My Experience at Unplugged Expo 4

Yo! As promised, I am back with another blog entry and this time I will be covering the Unplugged Expo. Also, I found out that I can pretty much copy and paste these posts and put them on my blog's that are on IGN (maybe get more viewers? Who knows? doesn't hurt to try though!). Anyways, let's get started!

This was my first time attending this con and I got the 3 day pass because there was a Street Fighter tournament that was scheduled. When I went on Friday the con was empty but that was to be expected since a lot of people work that day or are too tired after work to head out. There was an after-party that was around 10 PM but I didn't go because I was too tired. My friend did end up going but he said it was dead and the reason they had the party on Friday instead of Saturday was because of Caribana Weekend (the hotels were packed with people celebrating Caribana).

I also bought a Street Fighter gift bag that said it had 90 dollars worth of SF product in it and they were selling it for 60. Of course I bought it because I'm a big fan and I find out it has: a street fighter character book, an E.Honda mini figure and a huge Guile Hello Kitty plushie. I have no idea what to do with that plushie but at least I got that E.Honda mini figure though!

When we went on Saturday it was more of the same. The con was still pretty empty and it turns out there wasn't enough people to have a tournament. I wasn't too mad about this since they at least tried to plan something at such a small event. All the guys running the gaming section were really nice as well so I just played a couple matches when I felt like it. I also got to try that mixing game that I've seen at previous cons! It's really fun when you get the hang of it.

Also, there were a lot of cool looking tables which you can check out below:

My favourite table was of course the Toronto Power Ranger table because they had all sorts of raffles and fundraisers for charity. When you donate some money you get to shoot a member of your choice, so I had to go with the putty since he's a bad guy and promised to make the weird noises they make when he get's hit lol.

 I also got this sick picture with them! Unfortunately, I didn't get any of the raffle prizes but I ordered the Limited Black MegaZord from Toys R Us after finding out it was available from this con.

 I also visited a bunch of panels. One of them was about comics with Valentine Delandro and Adrian Alphona. They were very informative with their answers and it made me want to check out more of their stuff. There was a bunch of other ones but I'm not going to cover them all. The other panel that I found interesting was the Kill La Kill panel because I never watched the show but I was tired and decided to sit down and pass some time while listening to them. I found out that one of the voice actors in that show (Carrie Keranen) also voiced Caska from Berserk! So of course when I went home I did more research and found out that the other voice actor (Erica Mendez) does the voice for Annie from Skullgirls! The final day goal was to get my Berserk DVD signed by Carrie and get a picture with her:

I also got a Kill La Kill card from Erica Mendez and her and Carrie both signed it:

On the final day they had an X-Men musical. Unfortunately, the main stage is right beside the gaming area so it was hard to make out some of what they were saying at times.

I will say that the musical was pretty funny and it had my girl Jubilee so of course it get's extra points for that lol.

This con overall was pretty fun but they have a couple of things that they need to work on. I would suggest not putting the main stage near the gaming area since it's really distracting for the people on stage to talk when loud noises are happening right beside them. I would also suggest not doing this around the same time as Caribana since A LOT of people will be going to that event instead of this one. They should also make the gaming area bigger. It was hard to walk around in that area which makes no sense since they had a bunch of room for eating (I didn't see much people in this area btw) but none for gaming. There is potential in this con and hopefully they can improve on it next year. They need to find a way to get more traffic because it seemed like the vendors weren't selling much and some didn't even show up on Sunday.

 I'd say overall this con was just a little short of meeting the mark in some aspects. As previously stated, I think there is great potential with these guys and I think with the proper changes they can have something great here. I might check it out again next year but we'll have to see what the line up is looking like. Until next time guys!

Going to ConBravo for the First Time

Hey guys! As you all know, I have been going to a lot of cons this summer and I recently went to two that I haven't attended before. These cons are both still fairly new and don't have much guests appearing at them. Fist, I will talk about ConBravo, let's get started!

I initially wasn't going to go to this event because I had a wedding to go to the previous day. I thought I would be tired, but I wasn't, so we headed to the event a little late (around 3 hours late). I had no goal at this con, mainly because I didn't know any of the guests there (they were all youtubers that I was unaware of) so I was just following my friend to see how the con was. My friends goal was to meet the Black Nerd and he did just that at the TMNT panel. The TMNT panel that was hosted by the Black Nerd and his colleagues was handled really well. They talked about the good memories:

And the bad memories:

I didn't take much pics at this con because it was fairly small and I wasn't there for a long period, so taking pictures wasn't really on my mind. In addition to that, when I found the game room, I didn't leave that area. I had low expectations going into this con, so when I found the game room and it had a Street Fighter and King of Fighters arcade cab, I was like:

At first, I thought you had to pay 25 cents to use the arcade cabinets but then I found out you didn't have to pay anything! This was pretty awesome because I doubt people would've been playing otherwise. Some of the arcade cabs that were there were: Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter 3, Mortal Kombat 3 and a Neo-Geo collection one.

They also had a set up for Ultra Street Fighter 4, Killer Instinct and CVS2. It was my first time playing Killer Instinct and it seems like a fairly easy game to jump into (I was beating people that played the game before). I still don't know how to play that game but it was fun and the people that I played were all really nice. The guys that were good at fighting games were pretty much crowded around the Third Strike cab (I got some wins and losses there).

You could tell whoever was in charge of setting up this area was a big fighting game fan and knew exactly how to set up a gaming area. There were all types of games including: dancing, mixing, fighting, retro and the list goes on. 

Now I will show some of the stuff I saw in the video game area:

This is the E.T videogame that is famous for being terrible. I played it for about 3 minutes and couldn't get out that area. I have to say they might be right about this one lol.

Of course I had to hit the classic SF2 for Super Nintendo. Props to the guys that still have a working SNES from back in the day (I don't sadly).

This was the retro area that had SNES, Atari, PS2 and other retro systems running the classics.

This was a mixing game that I didn't get to try out but it looked awesome! Overall, ConBravo did exceed my expectations because of the one gaming area. This con had the best gaming area I have seen at any of these events. The con itself is small but for 20 dollars admission, there's not much to complain about. This is a con I would visit again for the games. Hopefully they get more guests that I know of in the future.

That's pretty much my experience at ConBravo. I will try to get my post about Unplugged Expo (the second con I attended recently) up soon. Until then,

 Peace!