Philip

OK I’ve sort of recovered from the second day at Wai-con, however it still feels like a large semi-trailer ran over me a few times. The JAFWA booth did some good advertising business thanks to Lindsay bringing in his PS2 with his legitimate copies of Final Fantasy XII and Naruto games which pretty much made us quite popular with everyone passing through. I managed to sneak in a few games of Melty Blood at the same time and got my ass handed to me by some adroit button mashing by the guests as I decided to play some of the more weaker characters this time to give everyone a good chance.

Towards the end of the day great deals were to be made by traders hoping to get rid of excess stock to avoid hauling it back to Perth. I’d like to thank Empire Toys for donating quite a bit to the JAFWA door prize pool, it looks like we won’t have to worry about door prizes for quite a while now! The president of PANIC also managed to talk her way out of getting her head shaved, since they didn’t crack 800 members of the public going through the doors. They did raise quite a bit of cash with the special auctions however, it’s a really good way to raise money it seems.

I also sat down to watch the second day of the cosplay competition. The first day was pretty good, but the second day proved just as good with quite a few people cosplaying new outfits or taking care of skits and acts. Again, they need a break after 45 minutes or so, there’s just no way people can keep still over that period of time in the chairs they had. I did find the gaming center had Guitar Hero, but apparently the plasma screens had some nasty latency so it was unplayable, so I settled for the JAFWA setup to play Naruto instead.

Apparently the yaoi panel was the most popular with people - a sizeable percentage of females at Wai-con all love yaoi for some reason. (Probably the same reason guys love lesbian couples). I guess females really do want their sensitive new age guy that looks like Brad Pitt or Orlando Bloom judging from how popular it is. I’ll talk about that later when I do a few book reviews soon.

I also saw some of the AMV’s that won awards are Wai-con during the closing ceremony, the technology has come a long way since the early days since computer video editors are making life a lot easier for them rather than laboriously doing it on a couple of VHS decks. Special effects are also big as well as lip synching, probably the best was an AMV from the Oh! My Goddess movie to the main song from Phantom of the Opera. (If you’ve seen the movie you know it’s kind of apt).

I’ll make another post with some of the pictures I took so you could get an idea of the main hall and traders hall. I’ll see about getting the cosplay photos dumped up somewhere soon.