#sugi updates

Friday started out rocky. My best bro came an hour later than originally intended and once we crossed into Pennsylvania we were suddenly driving through a snow storm. Visibility was horrible and my best bro couldn't seem to get his defroster working right so the windshield fogging up just made things 10X worse. At the end of it all we made it but we were 3 hours later than originally intended.

Thankfully once we got there the man at the front desk was very friendly and helpful. The breakfast buffet Saturday (and Sunday) morning was great as well. It reminded me of the old days when hotels actually gave good breakfast services and I was so happy some hotels still make an effort because outside of our experience in Italy last year we hadn't had the best luck with hotel breakfast (also breakfast was actually included this time!).

This con had a big guest list, I'd argue that was their biggest selling point. They combined their voice actor guests with a bunch of wrestling guests since apparently there's going to be a wrestling event this Friday so I guess they were all in the area anyway. We got a lot of autographs, probably spent too much money on autographs but I think it was worth it. I got to finally get Brandon Rodger's autograph, which I missed out on 3 years ago at Too Many Games. I'd say more of the guests did voice in cartoons I watched, although we did get the autograph of the OG english voice of Frezia...I feel like even though they had other guests that voice in Anime I wasn't really interested in getting many of their autographs (and in the case of some of them like Lex Lang I only cared about his video game role as Dr.Cortex, but that's kinda what happens when you don't watch dubbed Anime much lol). Some of the guests were from Hasbin Hotel and Heulluva Boss fame and my best bro and I are fans of them overall (if you wanna know my thoughts let me know)

The one guest who did voices in HH that I got was pretty friendly and encouraging when I mentioned I wanted to get into Voice Acting. It wasn't something I announced to each guest this time though lol. I have a feeling I was probably one of the only people who wanted to get Dante Basco's autograph for his role in American Dragon Jake Long since he also voice Zuko from Avatar apparently and I think you guys know I'm not a fan of Avatar.

My best bro got the autograph of three wrestlers, he wanted to get Rick Flair and Sting's autographs but they both left early so no luck there. The people at the con we had conversations with were really friendly and even people outside of the con, like at restaurants, were really friendly. We had no idea there was a Hockey game happening Sunday night. If we had known ahead of time maybe my best bro could've taken Monday off so we could see it but alas we had no idea and missed it.

Sorry for jumping all around, I keep thinking of things as I'm typing, hence why I did at TL:DR up top lol. We went to only one panel because this con did that annoying ting where they have the panels out in the main drag (also no fan panels). We went to their Gundam Wing panel which tragically only had the voice actor who provided the english voice of Heero Yuy and no one else, I ranted a few times about how it would have been better just to name the panel after the Voice Actor (which is pretty standard when you only have one guest) but it was pleasant overall, Mark is a nice guy and from Vancouver, which makes sense actually. Since everyone else asked only ab out Gundam Wing I asked what he was currently up to (since as far as I know he's not currently doing a ton of voice over work) and turns out he's got some theater projects in the works.

This wasn't a big con for buying merch for us. Sadly it's yet another Anime con where they don't sell DVDs or Blurays and most vendors were selling figures, original art, and various character merchandise. The only video game vendor was a letdown too. They were selling what they called reproduction cartridges of Pokemon games and his argument was this is a much more affordable way to enjoy the Pokemon games. While he was able to assure me that you can save the game he couldn't provide details about whether all the original game features work on the reproductions. So, even if it meant saving money my bet bro and I just wouldn't feel right buying any of those for use on our channel. Other notes that I wasn't sure where to put: The city itself is nice and very walkable, seems well kept-up too, I wish they would take as good care of our closest big city (Baltimore), they also have a subway system, we're tempted to visit again to see more of the city and maybe ride the subway lol.

