Day 3 of ESGS opened to a thunderous audience. The moment the event opened its doors to the public, everyone made a beeline for the games that they wanted to play. At the time, I was in line to try Monster of the Deep, but the booth with the longest lines had to be the one for Monster Hunter, which went into the hundreds within hours. (Good thing that the Sirus team mostly went at it on day 1!)
The crowd was surprisingly manageable on day 3, with the spaces and coffee shops around the event not too packed, and still enough breathing room for comfort. Many people were crowding around the stage areas, excited (and a little bit curious) to watch some of the last legs of the event’s various tournaments. One that stood out to me was the Heroes Evolved tournament, mostly because each team was sitting on stage at computer terminals, even though they were all still playing on their phones.
I spent most of the day toting around a pumpkin full of candy for Halloween, checking out the game booths and poking around the vendor booths for cool merch. The artists’ alley for ESGS was a lot smaller than in other local events, probably due to a different degree of focus, but they booths still had a lot of awesome prints and stickers up for grabs.
The Sirus team and I stopped by the Dead Prison booth to check out the game. It was my first time actually trying out the HTC Vive rig and I actually really enjoyed the setup! I’m a fan of the old Time Crisis arcade shooters and the game definitely had that kind of feel. Later on we got to interview one of the VR+ staff about their other projects.
Aside from the booth staff cosplayers, there weren’t a whole lot of crowd cosplayers. That said, there were definitely a lot of PUBG cosplayers. You could tell that they were from PUBG due to the weird combinations of military equipment and random clothes they were wearing. Despite PUBG’s relatively minimal presence at the event (there was only one booth running a PUBG event), the community was there and was definitely enjoying the day. It’s likely that a lot of the cosplayers were behind the scenes prepping for the cosplay competition, but the stage events were delayed by a couple of hours again and we weren’t able to see the competitors.
Aside from the perpetually crowded PlayStation booth, the other busiest booth that day had to be the Just Dance booth. People were jumping around on the dance floor, some trying to really learn the moves, while others were just having fun. At one point, the Synergy88 booth girls showed up and all danced to a Hatsune Miku song. The most popular track of the day had to be 24k Magic though, with several groups all lining up to take serious shots at the high scores.
As someone that regularly attends conventions, I think that ESGS was pretty successful with only the usual minor kinks. We got a lineup of solid and amazing titles, a diverse group of different developer and a huge and active gaming community to come together and celebrate video games. I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s event.
