I had a wonderful time at ReplayFX and I was excited to meet you all. I didn't expect to spend much time there at all (I was only going to come down for the Tetris seminar at first since TGM wasn't on their list of games) and went down to Victory Pointe on Thursday to just play some TGM like I normally do when I have the night off of work. Then a message from a friend comes in telling me there's TAP at ReplayFX. The owner of the arcade comes back and says he had a conversation about me with KevinDDR and that everyone was excited to hear that we had an arcade in town with a public copy of TGM. I had Friday and Saturday off so I decided to go down, and holy shit. They weren't kidding when they said they had the biggest collection of Arcade and pinball machines. I found TAP and started playing, most everyone was still in the pinball tournaments on Friday so I spent most of my time grinding out TAP games next to Caithness as he went for his Death Mode M. But I did meet up with most everyone (save for Kevin, basically) on Friday and got to see Kitaru clear doubles mode on his own (revenge for Summer Games heh) which was incredibly impressive. I played doubles for the first time with Caith and we cleared it, with the worst clear time on record LOL. I played so much TAP that I had to leave for an hour to buy advil for how badly my eyes hurt. I was supposed to have a date on Saturday, but my plans ended up falling through so I went back down on Saturday, didn't play AS much but still played quite a bit and also hung out with a bunch of my friends. Finally met Kevin in between pinball rounds. The seminar got off to a slow start due to tech issues (Kevin was also late because he was too good at pinball and was busy winning thousands of dollars) but all and all I think the crew did a very good job of explaining what TGM is to the local community, hopefully I'll see a few more people give it a go at VP. I had to work early on Sunday but heard that everyone planned to hit up Victory Pointe after ReplayFX was over. I brought down my personal board so we had two copies of TGM running in an arcade at the same time, which was quite awesome. Everyone demolished my high scores and had a blast, I even got a video of Kevin coming seconds (and one glaring mistake) away from his TGM1 PB on my board. I didn't expect ANY of this and I had the time of my life. It's hard to convey in words just how awesome the replayFX collection of games was (I'm including a bunch of pictures, one of which is an overhead view of the game room) and I didn't even know so many different kinds of pinball machines existed. It filled an entire convention center event hall. I met so many cool people (you all know who you are) and I just want to say that you are some of the nicest and most supportive gamers I have ever met. I hope to see all of you again, be it here or at another event. Kevin coming seconds away from PB:
I had a lot of fun as well. It was great to meet so many TGM fans and hang out, and I managed to get three Death M grades in as many days. Plus all the places we went for lunch had fantastic food.
Yeah, it was a great time! I really enjoyed meeting you all and getting to hang out and play games and eat good food. I'm guessing some of us that live out west will be in Pittsburgh again next year for the same event, so hopefully we can meet up again. Also, Victory Pointe is a sweet little spot and I really hope it's successful. The owner was really nice and definitely seems to put a priority on having everything play well.
