Conclusion and Pictures

The Good

The Nickelodeon party at the Seattle Aquarium was bar-none the coolest convention party I'd ever attended. They rented out the entire aquarium, and you were free to check out all the great undersea stuff. Furthermore, Spongebob Squarepants was in attendance. And if you're a six year-old girl, there's little more important than getting your picture with one of your cartoon heroes.

And on top of that, they had free drinks and snacks available, including the mythical Krabby Patty!

The Seattle Science Center, in the shadow of the Space Needle, has a game development exhibit. They had a couple of little kiosks available where you could modify the properties of a couple of very simple games to see how the properties affect the gameplay.

The Mochimedia party the first night was rather nice, and as a bonus they had some booths available where you could bring a kid. Unfortunately we were just off the plane/bus/lobby with luggage in-tow and were just too tired to mingle. The highlight was the Mochi Martini. . .

For those of you unfamiliar with exotic fruit, a lychee (pronounced "LEE chee") is a large white sweet fruit that's a bit like a giant grape. The cocktail was quite stout (it's just straight vodka poured over the fruit), and the floating lychee just ended up looking a bit like a large eyeball in my highball

okay, a martini glass, but that doesn't rhyme.

The six year-old got Shirley Temples and egg rolls, which was just fine with her.

The Bad

The conference apparently ended up with about twice as many attendees as expected, and the venue wasn't well-suited. Beneroya Hall is a large opera house, which means that it has one really big beautiful auditorium, a lobby, and not much else. There was a smaller side auditorium for the second conference track, a reception room that held the third track, and the fourth track was held in a small concert venue across the street. Everything else had to share whatever lobby space or nook and cranny was available. Thus the company booths were scattered around about four locations. Permanent meeting rooms were housed in a restaurant across the street, and the "press room" consisted of a couple of tables on a fourth floor balcony.

The upshot was that if you attended a keynote or a first-track seminar, you got the most deluxe auditorium room ever (the main opera house), and the quality diminished from there, although the little concert venue across the street was rather nice in a dark intimate sort of way.

The Ugly

Lots of homeless. We never felt threatened even though we took the bus everywhere, but the economy worries me.

A giant transvestite wanted us to take hir picture. Mmmmmmmokay.

And finally, the aquarium had a really huge live octopus on display. Yeah, he was pretty slimy-looking, but it was cool to see him up close.

The Finest Freebies

• $250 from king.com. Upon entering the king.com seminar, Shelly was asked to drop her business card in the door-prize fishbowl. Wonder of wonders, she won a major prize!
  
  
• A 1 gig USB flash drive and a $10 Starbucks gift-card from exent. They had a number of pin-on buttons in their booth with cute saying on 'em like "go green, download a game" and such. They also had a deal if you were caught wearing a button at the conference, they'd give you a prize. I was caught twice. Cool.
  
  
• A 1 gig USB flash drive from Fresh Games. They were showing off their very cute new game "Ranch Rush", and they handed me a USB stick with the Ranch Rush installer on it. They promised to email me the unlock code, but I never got it. Still, USB flash drives are useful things.
  
  
• Cards with free game unlock codes from alawar.com. Alawar is a Eastern-European game company with a number of very high quality casual games. One of them, a licensed Diner Dash clone called Snowy's Lunch Rush is one of my favorites.
  
  
• Free Chocolatier 2 from PlayFirst. Chocolatier was one of Shelly's faves, and getting the sequel for free was a bonus.
  
  
• And finally, our hotel had FREE ROBES!
  
  Okay, the robes weren't actually free, but you try to explain that to the kid who's just decided that she's going to take the comfy robe home with her.

Hope you enjoyed the coverage, folks. See you at the next convention!