I’ve been thinking about old arcades lately. This article, brought to my attention by Chris Remo @ teh shack, has prompted me to put my thoughts down too.

When I was a kid, I played arcade games in two places, as the article intimated. I got to play in great big arcades (”the amusements”) with rows and rows of machines when I went on holiday to Blackpool, Scarborough, Great Yarmouth, Torquay, Paignton. My mum and nan dropped me off while they got away from the cacophany, leaving me with a handful of 10 pence pieces and fantastic gaming opportunities at every turn.

Back home in the city was a different story. Sometimes I’d get lucky and the local supermarket would add a machine - for a while, Morrissons had an I, Robot cabinet. My mum would never take me into any of the actual arcades in Leeds though, because they were such crapholes. Of course, I’d sneak in with my friends when we went to town on Saturday afternoons, pocket money in hand. I don’t even remember the names of them now, but the two main game holes were both next to pubs, one was under a train bridge, the other nestled in an alleyway, and they were both populated by dodgy-looking men and foul-mouthed kids.

I might not remember the names, but even now, 20 years later, I can close my eyes and remember the layouts of all these places, whether they were grungy or great. In the grungy places, I remember a distinct tightening in the stomach watching my friend Peter Miles play Punch Out, innocently making comments about his dark-skinned opponent, not realising that a rather large black man was standing beside me. I remember wasting money on the Space Ace machine, it seeming so out of place amongst the other arcage games and the fruit machines that made up the majority of the hole-in-the-wall area. I remember spending more time with Temple of Doom in this place than in any of the seaside amusements.

I don’t share the author’s fondness for these dirty, smelly places though, not really. I might remember the games, but I didn’t like having to go in there. I have much happier memories of the giant (or so they seemed at the time) seaside amusements, where kids would run around like idiots without worrying about pissing off Big John or catching the eye of the greasy-haired pervert. Instead, I’d happily graze the cabinets, going from Karate Champ (FULL POINT) to Super Mario Bros. to Combat School to Outrun to Dragon’s Lair, where I’d lose a couple of quid in approximately 38 seconds.

As time went on, there were more places to go to play games in Leeds, places that actually had lighting and cabinets that weren’t covered in bacteria. More games showed up in the bowling alley, which is where I first got to play Operation Wolf with the Uzi. As more of the industrial area became commercialised, a laser tag place opened up as part of a larger “entertainment centre”, near the old Jolly Giant. I went a couple of times with my friend Jason Holt - we were old enough to no longer be worried by the dingy arcades, but it was still nice to play shiny new machines, and I remember we were both blown away by Virtua Fighter. He also destroyed me in Street Fighter II. I can’t use the fact that I was using a new character (Cammy), because he was using the new characters too. Besides, I’ve always been terrible at Street Fighter.

Which brings us to today. I’m in a different country, with a different arcade history, but oddly enough, arcades are in a state that falls neatly between the two British types. You’ll find them in malls, and they’re not really dingy - they’re billed as “family entertainment centers”. But they are getting smaller and smaller, and they’re filled with old games nobody else wants to play anymore, often with barely-working controls.

One thing has remains the same however - I always get a twinkle in my eye when I walk into an arcade.

A working downgrader has been released to take your 2.00 firmware PSP back to 1.50 - thus opening the world of homebrew software to you. Congrats

Another thing I learned at AI - I’ll whine and complain about the hotel pop machine charging 2 bucks for a bottle of Diet Pepsi, but I’ll gladly pay that for a bottle of ramune in the dealer room.

It’s all about the marble.

We spent the last weekend at Anime Iowa, an anime convention in Des Moines. It has been running for several years, starting in Cedar Rapids but moving two years ago to two floors of the Hotel Fort Des Moines. As lovely as it is, we didn’t stay in the hotel because we would have had to have booked months in advance - some con-goers booked their rooms when they were leaving the con last year! Instead, we stayed an the Marriott, an experience that left us feeling like schlubs. You know that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he doesn’t tip the bellhop? Yeah. I’ve now lived that. Obviously, we can never return to that hotel.

