A whole gaggle of teams rolled into the lower atrium, geared up to see who could lane the hardest and who could macro their micro the best. What interests me, though, was what was on the sidelines; the games that not everybody cares for. Some people, though, care enough to come to arguably the biggest LAN event of the year and willfully segregate themselves from the rest of the gaming community via esoteric taste. Here’s some interesting little bits of the night, as I encountered them.

Speedy Gonzales

Two guys, one on an honest-to-God Nintendo 64, the other on a PC emulator, both playing through The Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time, racing to the Master Sword. I asked them why they would come to a public, group party like this and willfully separate themselves. Simply, they said they just like doing speedruns of this sort, though they both admitted to playing LoL on the side. Without tools, one of them said he’d beaten Super Mario 64 in 30 minutes, something I didn’t realize was possible.

Two Guys, Two Games

Earlier in the night, things weren’t really going yet, but gaming always finds a way. One guy, excited to play Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2). Instead of playing Valve’s hot-pants MOBA, he was trapped in a game of the indie rogue-like, The Binding of Isaac. His excuse? “DotA Purgatory”, which was his way of explaining server issues. Sitting next to him was a bit of something more classic. On a Nexus 7 tablet, one man enjoyed a fine game of Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. Who says the Gameboy Advance is dead?

Keeping it Real

What kind of LAN party would it be without the obligatory retro station? The hybrid NES/SNES console, the RetroDuo, resulted in some good times from ancient times. The game of the day was the semi-esoteric Machine Warriors, a robot fighting game for the SNES. Host to a variety of different mechs, each with their unique movement options, weapons, and the source of at least a handful of friendly matches. All of this through a TV no bigger than a breadbox (like 12 inches). It’s a huge surprise that these people remained dedicated to the consoles and didn’t give in, bring their PCs, and start learning LoL.

Of course, the more/less friendly matches came about with the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 tournament. Far from mainstream professional play, these few fans of the fighter came and cheered on the new players and jeered the more experienced. Of course, the finals rooted out those less experienced, but it was clear that this cute corner of the sprawling party was at least as excited (and loud) as the nearly silent remainder.

The Many Miscellaneous

There were even more random, unknown things I saw only in passing. Here’s a quick list!

• One person playing Guild Wars 2
• One handsome Adonis playing World of Warcraft
• An animated Fluttershy dancing across an unoccupied PC
• A small (tiny, really) handful of people playing Counter Strike 1.6
• A contingent of Team Fortress 2 players. Not many of them, but it’s hard not to notice Valve’s cell-shaded shooter

At the Bethesda booth I managed to get some time with Skyrim. It was pretty much precisely what I expected- Oblivion but better and with more pretty. The highlight for me was the Prey 2 “demo”. As excited as I am for Prey 2, (and if you aren’t then you should definitely watch the Prey 2 trailer (as shown above)) the demo that was shown seemed really off. Attendees could not play it outright. A member of the dev team played it and talked about the actions he was performing. I say it was odd primarily because it seemed like it was a recorded video. I saw him play the demo twice, and they seemed IDENTICAL. Plus a few times he got way more headshots than I think is reasonable. Something just felt… off.

That said, Prey 2 was gorgeous. I really liked the aesthetic of “Alien Noire”, contrasting bright neon signs and deep shadows between buildings. Combat looked fine, and I guess my one concern would be that I really hope they don’t build this deep world and then squander it with superficiality. I think a lot could be accomplished by including some RPG elements and making NPC’s a large part of gameplay. But, we’ll see. I have high hopes because every single thing that was in the trailer shows up in gameplay. Even the HUD is the same.

Lolipop Chainsaw was another highlight. A Suda 51 game that stars a high-school cheerleader named Juliet who wields a chainsaw against hordes of zombified classmates and teachers. It plays quite a bit like No More Heroes with a few subtler combos available. Stars and rainbows pop out of the chainsaw as you mow through mountains of enemies, and copious amounts of blood splatters all over the screen. This game is over-the-top in every conceivable manner and I loved it.

For me, the highlight of the show was the PAX 10, a set of indie games selected by leading developers, writers, artists, and Penny Arcade. Fez, Solar 2, Antichamber, Vanessa Saint-Pierre Delacroix and Her Nightmare, and many more had much interesting premises and were doing creative things with gameplay and design. I won’t lie; I’ve grown VERY tired of most shooters. Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare lost my interest long ago. With the exception of graphical upgrades, they really aren’t doing anything that we haven’t seen done before and better.

Being able to talk directly to the entire development team of a game and see the kind of passion and care they poured into it is a lot more invigorating than filtering a message through layers and layers of public relations specialists and press embargoes. To bring this rant to a close and move on: I sat down to play Solar 2, and was poked in the shoulder 30 minutes later by the project lead. “Hey man, are you okay? Have you blinked?” It’s rare that I just lose myself in a AAA title like that. Call me a hipster, but I think the indie scene is a lot more promising than most of the things coming out of the bigger publishers.

