Fan Expo 2015 (Last time I went before this was 2008)

Yo! How has everyone been? Con season is almost over and it has me thinking about what I should focus on after. Twitch? Youtube? blog about different topics? make a comic? write a script? make skits? these are all things I've been contemplating but I haven't decided yet. Anyways, I went to Fan Expo yesterday (Sunday) for the first time in 7 years. The reason I didn't go for so long is because it was really disorganized and overcrowded. Plus, the staff seemed like they weren't properly trained to deal with so much people. The only reason I went this year was because my friend wanted to meet PJ Phil (he's a YTV host from back in the day) and since I grew up watching Phil as well, I decided to tag along. I was sceptical going in to this con because of my past experiences, so I was prepared for the worst.

My friend and I went on Sunday because we knew it would be the least packed that day. The good thing about this year was the fact that they used both the South and North parts of the Metro Convention Centre (it's about a 15 minute walk between the buildings but they really needed it with their huge crowd). In 2008 when we first attended, the convention was only in the South building which caused overcrowding, so it was good to see that they got more room for the event.  We entered the North building first and this area had the celebrity signing, horror and community sections. The vendors there all had great products to check out and take pictures of. Here are some of my pictures from the North building:

This was a signed poster from the group Goblin. I wanted to ask if it was the same Goblin that worked on the Suspiria soundtrack but forgot to go back.

Just some random props I saw hanging around the horror section.

Had to take a picture with Jason! This was selling for 350 which is a pretty good price.

Those were all the pictures I got at the horror section. They also had free face painting for kids in that area which I thought was a good idea. Now I will show some of the stuff that was being sold in the North building.

I have a lot of friends that play League of Legends (I play as well sometimes) so I had to get pics for them.

Had to take a picture of all these great banners!

Some artwork that was in the area. I never seen this Army of Darkness one before.

Some street fighter and Simpsons figures. I got the Honda one in a Street Fighter surprise bag that I bought at Unplugged Expo.

These were probably the greatest find at the expo. Unfortunately they weren't being sold because of how rare they are to get nowadays.

I didn't take pictures at the celebrity section because I planned to come back to the North building and get the autographs at 3 PM; Unfortunately, Tara Strong and Nolan North left before then and Gillian Anderson costs 90 dollars for a personalised photo and 80 dollars for a photo-op...so those didn't happen. I did manage to get Steve Blum's autograph and it was great to meet him.

I was really impressed with everything that I saw in the North building and it got me wondering...what could be in the South building? So my friend and I walked there (took about 15 minutes) and this area had the artist alley, video games and movies. To my surprise, they also had a Street Fighter V beta with all the announced characters so far! Unfortunately, they didn't have arcade sticks and we weren't allowed to record any game-play. I picked R.Mika both times and lost but she seems to play really different in this game. Also, it's going to take a while to get familiar with the new mechanics but I had a blast trying it out. My friend did manage to get some footage before we were shut down:

I didn't take much pictures on this side because I was too busy playing the games lol. Here are the few I did take:

Doing the signature pose near a Halo Lego Figure

The Witcher trying to stop the signature post

Had to get the power rangers and TMNT in there

Can't forget Deadpool!

And of course, I have to include the whole reason we went to this expo...to meet PJ Phil!:

It was a pleasure meeting him and it brought back memories of watching the Zone when I saw his table lol. He's a genuinely funny person and you could tell he enjoys meeting everyone that grew up watching YTV back in the day.

 All in all, I would say I was pleasantly surprised with how good this event is now compared to the last time I went. They have really come a long way and hopefully they can find ways to continuously improve this event. They also had other attractions that I took pictures with but didn't include in this blog (you can always check out my Instagram if you want to see more). There was one problem and it was the fact that it was almost impossible to leave their official parking area near the North Building. We waited about an hour and a half before we went back to the car to exit and there were still problems. I would suggest getting some workers to help remind people to pay before they exit and to help them out by the exit bars so that they can leave with little issue. Other then that, it was a great expo; This pretty much sums up my feelings:

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Two cons left and then it's back to hibernating lol. Until next time!

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!

Toryuken 4 and the Enthusiast Gaming Live Event

Hey guys! As promised, I'm here with another blog entry and it didn't take months to upload! There's a lot of stuff happening this summer and I'm off this week so I'm able to update this thing lol.  I'll be covering Toryuken and the EG Live event that was taking place in the same venue.

Toryuken 4 was the first tournament that I entered and it was really fun. My neighbour and I entered the Street Fighter tournament and he was my first opponent (lol what are the chances?). The first day of the tournament was running very late and the space for the FGC games wasn't that big. There was also an EG Live event taking place in the same convention so it was cool that we had the option to check out other things while we waited. My pool was about 2 hours late but it was all good because it is very hard to schedule something with so much people. Still, I feel like they can improve on this for next year. After waiting for the 2 hours, I ended up winning my first match against my neighbour (played with E. Honda in all my tournament matches). Justin Wong was in the same bracket and if I won two more matches then I would face him. Justin even watched my second match and was keeping score of it because he was helping run the bracket (he was a very nice person BTW). Unfortunately, I lost to a Bison player at the last round of the last match.

I noticed I was jumping in too much and the Bison player gave me some pointers against this match-up which I appreciated a lot because I'm always looking for ways to improve. So now, I'm in the losers bracket and it's all YOLO! (yeah I know it's a lame thing to say but what if Emma Stone said it?)

My first match in the losers bracket was against a Juri and I was able to win that one 2-0. Next up was a Makoto and it went down to the last round last match again. This time I had another E. Honda player watching and cheering me on (never got his name but shout out to that guy for cheering against his friend lol). He kept telling me to jump light punch during the match and it was the move that delivered the winning blow! Next up was a Rufus player and it came to the last match last round again....Beside him giving him tips was the Bison player that beat me and unfortunately I lost the match by a little bit. After that I was eliminated but going 3-2 for your first tournament is pretty good IMO.

I wanted to face Justin Wong and Infiltration but never got the chance. Although, I know that I need more practice if I want to be competitive with them because I got eliminated so early. After I was eliminated I decided to check out all the stuff the Enthusiast Gaming Live area had to offer and it was pretty cool. I like the fact that they teamed up and did an event together because it gives people a lot of options. There were tournaments for DOTA, Counter Strike, Smash Bros, etc... as well as live speed runs taking place. There were multiple booths for gaming and gear but one that I found really interesting was an E-Sports bar opening up in Toronto that will have drinks based on video games and you will be able to play video games in there as well. I took a picture of some of the drinks:

There were some more impressive booths that I saw but I didn't take a picture of all of them. I did however take some pictures and here they are:

The second day of the event ran a lot smoother then the first despite the blackouts the happened (about 3 of them lol). Here's some footage I took during one of them:

Although, you can't blame the blackouts on the event organizers as it was something that was happening in Mississauga at the time. Infiltration ended up winning USF4 decisively and Justin Wong won Marvel. There were a lot of other tournaments but those were the two I followed. Mortal Kombat seemed to have a lot of hype because the local players are really strong (a Canadian ended up winning that tournament, which is awesome!). I also went to some of the panels that EG Live was hosting but not much people seemed to attend them (maybe people didn't know they were allowed in those rooms? Or there was not much advertisement for them?). My friend and I made this bead art during one of the panels:

I would say this tournament was a great experience despite the long wait the first day. I will definitely try to go next year and make it to top 16 at least! I was going to talk about the Z-Trip & QBert event at the Phoenix Hall that we went to after this event but that would make this post too long. I'll just say that it was a dope show!! As always, feel free to follow me:

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