Bonus: After the con was over, on our way home we stopped at a retro video game shop named Arcadia Collectibles. They were getting ready to move to a new location (Still in Pittsburgh) so he apologized for the mess but we didn't really notice. We picked up a few games there and we had a good conversation with a customer who was clearly a collector and gave us lots of details about places we can find some games that are a little harder to find. While checking out I saw some of the storage bins they were using and asked where he got those bins, thinking I could buy some like them to use for storing our cartridge games (that collect too much dust on the shelves!) He surprised me by saying if we left him a google review we could just take the bins. I of course agreed and now we've solved the problem of where to put our cartridge games when we're not playing them for the channel!

We headed out Friday afternoon and our first task was to check into the hotel. IDK how many people saw my post before leaving for the con but I had stumbled upon hotel reviews mentioining bed bugs and got super anxious because it was too late to change hotels/ this room was non-refundable. The good news is no bed bugs! The hotel was a little bit older and did have an...old building smell? IDK how to describe it but the room itself was fine. We had some problems with the toilet but my best bro can handle a plunger so we were fine.

Anyway, I thought we'd be late but thankfully we weren't. I was required to sign up for the 6PM event and they had told me I was going first so I was a little annoyed when I got there and basically had to stand in line behind people who didn't sign up for the event. The volunteer basically wasn't verifying who had signed up and when the guest very calmly questioned him about it he kinda threw up his hands. This event was a charity event for a company that helps Autistic people find employment. Basically a select few who signed up got the chance to play a 2Player 'race' in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle against Johnny Gioeli from Crush 40 and get an autograph, picture, and certifciate all for $20 (with half of that going to the charity). IDK if you had to beat him to get the extra stuff because all they gave me was a photo. I don't even really mind because he was so friendly! A bit of a goof too, he had a Sonic cape on. It's nice that he's genuinely a fan of Sonic! I also noticed, from watching him play people who weren't super rusty and sucky at it like me that he was racing better so...I think he slowed down a bit for me (despite still winning).

We also did an event called Tournament of Voices which honestly was mostly a popularity contest in the end. I won't talk about it too much since my best bro wants to rant about it during one of our videos but basically we both participated, we didn't win and the person who ultimatly won was at least talented. I was worried because the person who won the round I was in sounded horrible in my humble opinion but he made the crowd laugh so that's how he advanced. My poor best bro, they had him do a round as a female character. He did the best he could but it hardly seemed fair since he was up against women. I think though that there weren't enough women for every female character to only have female contestants. I was very annoyed that after the event was over they said we could provide feedback but three people who had gone all the previous years monopolized their time to the point where they didn't realize we were there.

Saturday was super packed to the point where areas were stopped with foot traffic. It was also hard to find parking spots at times whenever we came back from getting food. We actually missed two panels because of this and the afternoon mostly became out first stop at the Dealer's room. The Dealer's Room had many more vendors than previous years and we only visited a few because of how packed it was. We were hoping Sunday would be less crowded, since it usually goes that way at cons (spoiler warning: It wasn't!) We bought some games and came back after dinner for a Mario Party 4 tournament. We didn't win but we had fun. We also handed out plenty of our business cards for the channel (so far no new subscribers but I'm holding out hope!)

Sunday, the final day, was oddly as packed as Saturday despite that usually being the day when most people head home and the cons wind down. We entered a tournament that was supposed to involve the games being announced on the spot and well that was the case but the first game was a PC game that was in early access and boy was it a mess! There were twice the amount of people than computers so we had to pair up and since the game isn't finished yet they have no in-game timer so they had us use our cell phone stopwatches to record the time of our partner. The game lagged and often crashed so what should have been a quick 30 minute run took an hour and a half to make sure everyone got a chance to do it. We were tired so we were actually relieved not to make it to the second round. Since we didn't make our next planned panel we just went back to the dealer's room and bought some more games.

That's why I'm dubbing this years Too Many Games the I bought Too many Games 2025. It's fine really, I'm just...not used to having money to spend at these things so I felt kind of anxious after I purchased stuff despite knowing I was responsible about it.