INITIAL PICDUMP FROM OUR CONSOLE GAMING BOOTH
SHMUP FACES PICDUMP
PANEL PICTURES
VIDEO CLIP OF ME HITTING THE LOOP
THE KETSUI RUN, CLEAN RECORDING
These are entirely unedited, so some are poorly exposed or composed or just plain bad. Literally just dumped the pics into an album and uploaded it because I didn't have time to sort through everything yet. The second set is a series of portraits showing people's reactions to watching or playing the games -- I thought it was really interesting to see how into it everyone got. Some of the shots are of random passerby who for whatever reason never came up to try the games themselves, yet clearly resonated with them on some level.
I really wish we had more shots of the panel itself... I actually had a friend of mine taking pics throughout the whole thing (he got more than 100), but he apparently had no idea how to use a DSLR for stills (he's a decent video guy though; was responsible for some of the best footage from the event actually). So roughly 90% of his shots came out incredibly blurry because of shaky hands, prolonged shutter speed, or bad focus. I collected the best ones and uploaded them to a small imgur album.
Crew Photos
Left to right, top to bottom on first image: Trap15, Softdrink 117, GDLKscrub, Frenetic. Not pictured: cuilanB, mdl.
And check out the awesome STG Weekly T-shirts, courtesy of EllertMichael! These were a test batch for STGW@AX staff members and to make sure the print run would come out well; now that we know things will work we will open up public orders soon!
A very quick recap of what went down:
Thursday:
Only one actual gameplay station was working
Constant foot traffic
People would come up to play or watch constantly
Seat was never empty for more than five minutes
Met "Joeybeta" from the Touhou fan community and he offered to bring his own setup
Friday:
Three xbox stations with tate monitors
Two laptops for doujins (Crimzon Clover mostly, a special request for Hellsinker though)
A 47" TV brought by Joeybeta running Touhou games all day
Much more foot traffic, seats basically never empty at all
Lots of engagement from attendees and a high level of interest in our panel
Saturday:
Panel attendance quite probably in the hundreds (we printed 200 flyers and RAN OUT)
History section was great this time; audience got really engaged
Demonstration was absolutely insane. I have never had a better shmup moment. To summarize:
- Ketsui clear after NM2B (I think) all the way until stage 5 boss
- The entire final boss fight the crowd is literally chanting my name
- Get clear, start to stand up and take a bow...
- Screen turns *WHITE* instead of black
- HOLY SHIT DID I JUST LOOP!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
- Proceed to flip the fuck out because I finally made the loop
- Make it to 2-3 Omote playing totally blind
- Applause and cheering on game over, almost forget to save replay because I am so fucking happy
I have no idea how the commentary went because I had headphones on during the run and couldn't hear anything except really loud crowd noises, but it seemed like everyone got really into it.
We had a lot of people stay after to ask questions; security had to force people to leave so that they wouldn't interfere with the next panel.
Later during the day we set ourselves back up in the console gaming area and again got a lot of foot traffic; people even waited in line to play Futari and DFK.
Oh, and we got the whole thing on film. From three separate cameras. With actual cameramen behind them. And audio recorded in two separate locations, including straight from the mixer. We have a total of 4 or 5 hours of content to edit together to cover the 90-minute panel. I took many, many, many pictures of our setup throughout the entire weekend; I'll try to get at least some of them up by tomorrow night.
HUUUUUUUUUGE thanks to Frenetic, trap15, GDLKscrub, cuilanB, and mdl. I am so incredibly glad that we were able to put together an event like this. Special thanks to Joeybeta for bringing his gear out and Rockin' Android Games for helping us get this amazing opportunity.
