The convention seemed a lot bigger than last year. I think it has outgrown a the space at the hotel and they organizers may have to find a new venue for next year.
I feel like we need nametags next year for the PCEFX'ers; I always miss meeting a few of you guys every year. Tried to make it down to the Turbo room as much as I could but I was stuck running my area in the museum 3/4 of the time. Great to see old and new faces as always.
Regarding the potential to move the show - the show outgrew the Sheraton 2 years ago honestly. Unfortunately there's a number of legit factors that are preventing an immediate move somewhere bigger...I'd probably get killed if I went into detail on a public forum
The powers that be are definitely aware of the situation. My hope has always been that they'd move it from Brookfield to the Delta Center downtown in Milwaukee (selfishly so that I could walk 5 blocks to the show). It's a much better, wide-open space and has big-league facilities for loading/unloading. So people wouldn't have to push arcade machines, boxes and huge TVs up stairs, through doors and around corners and whatnot. We'll see what happens.
The flow was WAY better this year - we didn't have nearly as many logjams as years past; hallways were clear for the most part. Moving the vendor hall I think was the right choice, even though it was a freaking monsoon this weekend and the rain/flooding combo pissed off some vendors (rightfully so IMHO). You can't predict mother nature I suppose.
Our museum space was a huge upgrade - we were busy all weekend and Beemer, Mati and Bartre's areas of the museum had a prime spot right out in the main hallway with tons of foot traffic. We had Eugene Jarvis come through and play games in our space which was awesome...spotted some recognizable YouTube/Podcast folks, along with Trickman Terry and Sushi-X from old school EGM.
Lightgun area did awesome again this year, even though I had bad luck this year with equipment (2 dead lightguns, smashed Time Crisis footpedal, dead PCE CD-ROM2). I had House of the Dead 4 running on my 55" LED LCDTV, which was busy pretty much 24/7.
I had to make 2 round trip truckloads to get all my stuff back...that damn LCD took up my entire back seat in the cab. Thanks to Turbokon, Majors, Bartre and Chris (Windy Gaming) for the late night beers after all the packing and loading insanity. I didn't get home until 3:45AM and made the genius decision to go into work this morning on 2 hours of sleep. I still have that 55" LCDTV in my backseat, haha.
Thanks to everyone who came! Pictures to come soon.
