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Thursday
 
Like every year I’ve attended the con, I took the trolley to get downtown, as like all previous years, parking was hell downtown.
 

When I first got there, I spent a brief amount of time looking around the exhibition hall.  The setup was pretty much the same as all the previous years.  Shortly after this I met up with some friends for lunch at Fuddruckers.  That place is awesome as always.  If you have never eaten at a Fuddruckers, then do yourself a favor and get the hell over to one right now.  Seriously, stop reading this and get there.
 
    
Upon our return to the convention center, we headed to hall H for the Capcom Panel.  Sadly, I can say that this was the biggest waste of time that I partook in the entire weekend.  They did not present one new piece of information about any of the games that were shown that had not been revealed at E3 or even prior to that.   For instance, they showed a trailer of Spyborgs for the Wii.  Was anything new or interesting shown?  No, it was just video of the demo from E3.  The same thing happened with Darkside Chronicles.  They showed an old trailer from prior to E3 that ended with Ada Wong appearing on the screen which garnered cheers from the crowd which cause me to audibly blurt out, “Why are you clapping?  Like no one knew she was going to be in the game?!”  Seriously, it’s like when a new Xmen movie comes out if fans were saying, “Gee! I wonder if Wolverine will be in it?!”  Sorry to rant here, but if you read my impressions on that game from E3 you’ll know I’m not a big fan of it.  Plus, the demo they had was the EXACT SAME ONE FROM E3.  I nearly got kicked out and got a fare share of dirty looks when I couldn’t hold back my laughter when they said that this game would be the premiere shooting experience on the Wii.     Capcom also dodged questions during the Q and A section.  They ignored a question about a new Mega Man game telling the kid to go buy the current Starforce game and flat out ignored answering a question about why there is no traditional Resident Evil game for the Wii instead of making more rail gun shooters. 
 
      
 
 
I was hoping that they would announce some new characters for the US release of Tatsunoku vs. Capcom, but they didn’t talk about it at all spare one brief mention of upcoming releases.  A year ago at Comic Con, I remember the huge buzz going around after Midway had announced that The Joker and The Green Lantern would be in that year’s Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.  I’m not saying that Capcom had to lay out all of their cards so to speak, but just one new piece of info would have been nice.  To be fair though, the booth Capcom had in the exhibition hall was very nice.  Lots of exclusive merchandise was available and a lot of good Capcom Cosplayers were present.
 
    
While on the topic of Cosplay, Comic Con usually isn’t as big on it as other cons are.  While there are cosplayers to be had, it’s nowhere near the same amount as at other cons. And sadly the ratio between good costumes and crap costumes is fairly large.  Now I’m usually not one to criticize other people’s costumes, but I saw one that broke my tolerance.  Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera on me at the moment to capture its “greatness,” but I have spent minutes in MS Paint recreating it for you to see.  Apparently this kid was cosplaying a character from Naruto.  I don’t know the character’s name, but an image of the actual character is on the right and the kid is on the left.  SEE THE RESEMBLANCE?!!!
 The only other thing I got to go to on Thursday was the premiere of the new animated Green Lantern movie.  It was made by the same people that brought us great shows like the original Batman the Animated Series which I am a huge fan of.  Unfortunately this movie falls a bit short of my expectations.  It wasn’t a bad movie per se; it was the timing in it that falls short.  The movie serves as an origin story for the Green Lantern Hal Jordan.  However, him getting the ring and learning how to use its powers takes place before the opening credits even roll.   Hal’s rival and nemesis Sinestro starts out in the movie as a Green Lantern.  Now this isn’t really a spoiler as nearly everyone that is familiar with the Green Lantern series knows that Sinestro betrays the Lanterns and goes rouge.  However, again this is another aspect rushed as they don’t even try to conceal the fact that he is evil.  He might as well have had all his dialogue been, “Guuurgh! I’m Evil!”  The movie was animated well, had a good cinematic score, and as always in these WB features, had great voice acting.  Seventy minutes is just not enough for this type of movie.  An origin story needs more time to develop.  The Superman Doomsday animated feature that came out before this worked out better as there is no origin to be told.  That story jumped straight in with everything pre-defined and things moved at a better pace because of it. 
 
 Saturday
    
Unfortunately, I got to the convention center pretty late on Saturday so I won’t have as much to report on here.  Finding parking to get on the trolley was horrible so that didn’t help matters either.  I spent most of my time further exploring the exhibition hall.  The entire con was more crowded this year than any other I can remember.  There were a lot of collectibles that were con-exclusive and others that were making their debut.  It was nigh impossible to navigate around the hall though, so I’m sure a lot of people missed out on seeing some of these things.  One thing that caught my eye in particular was a large Wesker figure in his STARS uniform.  However when the price tag said ask for pricing info I knew that it would be far out of reach for what I was willing to spend on such a thing.
 
 
    
In one of the bigger disappointments for me, the Mega 64 crew did not have any new DVDs available.  Usually they have con-exclusive DVDs with unused material on them, but this year was for naught.  Still, getting to see them interact and confuse the hell out of the general populous was hilarious as always.  I’m still looking forward to their 3rd season release.
    
 
I really didn’t get much of a chance to play any demos to get any hands on experience.  Capcom’s demos were exactly the same as what was available at E3, so I have nothing new to say here as mentioned before.  One funny thing I have to comment on is the display for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash Up game.  There was huge poster displaying some of the characters available in the game in addition to the turtles.  One character in particular, the Utrominator, was drawn as looking particularly intimidating and bad ass.  This is in stark contrast to his premiere in a trailer where he looks and sounds mentally handicapped.   
 
 
   
The only panel I was able to get into was the Kevin Smith panel.  I thought I was in line for the Iron Man 2 panel, but apparently the con staff had used the same area to line up for both events.  The staff was kind of frustrating here telling everyone to get out of line and that we weren’t going to get into the Iron Man 2 panel without realizing some people were waiting for Kevin Smith.  I was glad I got to get into this panel as the man is hilarious in person.  The entire panel was just one giant Q and A as Mr. Smith didn’t want to show anything from his latest movie as his last movie did poorly after he showed bits from it at comic con.  Kevin knows how to work a crowd as he would go from starting to answer a question, to ranting about the latest trends before going back and finally remembering that he forgot the question.  Most of what he said is not appropriate to repeat here, but him finding a way to compare Twilight to porno mags got a huge laugh from the crowd.  Surprisingly, I have the same sense of timing as Mr. Smith, as just when I was starting to get bored, he ended the panel.  If they gave this man a half hour show of answering fans questions, it would be a ratings jackpot. 
    
That about raps it up for my experience at Comic Con for 2009.  Wish I had more to write about, but it was difficult to get into any panels or play any games as the whole event was so packed.  Hopefully the convention center will be expanded in the future to free up some more space as its been rumored.  It wasn’t a bad convention, it’s just that nothing really stood out at all or was impossible to find.  If you can deal with crowds, than I would give this year’s Comic Con a B, if you are like me and hate overcrowding and getting trampled on, then I’d say it’s a B-.  I’ll try to end this article on a positive note though.  Let’s see here.  There were too many damn Twilight fans.  Well guess I failed at going out positively.  I’ll try again next year.