Pros and Cons: Animazement 13, Part 3

Hey, PaulM aka Lungkisser here with some pros and cons from North Carolina's proest con, Animazement (AZ).

PROs:

That dealer room!

The dealer room at AZ was amazing. I'm not really much of a window shopper and I tend to browse pretty quickly but I still spent a few good solid hours in there over the course of the weekend. I found myself wishing that there was a store that was anything like a con's dealer's room.

Video games

For an anime convention, AZ had a surprisingly cool game room. It had a great mix of games, from some newer stuff like Super Street Fighter IV (SSFIV), Tekken 6, Rock Band 2, and BlazBlue, to older stuff like Melty Blood, Bomberman on the Sega Saturn, high score challenges on arcade games like Donkey Kong and Burger Time (free play, of course) and older fighters like Marvel vs. Capcom. While it would never be as big of a game room as I'd want, for an anime convention it was pretty great.

Artist Alley

I'm a much bigger fan of professional artwork than amateur artwork, but Artist Alley had enough impressive artists doing their thing that I gotta say, it was a pleasure just to walk around and see what they could do.

CONs:

Weeaboos

I'm a gamer before I'm an anime fan, and while I can be as weeaboo as the nastiest mouthbreather, gaming is my THING, so most of the time the anime-only weeaboos were more in the background or just a nuisance than anything.

Quality over Quantity

Make no mistake that I think the quality of the assortment of video games in the gaming room was great, but there were not enough stations! All those games pretty much only had one spot, and people were lining up to play SSFIV and Tekken while other stations had the same two people or nobody for the longest time. Next year I can understand only one table for the those games, but with SSFIV especially being only out for a month or two, you should have KNOWN people would want to play it! Bonus complaint: tournaments were held in the same room as other people casually playing. Bad idea!

Two small complaints

I bundled these two together 'cause they're kind of small, but one is that I was so sick of all the walking, especially the unnecessary walking you'd do to simply try to meet up with people and end up walking back the way you came anyway, rather than having them meet you. Second, the prices. $3.50 for a drink, $8 for some nachos. The only guy who could get away with overcharging was the hot dog guy, 'cause he was amazing. Try the kielbasa!

And that's all I got. While I didn't have the greatest weekend, the pros outweighed the cons, and so I'll probably be back next year!