Videogames History 2009 weekend (Oct. 2/3/4)

During the last months we had several ranbats/meetings in Milan, but this event was special enough to make me feel like writing about it. First of all, what is VGH? It's an annual exhibition about the history of videogames, with a very nice "museum" (which I didn't care much about, but it was indeed nice) and a lot of space for gaming-related communities, shops and such. Me, Jck and Nev put together a stand for Arcade-Extreme, with STG arcade boards, a 3rd Strike setup and our videos going on the whole time. It was quite a success, with a lot of random people getting interested as well as well known faces getting there all the time (lol at this sentence). We even arranged a SFIV tournament but... Let's start from the beginning.
Friday was the day before VGH. I had to get to Milan that day because we were supposed to set up everything during the night. So I ended up having a whole free afternoon in Milan, because the only decent cheap train was in the morning... And it was great because I was able to join fran for a 3rd Strike session with just him. Superb practice for the following days, and great to find out some other patterns and problems with my game. Play against him is useful every single time for a lot of reasons... Well, you kinda have to have the right attitude though. Otherwise it can be difficult, lol.
The following day, Saturday, was VGH day one. We did standard stand "work" all the time... Well, I played A LOT of 3rd Strike against a lot of various people, basically. In the end we were able to run a 3rd Strike tournament as planned, the interest was high enough, and we even had to cap the tournament to 16 people only (double elim) in order to finish it on time. Fran was supposed to come at the exhibition that day but... He was a no show! Therefore I was able to win the whole thing without big troubles, except for Jck's Urien that suddendly decided to perfect me once during winner's final just to add a bit of suspance! Anyway, it was good to get some people interested in the game, SFIV players included (this is very important, in my opinion). The prize was nice as well. Oh, the after party was not bad either, good times and some beers with SFIV heads, basically.
Day two, Sunday. This was supposed to be the main day, and it was true. Way more people joined the event, there were some tv reporters as well... Some crazy stuff happened, lol. It was good to take a picture of Rushing Monkey (top SFIV player) with a PS3 PAD in his hand while getting interview by tv about "how he got started with videogames"... That was random!
Eventually we were able to set up some 360s and run a proper SFIV tournament, which ended up being pretty fun overall for some reason. During the day I was able to enjoy Mushihimesama Futari as well (thanks Nev!), with some real time coaching by RF2 (well, AST-DGN), another owner of the board. I wasn't able to try Ultra as much as I wanted, but Original was good enough. And Ultra-easy, which is good when you have clueless people watching you play in ecstasy, lol. The 360 port is going to be region free... I'm gonna think about buying it, but I don't know. The only STG that I'd really like to (maybe) play nowadays is Futari's GOD mode, which is not included in the port. Damn.
Anyway, the day ended well and I was able to get on a cheap train in time to get home at 1:30AM after a 6 hours long stupid trip. Not too bad :/
Whatever. For full results and stuff about VGH, please check AEX's homepage in a few days. We'll have pictures uploaded soon as well, so watch out for our galleries as well.
Geez, this post was long... Not going to happen again soon, I guess!