What's that Smell? The Anime Convention Video Gaming Room Experience

Heavy traffic, high temperatures, people chattering endlessly, empty bottles of energy drink scattered everywhere, and the smell of the unwashed masses. This tends to describe rush hour on most roads around and within Anywhere, USA, right?

Welcome to the "(insert Japanese word here)Con" video gaming room.

Yes, you have just entered what has to be the most consistently noisy, hot, and smelly room of any anime convention. No matter the size of said event, you can count on slow-moving lanes of traffic around the lanes of tables which hold LCD television monitors hooked up to consoles of every variety and from most every era. You're just as likely to see a Nintendo 64 as a X-Box 360. A range of titles from Dance Dance Revolution to Katamari Damacy to Tekken 5 can be found on full tilt without end through the entire weekend.

These are the many similarities between all anime convention video game rooms. However, size usually dictates the overall experience.

A smallish convention, such as TekkoshoCon (Monroeville, PA) with a fifth year attendance of just under 2500, tend to have a decent variety of titles available for preview. There may not be an abundance of playing stations and a mass of players will usually crowd the area waiting for their turn. You'll usually find the games of mass interest such as DDR or, as was the case this year, Guitar Hero II. The best part about these conventions' game rooms, however, is the tournaments offered. This year, for example, TekkoshoCon had a "Battle of the Bands" using Guitar Hero II. Teams of four players would "perform" a song, head-to-head, with one of the "band" members playing the game while the other three acted out their roles. The determining factor for the winners of each round was the game score. In the event of a tie, the "audience" would decide.