s alley, and as someone that doesn’t really surround himself in many of the biggest American media franchises, that was probably the biggest incentive I had to attending EternalCon. Maybe next year if I’m able to come to EternalCon with better preparations (and stronger legs), I will immerse myself deep in the convention’s activities, vendors, and showcases the same way I do at New York Comic Con. Until then, I have a whole year to go through and several more events to attend, so there’s a good chance you’ll see me give those events’ vendors more attention to make up for the lack of attention I gave to EternalCon’s. Unfortunately I do not have any cosplay photos to show from this event, as the cosplay showing was not enough to my liking and I typically skip cosplay showcases at EternalCon and the other local comic and pop culture events anyways. I do have some commissioned arts to share, so I’ll go and plug those.

Anyways that’s all I have for today. I will return next month for a synopsis of Long Island Retro Gaming Expo 2023, and it’s shaping up to be a big event from what I’ve seen of it online.

The Twitter Alternatives

This is going to be a shorter blog post than you're likely used to, but I thought I'd update you all on a few more sites I joined in the wake of many controversial changes made to Twitter in the past few months. These are currently light on content and I will be treating these as a mix of my normal and art/creative focused Twitter accounts (the latter of which has not seen much activity as I am currently occupied with both my personal health and finishing some leftover WIP's). Two of these sites are Twitter-styled social media sites and the third is a site that I did not see myself ever joining until recently.

Mastodon

Bluesky (currently in beta, future-proofing for when the site opens or for those with access)

Tumblr

If Twitter becomes completely uninhabitable due to all of these changes, I will likely migrate most of my social posting online to across these three sites. Until then, I'm keeping my focus to Twitter, even if the site's algorithm has been detrimental to my account and the many, many interests I have.

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.