So, we got down to Des Moines on the Friday. The convention actually opened at noon, and we got down there early in the afternoon as I didn’t want to miss much. Only Sam and I would be at the convention proper - Charlotte’s just too young to take around for three days, so we didn’t see the point in spending another $35 for Amy to register if she wasn’t going to be able to spend much time in the con, so we decided it’s just be the boys this year. We set off for a ten minute walk down the skywalk - a rather cool feature of Des Moines that allows you to walk all over downtown without setting foot outside - to the con. We could tell we were going in the right direction because people were wearing increasingly strange outfits. Cosplayers!

Call it cosplay, costume play, or just fancy dress, but the act of dressing up as your favorite anime or videogame character is a big part of modern anime conventions. A very big part. I would say that of the approximate 1600 attendees this year, the majority were in costumes ranging from the simplistic (here are two copies of Fullmetal Alchemist’s Envy to the elaborate (one of several versions of Chii from Chobits). Lest you think that there are only female cosplayers, here’s a group of Raccoon City’s finest, although admittedly Ada Wong probably got more attention. Well look at her, she looked really good. So yes, cosplay is definitely ingrained in anime fandom at this level, and I wish we’d have dressed up too.

We reached the hotel, and after milling around the lobby trying to find where to go, we realised everything was upstairs. Registration desks were setup close to the entrance, and as we were preregistered we were able to quickly pickup our badges and were ready to head off into the growing throng of people. Even though it was still early in the afternoon, it was already getting quite packed.

Looking around, I got a pretty good idea at the sort of people I’d be spending the weekend with. AI is a fan-run convention, not the smallest but certainly not as big as something like Anime Expo (site currently empty as they prepare for 2006) or even the midwest’s Anime Central (site also empty in preparation for next year, but they at least have links to 2005’s site), and like many other fan-run cons, the fact that it was started by ambitious college kids shows in the face of the average attendee. I wasn’t the oldest person there, but I did feel a bit creaky when presented with a sea of highschool and college students! The one thing about AI is that they aim to be family-friendly, and it definitely shows. 16-24 year-olds might have outnumbered the other age groups, but I saw plenty of younger children, fathers, and the odd mother. The gender-split is fairly even, so the modern anime con isn’t the sort of place where a woman can expect to be surrounded by pushy guys just because she’s female. As to the type of person attending.. well, let’s get this out of the way first - you’re going to find a lot of kids who probably get called nerds at school. A lot of people who might be the misfits - the weirdoes - in the regular world, but for a few weekends a year get to be in their element. My experience at AI was that you couldn’t meet a friendlier, politer bunch of people, with no judgements and only a desire to have fun.

The first thing I wanted to do was head upstairs into the gaming room, to drop off the videogames and NES console that I had agreed to loan out for the duration of the con. Gaming tends to go hand in hand with anime, either directly connected in licensed games or just sharing similar aesthetics, so most cons will have some sort of game room. Anime Iowa’s game room was stocked with several PS2s, Xboxes, and Gamecubes (and one NES!), with 3 PS2s being dedicated DDR machines. A nifty check-out system was in place so that any con-goer could grab a game from the stockpile in exchange for their con badge, go play for a while, and come back for another game. Two official tournaments had been setup, for Katamari Damacy (which we signed up for) and Halo, although judging by the fact that one of the Gamecubes was running Super Smash Bros. Melee for 18 hours straight, I think the Halo tournament should be replaced next year. An unofficial Naruto tournament (I think one of the Gamecube fighting games) was also happening at one point. From Friday evening, the game room was always pretty loud and crowded, which made it hard for the board gamers and RPG players who had been stuffed into the same room as the videogamers, but nevertheless a LARP (Live Action Role Playing) session was conducted, and Apples to Apples and Chez Geek tournaments were run during the con.

