Blizzcon 2007!
Aug. 6th, 2007 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furtechI know I'm way behind-- I haven't even touched SDCC yet. But Blizzcon's on my mind and fresh, so here goes:
Blizzcon was this last weekend, August 3-4. Odd that it was only Friday and Saturday-- it's thrown off my sense of time: Saturday felt like a Sunday and today (Sunday) felt like the next Saturday.
There was plenty of room-- though the halls were very dark (probably to simulate the typical environment of their players-- it had that black-light/basement feel to it). Not too noisy. Pretty cool, actually. Certainly a refreshing break from the jostling of SDCC!
As much as I thought the Star Wars Celebration was a highly focused convention, Blizzcon takes this to a whole new level. All about Blizzcon and their games (particularly World of Warcraft). Still, they really treated the members well: they had a "goodie bag" with all the usual flyers and program stuff-- but it also had a sealed "Heroes of Azeroth" starter deck; a limited Murloc card; a small bottle of hand sanitizer/moisterizer (in a neoprene holder); buttons, temp-tattoos, a t-shirt and of course the special card with a beta key (rumor has it that it's for the new Starcraft beta) and a murloc suit that your character can wear. Wow.
Tons of people there eager to try the new expansion for the Warcraft : the lines for those terminals was always huge. As opposed to the terminals for the new Starcraft (2) game, for which there were always available terminals. No dealers to speak of, with the exception of a few selling WoW licensed stuff. Lots of cool art-figures based on the card game. There was an Nvidia booth, WoW collector card booth and even a company that lets you get credit cards with Warcraft art on them (warning: a 500k image). The Blizzard Store was pretty sold out of everything by Saturday (like the cool murloc shirt ), but I did get a set of baby murloc figures and a t-shirt (that I ended up trading with Roz).
Talk about focused! These people looked like new convertees to a cult! The main stage audience was always packed with eager, beatific faces hanging on the speaker's every word. Like a religious epiphany. I remarked to Roz that it was ironic in that most of these people are the most hard-core of a pretty hard-core group of gamers-- yet they had to pry themselves from their gaming to come to this con to immerse themselves in every aspect of the game-- yet not play (for the most part). Like heroin addicts drawn to a methadone convention. And happy-- very happy! Both of us felt a little out of place. Still, any huge convention center filled with giant orc banners and costumes and fantasy stuff is still very cool even to non-players like us. And generally people were very nice-- maybe because they socialize so much in-game they have better manners than the shut-ins at other cons.
There were a lot of exhibitors there, most having mini-contests for bling. Nvidia had a "match the number on a button" contest that won you a bag of swag, including this graphics card with the cool wolf-thing on the front !
I have to thank![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
waynekaa profusely for helping Roz and I to get this cool shirt with the South Park tie in! He is a master of ferreting out freebies! We can thank him for the extra posters and oversize WoW collector cards, water bottles, pins and posters, too!
Along with Mr. Kaa, Roz and I caught up toauryanne and got the dope on the con; an animator friend who knew the winner of the video contest (amazing stuff!) and a few cosplayer-crossover fans! Unfortunately we totally missed shoka (we tried, though!)
Tons of contests! Here are some examples of the fan art contest-- cute stuff! Contests for everything from dance contests (warcraft in-game dances) and imitating Warcraft voices/sounds and videos created using the Warcraft engine/models. The prizes were usually pretty cool: $$$ Dell laptops, graphic cards/accelerators, two years of Warcraft. Speaking of contests...I was mainly there to enter the costume contest-- but that's for another post!
Blizzcon was this last weekend, August 3-4. Odd that it was only Friday and Saturday-- it's thrown off my sense of time: Saturday felt like a Sunday and today (Sunday) felt like the next Saturday.
There was plenty of room-- though the halls were very dark (probably to simulate the typical environment of their players-- it had that black-light/basement feel to it). Not too noisy. Pretty cool, actually. Certainly a refreshing break from the jostling of SDCC!
As much as I thought the Star Wars Celebration was a highly focused convention, Blizzcon takes this to a whole new level. All about Blizzcon and their games (particularly World of Warcraft). Still, they really treated the members well: they had a "goodie bag" with all the usual flyers and program stuff-- but it also had a sealed "Heroes of Azeroth" starter deck; a limited Murloc card; a small bottle of hand sanitizer/moisterizer (in a neoprene holder); buttons, temp-tattoos, a t-shirt and of course the special card with a beta key (rumor has it that it's for the new Starcraft beta) and a murloc suit that your character can wear. Wow.
Tons of people there eager to try the new expansion for the Warcraft : the lines for those terminals was always huge. As opposed to the terminals for the new Starcraft (2) game, for which there were always available terminals. No dealers to speak of, with the exception of a few selling WoW licensed stuff. Lots of cool art-figures based on the card game. There was an Nvidia booth, WoW collector card booth and even a company that lets you get credit cards with Warcraft art on them (warning: a 500k image). The Blizzard Store was pretty sold out of everything by Saturday (like the cool murloc shirt ), but I did get a set of baby murloc figures and a t-shirt (that I ended up trading with Roz).
Talk about focused! These people looked like new convertees to a cult! The main stage audience was always packed with eager, beatific faces hanging on the speaker's every word. Like a religious epiphany. I remarked to Roz that it was ironic in that most of these people are the most hard-core of a pretty hard-core group of gamers-- yet they had to pry themselves from their gaming to come to this con to immerse themselves in every aspect of the game-- yet not play (for the most part). Like heroin addicts drawn to a methadone convention. And happy-- very happy! Both of us felt a little out of place. Still, any huge convention center filled with giant orc banners and costumes and fantasy stuff is still very cool even to non-players like us. And generally people were very nice-- maybe because they socialize so much in-game they have better manners than the shut-ins at other cons.
There were a lot of exhibitors there, most having mini-contests for bling. Nvidia had a "match the number on a button" contest that won you a bag of swag, including this graphics card with the cool wolf-thing on the front !
I have to thank
waynekaa profusely for helping Roz and I to get this cool shirt with the South Park tie in! He is a master of ferreting out freebies! We can thank him for the extra posters and oversize WoW collector cards, water bottles, pins and posters, too!Along with Mr. Kaa, Roz and I caught up to
auryanne and got the dope on the con; an animator friend who knew the winner of the video contest (amazing stuff!) and a few cosplayer-crossover fans! Unfortunately we totally missed shoka (we tried, though!)Tons of contests! Here are some examples of the fan art contest-- cute stuff! Contests for everything from dance contests (warcraft in-game dances) and imitating Warcraft voices/sounds and videos created using the Warcraft engine/models. The prizes were usually pretty cool: $$$ Dell laptops, graphic cards/accelerators, two years of Warcraft. Speaking of contests...I was mainly there to enter the costume contest-- but that's for another post!
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-06 05:25 pm (UTC)You can probably make use of Tracy's beta key, then!
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Date: 2007-08-06 06:36 pm (UTC)Starcraft 2 does have the possibility of showcasing some neat critter designs as the evil alien race holds a lot of similarities to Geiger's Alien and other grim-toothed visages, but of course it skews towards the sci-fi rather than natural wildlife. Blizzard hasn't released much info on these guys yet however.