So the area directly underneath registration is the Dealer's... uh, Room. I guess. I mean, it's in a room. It's not outside, so I'm assuming that's true. I'm not an expert on the dichotomy of rooms and not rooms, but you could also call it an area or a general... sort of... dealery... zone.

...Place.

We walk around the Dealer's Coordinates for a bit, checking out all the shirts and artwork they've got for sale. One guy's got some crazy Link artwork going on, and a bunch of other stuff I've completely forgotten, which is a shame, because it was rather amazing. You really should have seen it. Every time I get near the Game Room side of the place, I hear sweet Mega Man music cranked out of this one TV that people are stopping by to get their asses kicked on (I assume they got their asses kicked because Jesus, Capcom, why can't you make one single goddamn game that I'm good at?). It's a decent collection of dealer stands. Look out, more Otakon comparisons coming your way!

Otakon has about nine billion merchants. And there are only ever, like, three that I'm interested in. Two of those are because they're selling manga and I need the next volume of Trigun Maximum. And the other one is usually a place with a cool action figure or shirt I like. MAGFest has like ten. And they've all got something interesting and if I had more money, I would be broke.

Anyhoo, as I mentioned this was next to the Game Room. Which is three rooms. Well, one of those rooms is also the same room that is the Dealer's Room, so, well, let's just not get into that right now.

All this geography is giving me middle school flashbacks.

So. The outermost part is the Game Room. This is three rows of arcade cabinets, and then a row of tables. It's all really squeezed in there, too. So there's just enough room between the two rows facing each other for the people playing the games, and not a whole lot for those trying to get by while attached to, say, giant backpacks.

Doesn't matter. I have arrived at the promised land. An arcade filled with great, old games. Yes. I've got next. on everything. Give it.

The Tron and Discs of Tron machines at the end are down. But no matter. There's a good collection, here. Gauntlet. Mario Bros. Mortal Kombat 3. I go get N1NJ4 to play that last one with me. Then I turn and he hasn't followed me at all. So I go back and get him and he's not even with the group, anymore. So I figure maybe he's back in the crowd of machines. I dive through. They have all manner of amazing games, which I mostly can't remember the names of, now. Write an angry comment about it. Head around the other side. There's a series of pinball tables at the end of the tables. And then more cabinets across from those. Excitebike, some SNES thing, Super Mario Bros., Gradius. The works.

Get back to the group, and N1NJ4's still missing. I ask them where he went, and they said he's down in the games. So I head back in and he's over by the MK3 machine now, but somebody's playing single player so BOOOOOOOO.

I go off looking around, again. At the far end of the cabinets is a door, which leads to the Arcade Room, where they have more (and typically larger) arcade machines. Then there's also a hallway beside the pinball games, with a couple games down at the other side. One of them is X-Men, and unfortunately it's broken. There's no screen inside. Extra-unfortunate, as it's the meme of the convention. At random moments, somebody will roar, "BWOOOOOOOOOOAGH!!!" and, without fail, half of the people within hearing distance will follow suit.

If you do not understand this, play the game. Failing that, look the game up on YouTube. I'm sure it won't take long to figure it out.

So there's a gap between the tables, with a set of double-doors which lead to the Console Room. Now here's where all the space went. There are more arcade games set up along the walls, but these are mostly musical rhythm games. Then there are consoles filling up the middle, and towards the one corner... computers. And then on the wall opposite the door, there are two stages separated by giant dividers which I would later discover are hanging from the ceiling. On one stage, they have some sort of dancing game, and on the other, Rock Band.

So we wander around and get separated from CK. N1NJ4 and I check out the rhythm games, immediately finding my friend Tito by the DDR-esque stuff, as I knew I would because anytime you go near those at a convention, he will be there. It's a law. I do poorly at some drum game, then we pick up the three-fret guitar game and rock the hell out of some 20th Century Boy and a couple other songs.

Eventually, we head back to the Dealer's Keep and shop around a bit. CK spots JewWario and is excited to see him but won't go say hi because blah blah tomorrow blah blah procrastination. So I urge him to do it, and nope. Nothin' doin'. So I wander around a bit and when I come back, he's talking to him. Pfff. Jerk.

We go to get some food with Lotus Prince and head outside, but the shuttle to LP's hotel isn't there. So we ask a doorman how to get there and he gives us some directions and instead of simply following them, we head back to the car to get N1NJ4's GPS. Plus my jacket (wisely). Then we exit the parking garage and quickly don't know where the hell we are. So we walk around the perimeter of the property until we get our bearing, and then start following the directions. Until Sarnecky leads us through a parking lot, anyhow. At the other side of the parking lot, there's nothing. Just a raised-up highway that we cannot cross.