With the backpack lightened, we headed back downstairs to check out what was going on. I already knew what celebrity guests would be present, including voice actors and industry professionals, and I knew what discussion panels and events I intended to see, but in the excitement I’d forgotten almost everything. The printed programs had arrived, much to the relief of the organizers, so there was a swarm around the registration tables. I grabbed a couple of programs, but realised there wasn’t anything running at that time that we really wanted to see, so we just dove into the nearest video room to watch some anime and collect our thoughts. In total, AI had six video rooms, continuously running anime throughout the con. Take a look at the schedule to get an idea of just how much programming that is, and what a variety of shows there were available. AI is one anime con that allows the screening of fan-subbed shows before they get an official US release, so in addition to the subtitled or dubbed domestic releases they had a lot of fresh-from-Japan shows for people to check out.

We quickly realised however that we shouldn’t just hole up and watch anime all weekend, so back into the hall we went. By this time there was quite a crowd, but they seemed to be forming a line. Wondering why, I looked ahead and saw the reason - the dealer room was about to open, so we grabbed a spot in the line and waited. The dealer room is a big draw for any convention, giving attendees a chance to buy things relating to their hobby or business that they would be hard pressed to find otherwise, and this counts double for anime cons, where the merchandise is predominantly Japanese. When we reached the doorway and were allowed in - the number of people in the room was controlled to allow for the most comfortable browsing experience - our heads just about exploded. Toys, videogames, manga, artbooks, DVDs, VHS, posters, clothing, Japanese snacks - anything you can think of, they had. I would say something about children wanting to buy the first thing they see, but truth be told, I was just the same as Sam. I just managed to hide it better. We loaded up on Pocky and ramune, gashapon and manga.

By the time we stumbled, wide-eyed, from the dealer room, I was starting to get rather hungry. Pocky only goes so far. The consuite upstairs was freely serving a variety of snacks and drinks throughout the weekend, but as the program itself warned, “you can’t survive on consuite food alone!”. Besides, due to an unfortunate series of events involving washing clothes and taking care of babies, I’d only had two hours sleep the night before and there was now a constant buzz in my head. With regret, I wrote off the chance to meet fellow Anime Iowa forum members at the Meet & Greet panel, I took our names off the Katamari Damacy tournament, and we retreated back to our own hotel to order pizza and unwind. After recharging, we did head back to the con in an attempt to check out the Fullmetal Alchemist discussion panel, but the room it was held in was absolutely packed (a bit of poor planning on the part of the organizers, methinks.. the show is insanely popular), and my head was still pounding, so we decided to call it a day.

We knew the Saturday was going to be the busiest day of the con, so we were up bright and early. Then we realised there weren’t really any panels we absolutely HAD to see in the morning, so we decided to all hang out as a family in Des Moines, making sure we’d be back in time for the second forum Meet & Greet, because I’d promised that I’d take Charlotte along for everyone to coo at. This turned out to be quite the mistake, because the city of Des Moines decided to hold a farmer’s market that day, and we found our return route to the hotel to be completely changed. So we were half an hour late for the Meet & Greet, and by the time I’d struggled with the stupid umbrella stroller we’d brought along for Charlotte, there was only time to pop our heads in to say hi and get in on the group photo. We wanted to see the children’s cosplay competition which was scheduled immediately after the Meet & Greet, but I wasn’t crazy enough to try and take Charlotte around for 2 hours, so we raced back to the Marriott to drop her off with Amy before rushing back to the con. By the time we returned, the children’s cosplay event was over, much to my surprise. We later found out that that was because only two children entered this year, to the organizers’ dismay. We just ambled around the con for a while, before I realized the Anime Music Video competition was about to start. AMVs have been around for as long as fans decided to set anime clips to their favorite music, and a lot of them are rather well done, so I wanted to check out the contest. Unfortunately, it was too late, the room was packed and I wasn’t about to stand for two hours. Sigh.

