After 5 years of not seeing you guys, this was a big visit for me. The major difference in this one was that we literally set up a booth with FFR that had an external monitor facing the hallway for people to see as they were walking by. Thursday night, Velocity helped configure the steam deck with FFR and the small portable keyboard. It could handle something like 160 BPM 16th jacks and 320 BPM 16th relatively consistently, but speeds above that it couldn't handle well.
The Sheraton
There was no rhythm gaming room, but the hallway had Pump It Up, Stepmania (with Simply Love and unmodded L-Tek pads), and the FFR booth. It would be amazing if we can get a booth like that again for next year.
A person with a pirate costume made a four-key setup that had a circuit board with large blue keys. This attracted a surprising number of people who were walking by.
Thanks MarioNintendo for recording Reality! It's a great way to de-boost yourself at least 3 divisions down, and the anchor section in AIM Anthem became impossible.
Can I also mention that
kommisar recorded MarioNintendo going hard at the FFR booth? It's amazing.
Dinner
It's a shame that Tuckers closed, but we still had that group photo taken at the Tuckers location for old time's sake.
We had the Lone Star Texas Grill, sushi, and Jack Astor's. I got reminded how amazing Tim Horton's is, especially those honey cruller donuts. It's a shame the line went outside the door during the convention though, so I ended up having to skip out on a donut dessert a few times.
PIU Tournament
I'm proud of smartdude1212 for winning the PIU tournament on Saturday. I made a thread over in
Brag Board about it.
Hotels
The hotel nights were incredible. ShadowGod in particular made me lose it so many times, and Velocity's deadpan sarcasm in person is definitely an experience in of itself.
Next time bananagram is brought, let's deliberately try to make Gaelic words for the memes. Also gotta love the Joking Hazard night.
Some lessons learned
Don't fly Air Canada. Had to take two expensive Lyfts (Uber was around the same price) due to switching airports in the layovers. $90 and $146 base price, spent over $250 to go across airports. I didn't know I had to switch airports until the day of. Never again.
Also, the guy who brought the L-Tek unmodded pads is arrogant and a hypocrite. Really bad combination. When I first played on them, the offset was way off and when he had to reset it, it was something like 14 ms off. Ok sure, that's fine. I play a 10 and get like, a 68% because of how bad the registering was. For comparison: It was worse than DDR gold cab pads, and that's saying a lot. When he was like "let me see what's going on" he picked a 7 with slow 8ths, got greats and perfects instead of fantastics, and then was like "it's fine, they're unmodded and you can't bracket on them" -- then why were ITL and other technical packs on the machine? He also made some rude offhand comment about "pick something actually hard" when smartdude1212 and his opponent (Kevin?) got a dual SSS. Going to remind myself that I just shouldn't bother going onto the 4 panel setup since it's clearly terrible, ESPECIALLY when that guy was like "all of a sudden 8s are hard" -- that's a huge red flag, jesus fucking christ.