We spend some time looking around for a way across before giving up and just heading back to find a different route. Then we spot a sidewalk bridge access. Salvation! Oh. Dear lord. I spoke too soon. Oh man. This is really high up, huh? Geez. There's like three layers of traffic beneath us, and not a very tall rail/wall guarding us from going over. Plus the cars flying by crazy fast inches beside us. And then there's the probability that there might be ice somewhere along this sidewalk. Oh man, I do not feel good about this, at all.

I distract myself from all this by telling CK about how much certain really tall, rickety escalators in the D.C. Metro freak me out, and wondering why the hell that guy honked as us as he was going by. Was he pissed because he almost hit us? We were on the sidewalk. Honestly, that would be his fault even if there weren't pedestrian laws. What a dick.

We survive the bridge and reach the other side safely. There's a pizza place across the street from Lotus' hotel. Grab a large pepperoni and take it up to LP's hotel room, where we meet two of his roommates, Zhu Zhu and Perry. We share our pizza, hang out, take a shot, watch some TV, and grab a breather before our next big adventure.

Our next adventure being a shuttle ride back to the convention, sans Lotus Prince, to catch Spoony's riffing some Uwe Boll. I forget if BloodRayne II was what they had scheduled or not, but that's what we saw. The schedules and the realities for these things were quite often wrong, but I don't believe they were wrong yet. If I had to have one complaint about the convention, though, that would be it.

But no matter. The important words in that paragraph were "Spoony's riffing", because I'm a fan of Spoony, yes. But, specifically, I'm a fan of Spoony's Let's Plays. His LP of Phantasmagoria II is my absolute favorite (followed by Sonic 2006 and Freeman's Mind). So anything with him providing commentary over something else sounds like the panel I need to see.

Spoony arrives and the room bursts into cheers. He heads to the front and starts talking about all sorts of great things. There's a guy standing by the wall near him who's dressed as Dr. Insano. Nice. Then JewWario and Linkara (neither of whom I actually knew of at the time, I'm sad to say - aside from CK' having met JW earlier on) showed up and joined in on the riffing.

Of course, none of this mattered because the room quickly devolved into a mass-shoutout session. I only occasionally caught what the hosts said. I noticed during this time that the room was an obedient little army. Spoony could have walked them up to the White House and conducted an attack, if he so pleased. They would have gladly carried out his orders to their doom.

See, here's the thing. First off, most of what Spoony said was hilarious. He's a truly funny guy. But, as with everything, there were a couple jokes that fell fairly flat. And yet, every time he said anything - including the flat jokes - the room erupted with laughter. And second off, if we were watching MST3k together, the room would have been quiet aside from the laughter and a joke here and there. But with the commentary live, everyone wants to impress him by shouting out and trying to be funny. It's this little thing in the back of your mind, telling you that he'll pick you out of the crowd and let you join him and be his partner and love you forever if you can just get one good joke out there so for the love of Carlin, keep spamming the air with as many jokes as you can, as there will most certainly have to be one quality one out of the clusterfuck spewing from the hole in your face.

Not that I wasn't shouting out jokes, too, mind you. I'm a hypocrite, but I'm an honest hypocrite.

I think my favorite joke of the evening was, "I liked the jail scene from the first one better!" Also, Spoony managed to squeeze in an "I heard that, Curtis!" so I was content simply with that.

Eventually, however, it had to be cut short (not a bad thing as, Spoony or not, there's only so much BloodRayne II a person can stand in one sitting) due to Spoony's prior engagements. I don't know if you know this? But Spoony's popular. Very popular. He had no fewer than eighty panels to appear at over the course of this convention. So many, in fact, that they had to schedule some at the same time as others. Now, I had assumed he had some sort of time travel necklace thing like Hermione in The Prisoner of Azkaban. But no, he simply had to spend some time at one and then away to the next.

Taking the entire audience with him. Not one single person stayed in that room to see the conclusion of the movie once Spoony and co. left (JewWario and Linkara couldn't stand to see the rest of it without Spoony protecting them, either). Including us.

We staggered out into the piano area, and lo and behold, I find Malon sitting at it and playing. I tell her that she needs to be playing Epona's Song, for obvious reasons. She does, magnificently, and then shows off by continuing straight into the Lon Lon Ranch theme. I got a picture of her, because music translates well into photograph format.

Then I realize that I never got my cash from registration after the Gamer Iron Chef. It's somewhere around 2 in the morning, now. Still, I head to registration and ask them about it, and nobody has any idea what I'm talking about or what to do about or who can help me or where they're at or what their names are. So I figure I'll just come back the next day and see what's up.

We head back to the piano area, and now there's two guys using it, instead. N1NJ4 decides he's going to try and pull a tablecloth off of a table without knocking the bottles off of it. He manages to knock every single bottle of the table except for one which barely made it, and wound up on its side anyhow. CK makes a Ghostbusters reference and we take our leave, exiting the building to the sound of a slow, classy piano version of the Super Mario Bros. theme.

Now that's how you make an exit.