I thought we’d just go back to Amy and Charlotte and get something to eat, so that I could be back in time to get a seat for the main cosplay competition. This event, often referred to as the masquerade, is the highlight of any anime con, where the cosplayers pull out their best costumes and go out on stage in front of everyone to compete for the judges’ attention and ultimately win prizes. AI puts on an overflow room to accomodate everyone who wants to watch the contest because the main room is always full, but I wanted to see it live rather than through a video feed, so I figured leaving for food at 4pm would give us plenty of time to get back for a 7pm event start. Oh, how wrong I was. Even though I got back to the con at about 6:30, I knew I was too late when I saw that the line for the cosplay hall stretched out of the hotel, up the stairs, and halfway through the skywalk. Wow. Still, at least we’d found good, cheap Chinese food. Six thumbs up for Cho’s China One International Buffet!

Anyway, as I say, I got back to the con at 6:30 and waited in the overflow room (which quickly became full itself) for the cosplay competition to start. I was alone, as Sam had decided that he wanted to stay in the hotel room and watch the US premiere of Naruto. How’s that for irony? Not going to an anime convention in order to watch.. anime. As it turned out, I’m glad he wasn’t with me, because we had to endure a lengthy wait of well over half an hour before the contest even started, as the AI techs desperately tried to fix sound issues in the overflow room. I was glad I had my PSP with me to pass the time, and my Metal Gear skin for my PlayGear case attracted a few comments. Once it was underway, however, the contest went smoothly, with some great costumes. The best by far had to be the one that the MC introduced with “She has been an anime icon for 20 years..” and the Sailor Moon music hit.. and out walked Sailor Kitty. While the judging was being conducted, they ran the winning AMVs and shots of the hall cosplay contest. The hall contest is a great way for people to compete with their costumes without having to get on stage, so you’ll find a lot more entries - some conventions have judges wandering the con checking out people’s costumes, but AI has returned to the clearer format of setting up a judging room that attendees can drop by if they feel like entering throughout the con. Fatigue was getting to me though, so I left before the winners were announced. I did check out the gaming room, but my now-swimming head was not going to be able to stand the volume, and I went back to our room. Despite the protests of Sam and Amy, who were demanding that I walk down to Quiznos to get them a snack, I fell immediately asleep.

Sunday is a traditionally slow day for cons like this, as people are either hungover from Saturday’s festivities or preparing to check out of their hotels. Sam and I made sure we were up and at the con nice and early however, because we wanted to watch the screenings of Yakitate!! Japan, one of our favorite shows. It being 9am on a Sunday morning in one of the smaller video rooms, it wasn’t exactly packed, but everyone there enjoyed the show, judging from the guffaws of laughter from all around. After that, we enjoyed some pseudo-breakfast in the consuite, with rice and Japanese nibbles such as shrimp chips and wasabi peas. We had one last leisurely stroll around the dealers room (finally, a time when it wasn’t full!) before picking up our stuff from the gaming room and heading home.

So, was it enjoyable? Yes and no. I mean, yes, we had a lot of fun, but it could have been so much more fun had we avoided the n00b mistakes, and we didn’t get to do a fraction of the things we had the opportunities for. So, my advice to anyone wanting to attend a con, and to ourselves for next year:

- Make sure you’re well-rested before you go, and try and get enough sleep each night
- Book your hotel stay to cover the opening day and the closing day. I would have liked to have stayed for all of Sunday’s activities and to discuss the next year’s con, but we had to be checked out and gone by then.
- Don’t let the lure of the dealers’ room take you away from other activities.
- Conversely, save up lots and lots of money for the dealers’ room, because you WILL be disappointed that you didn’t stock up on discount manga or grab that one action figure. Being an anime fan isn’t cheap, so don’t try to be.
- Don’t be afraid to jump in and talk to people. I had plenty of people strike up conversations with me, but I hardly did the same.
- Cosplay! You don’t have to of course, but a costume is the perfect conversation starter. You don’t have to spend massive amounts of time and money to create a knockout outfit, especially if you’re not planning on entering any contests, so just enjoy yourself.
- Plan which activities you really want to be at, and if you’re anything like me make sure you mark these clearly in your program or do whatever it takes to remember.

Anime Iowa is moving locations again next year, returning to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cedar Rapids. It’s going to be a longer journey for us, but we’re looking forward to it already. See you there!