This turned out taking longer than I thought it would to write, and I still have plenty more to say, including full previews for a couple of the games mentioned above. So I will be splitting this up into a short series. And if you want to catch my previews of Firefall, Torchlight 2, Blacklight: Retribution and more check out Destructoid.com

Battlefield has a strong pedigree in the world of online first-person shooters. Battlefield, specifically the Caspian Border trailer is beyond impressive. If the gameplay can match the visuals, then Battlfield 3 has a shot at 2011 Game of the Year.

Devil May Cry

A lot of people were really concerned when Ninja Theory’s new Look for the classic Capcom character, Dante, was unveiled last year. While I’m still not a huge fan of the redesign, the gameplay looks as tight as ever. As a huge Devil May Cry fan myself, I’m really excited to see if Devil May Cry will live up to its predecessors.

Guild Wars 2

As someone who has never really been into MMO’s and who has always considered Guild Wars to be the bastard child of World of Warcraft, I was BEYOND impressed by this trailer. NCsoft just won themselves another customer. Guild Wars 2 also has my pick for Best of Show.

Some other tasty bits:

Valve held a massive tournament to showcase their new MOBA title, Dota 2. It is notable for having the largest prize ever awarded at an E-Sports tournament. Valve has shown they are serious about the genre and E-Sports in general with their million-dollar prize.

Read more about Dota 2 here.

The Assassin’s Creed: Revelations Trailer, while awesome, doesn’t really show us any new gameplay elements that haven’t been a part of previous installments, it does, however, an interesting dubstep accompaniment.

What’s it like to attend Anime Expo? Simply put, it’s like attending a huge carnival. Hundreds of people are dressed up in cosplay, which is quite a sight to behold. Personally, one of my favorite activities was taking pictures of beautiful cosplay, some of which you can see below. There is always something happening and something to do including panels, demonstrations, screenings, shopping, and concerts. Unfortunately with all the festivities come enormously long lines. Take picking up my badge for the convention the day before it started: the process entailed a two and a half hour wait in a line that snaked around the outside of the LA Convention Center.

Since this is a video game website, it’s time to address the gaming side of Anime Expo. The Japanese video game localization company Arksys Games, famous for bringing the Guilty Gear and BlazBlue fighting series stateside, was present. At their industry panel, Arksys Games showed off two upcoming titles coming to the US later this year and took questions from the audience. On the note of fans’ desire for a Guilty Gear/BlazBlue crossover, studio Arc System Works stated that they prefer to finish BlazBlue’s story before considering tackling a crossover. The most prominent game Arksys Games featured was a spinoff of the Type Moon’s famous visual novel Fate/stay night titled Fate/Extra. The game is a dungeon-crawling RPG on the PlayStation Portable that takes place in a parallel universe to the original. An English dub cast has not been decided for Fate/Extra yet, however the original Japanese audio will be included. For those hoping to see the original Fate/stay night game localized in English, Arksys Games currently has no plans to do so. You’ll just have to make do with the fan translation patch or the anime TV series.

The biggest and most important gaming feature at Anime Expo 2011 was the man behind the tactical RPGs La Pucelle: Tactics and more famously, the Disgaea series: Guest of Honor Sohei Niikawa. Niikawa discussed his history with video games and how he got started in the industry. Despite playing games as a child, he went to college to study archaeology, hoping to be a professor like Indiana Jones. Then Final Fantasy V came out, which he played, and inspired him to get into the industry by applying to Nippon Ichi Software (NIS). The rest as they say is history.

With Disgaea 4 coming to North America on September 6th, Niikawa and the NIS America industry panel addressed some information about the game and trivia about the Disgaea series in general. As of now, NIS America cannot promise that it will be able to bring over all of Disgaea 4’s DLC, but said they will try to get as much of it as possible. On another bad note, because of regional and other technical issues, Disgaea 4 players in US and Japan will sadly be unable to play maps from one another’s country. Although the main Disgaea games have been released on Sony PlayStation consoles, Niikawa said there would be a possibility of porting the first two games to the Nintendo DS if fan interest was high enough. When asked which Disgaea game was the most difficult to translate to English, the localization writers replied that due to the more serious nature of Disgaea 2, that game was hardest. Finally, the name Disgaea came from the original desire to use dystopia or Gaean as the game’s name. Both did not fit and because the game was actually “dis-Gaean,” the final name was created.

This year’s Anime Expo saw a number of video game voice actors in attendance such as Cristina Vee (Noel Vermillion & Nu-13 of BlazBlue), Toshio Furukawa (Jann Lee of Dead or Alive series), and Miyuki Sawashiro (Carl Clover of BlazBlue series, Elizabeth of Persona 3). There were even a number of video game Internet celebrities. Monty Oum, a CGI animator most famous for his Dead Fantasy Final Fantasy/Dead or Alive crossover CG short animation series, was present at Anime Expo this year. The team behind Mega64 online video game-related comedy skit videos was back at Anime Expo to hold another Mega64 panel as well.

Lastly, there’s the elephant in the room for those that know about this year’s Anime Expo: the Hatsune Miku concert. This year’s record attendance may be attributed to Miku as a Guest of Honor. That experience is another story for another time and will be part of a story for my article next week looking at the history of the world’s most successful virtual idol, Hatsune Miku, and the impact gaming has on her. As a final point, Anime Expo was a blast – definitely one of the best parts of my trip to Los Angeles.