July 26, 2007
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Otakon: Music and More
So, Otakon was in Baltimore this past weekend, and it was plenty of fun. I go every year, and some years are better than others. But this year had some particularly great events.
For starters, I managed to get it so that I had a business trip up to Baltimore on Thursday. So… I went up in the afternoon, and went into the city around 5:00 to pick up my badge a day early. This turned out to be perfect, since there was a panel I really was aiming to go to early Friday morning…
OverClocked Remix
So the first thing I saw on Friday was the OverClocked Remix panel. OCR is a video game music remixing community and, well, the kind of music that’s up there is incredible. Probably about 90% of the music I regularly listen to comes from there.
Anyway, some artists that I really like were up there on the panel; most notably pixietricks and Zircon. Not to mention that pixietricks (Jillian Goldin–link’s on the left) is also one of the voices on the soundtrack of the latest expansion for the Civilization series: Civilization IV – Beyond the Sword. Anyway, the panel was incredible, we got to see some live performances, and overall it was a great way to start the entire convention.
By the way… All the music on OCR is free for download. So, well, don’t dismiss the idea of remixing video game music until you’ve heard how good some of these folks are.
Lunar: Past, Present, Future
On Day 2 (Saturday), we had a panel on my favorite video game series: Lunar. This was the second year running for this panel (I mentioned how it went last year), and, it was pretty successful if you ask me. We got a good crowd, and it was tons of fun talking about the series and showing off some of the lesser-known things about the series.
For instance, we spent some time talking about some of the changes between the Japanese and English versions of the games, and some of the extra merchandise like the novels. 
One thing I’m glad we got to do is show the extremely-obscure Magical School Lunar anime. It’s about a 12-minute clip based off of the least-known game in the series. If you check LunarNET’s anime page you can see the video for yourself (also available via YouTube or animesuke.com). 
OBJECTION!
There were a lot of common themes to this convention. I did manage to see a lot of folks from my favorite current video game series: Phoenix Wright – Ace Attorney. Such as Phoenix and Edgeworth:
There were a number of other great things about the weekend. Chief of which is that a couple of my friends came up from North Carolina (C & D) for Otakon, which made it all even more worthwhile. Then there was the “How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse” panel, which taught me a few things that could very well save my life one day. And, lastly, a couple of finds in the dealer’s room.
Oh, before I forget, my convention curse did return. The final total was 28–no exaggerations. KF
