AYACON 5

SATURDAY: stuff & things

With the help of a few alarms I was up and met Edge and his friends down in one of the small cafes for a breakfast of sausage and bacon sandwiches and Transformers related chat. We moved onto the games rooms as MangaMad wanted to check out the collectable card room and I was to be in the Naruto Gekitou Ninja Taisen 3 tournament next door that had been arranged on the Aya forums much earlier. We hung around a bit waiting for more people to arrive and I decided to pass them some of the A3S promos, and basically I couldn’t believe it, these guys were actually laughing out loud at nearly every page. Maybe I am doing something right, or had I just hit my like-minded target audience?
Edge and co decided to leave for other missions while I stayed behind chatting to random people and waiting to see if this Naruto thing would kick off. Soon enough Ropponmatsu, cosplaying as Gaara, turned up with some friends and his Gamecube. It took a while but soon enough others arrived for the tourney (including Fiona) and the game was finally set up on the big screen. We were all then ushered out by the gophers for some unknown reason, something that sounded like “we have to check the power” or something. Basically they told us all to come back in an hour, so Fiona and I decided to have another float around, checking out the artist gallery and then the main dealer’s room. Bar drooling over all the content of the dealer’s room (and crying at some of the prices), one stand seemed to stick out. The ADV guys were about, led by the main man Hugh David, the dude who I brought the slightly scratched and thumbprint covered Hellsing box set from at Amecon. As well as their latest releases, they were promoting their new ADVocates plot. This basically involves giving a free monthly DVD of a few pilot episodes to anime clubs in the country after they sign up. As Ven and I had just taken control of YATA, I was in prime position to sign up to this.

Bit of game

Fiona and I high-tailed it back to the games room to find everyone still standing outside. It seems the story went like this; the gophers had discovered that Ropponmatsu (like most if not all of us) was using a UK Gamecube with a Freeloader that allows the system to play the Japanese game disc. Supposedly the Freeloader is only supposed to be used for Japanese preview discs… a lot of us didn’t believe such fact. Actually, still gotta look it up, either way they weren’t taking any risks (supposedly some Nintendo rep was about as well) and so we had to wait until someone came along with a Japanese Gamecube. So while we all continued to wait, I chatted, passed out A3S comics, and took photos.
Finally the Japanese Gamecube arrived but there was one major problem, we couldn’t use Ropponmatsu’s UK memory card as the system would try to format it, so the tournament was put on hold and everyone volunteered to start going through the mission mode to start unlocking characters and then onto random 4 player bouts to raise more money in-game to buy said characters. Even the gopher cringed at all the missing characters on the select screen. Fiona and I took on a few missions and mostly succeeded in them. Have to say, I think I was being nervous with the huge crowd surrounding me and I made a lot of mistakes for someone that had my experience on the game. In the four player battles it was noticed by all that Fiona was an absolute killer with the Sasuke character. Loadsa fun!
During this time the lovely Kat from Two Sides Wide appeared after a quick txt to bring me the plain black kat-hat I requested. It looks way cool (I even had a couple of random girls play with the ears and say it was cute) and much homage must be given to her for making them so well. We got chatting but she and Amy wanted to move onto the artist gallery and such as they were only visiting for that day. It was seconds after that it clicked that I hadn’t paid her and I ended up chasing her down the hall with the money (thanks for the note btw Lu-chan).
Fiona and I stayed for a little while longer but since it was stated that the tournament would be moved to the next day and we wanted to check more of the convention out, we decided to leave them to it.
It was then we realized we’d been in there for quiet a while and had missed out on several events such as the Tokyopop panel, the manga industry, games industry, ADV Films, Amecon, voice acting, Sweatdrop, and so on. We decided to continue this trend by blatantly missing the masquerade... actually we just saw the size of the crowd trying to get in and ran away (it was seriously chockablock).

The pub quiz

After floating around the art and dealer rooms again we ended up back at the bar for munchies. Sadly Fiona had to go again and so I was left to my own devices… sadly there were no cat girls around, so I went to the pub quiz. I’d already seen Keiichi (from Amecon) and he was up for the quiz again and a quick call to Edge made sure the old team would be reunited. I turned up fashionably late (ok, I just got very lost again) but thankfully the quiz was a little late too. Noticing a lonely looking Kate F and Andy H, I asked them to join us and ‘The League of Extra-Ordinary Otaku’ were back! Other team names included wonders such as ‘Doom all over your face’, the funky ‘Bah weep granah weep ninni bong’ (referred to as ‘they who shall not be named’ by the quiz master), the barely audible ‘Team far away’, and the constantly teased ‘Team Yaoi’. It was another great quiz full of laughs and varying questions. Did you know the English dub scripts for Samurai Pizza Cats were just made up as none of the script writers understood Japanese? We all had our specialties; Kate (being a Sakura cosplayer and massive CLAMP fan) thrashed the CardCaptor Sakura question that came up and a few others. Edge’s eyes lit up again and easily nailed a Gundam Seed question that many missed. Keiichi was just a legend on most of the questions, and Andy and I backed up with the odd one here and there (was I really the only one that knew what the relationship between Sana and Rei was in Kodomo no Omocha according to her? The answer of course being her ‘manager, boyfriend, and pimp’. Ah, just watch it, it’s funny. Points were awarded for bringing the quiz maser beer, points were taken away silliness that just wasn’t funny enough.
In the end we came fourth, but only the winning team went home with the prize, the large laminated photo of Helen McCarthy (?!).

We actually watch anime now?

Afterwards we all moved on, though I got Edge to follow me into the J-Pop party just to check it out. Indeed it was packed and loud and crazy, I was happy with that and so we did a once around and escaped before browsing the con guide.
We checked out some anime music videos before watching two episodes of Die Buster/Gunbuster 2 (think the original Gunbuster but in a very different and FLCL style) and Trinity Blood (seriously looking like a cross between Trigun and Hellsing).
With nothing else showing we headed to the accommodation blocks. My cold had fully kicked in and I was having trouble breathing and sleeping, a recently required Tenchi Muyo manga helped me on my way after filling out the ADV form (with Ven’s helpful txts) for tomorrow.
Ahh, the dark milk of sleep.

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