(Note: There might be some more reviews written by the other members of Spork of Doom and more pictures at a later date. Keep an eye on the main page for a news post.)
Well, we are back from Anime Weekend Atlanta 2005. I must say we had a blast. However, before I get to the review let me give ya some background on our trip. Well the night before I lost my PSP. Needless to say I was pissed and Pen_Dragon was laughing at me. (It was payback he just replaced his lost PSP, and I had laughed at him when he lost his.) Anyhow, we get started on our trip and an hour out Pen_Dragon realizes he forgot his camera. We do have pictures thanks to HPanda but not many and some need a lot of work, I'm not even sure some are useable. On a fun note we did an experiment on the drive. InterPaul made signs to hang in the rear windows that said "We play violent video games!" We got some interesting reactions to them. For instance we passed a church van with what appeared to be a youth group inside. When we passed the driver read the sign. He had a look of horror on his face that was priceless; I wish I had a picture of it. After that he backed off out of site and even though we had to slow down due to traffic we never saw the van again. Otherwise the drive was rather uneventful.
Well what can I say about AWA other then IT KICKED SO MUCH ASS. Normally are drive plans for cons get us there late Friday at which time we check in and go get out tickets. Afterwards we go get some grub and check out the city. This is exactly what we did for AWA. Now normally this isn't too much of a problem. Most cons don't have all that much go on, on Friday afternoon. Well imagine our surprise when we got back to the hotel and looked at the event listing and realized we missed 2/3 of the AMV expo showings. We were not even in the city when they were shown. We also missed some other stuff we would have liked to go to. Needless to say we are upset we missed so much and we are planning to get their earlier next year.
I was fairly impressed with the location of this con. To those lucky enough to get a room at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel are lucky indeed. The convention center is directly connected to the Waverly hotel. In fact all the panels and viewing rooms were in the Waverly. The only thing in the Cobb Galleria Center that I saw was the vender room. All the content was well planned. The only bad thing I can say is, because of all the contests being held on Saturday there was a lack of things to attend on Sunday. There were just the viewing rooms and the deals in the dealer room.
The vender room kicked ass. There were so many venders that I can only equate the size to MegaCon in Orlando , and for the most part there were good deals to be had. I also saw a lot of things usually only available in Japan for good prices. However, I'm seeing a trend with anime being sold at conventions and the lack of deals for the anime. I wanted to buy a few different series but came home with zero of them due to same as retail prices. After all was said and done I came home with 3 shirts, 2 key chains, and around 18 copies of various manga, and I must say the manga was the best deal especially on Sunday.
One thing that was slightly annoying was the line for tickets was huge. It took us about 30-45 minutes to get ours, and that was the preordered line. I really didn't see much of a way to improve it though due to the size of this con.
In all as I stated already this con just kicks ass and was great fun. I'm already looking forward to next year when we will stay at the Waverly (hopefully). My suggestion go to this con is you live in the SE United States , it's worth the trip.
If you would like to take a look at the pictures from the con take a look here.
Pen_Dragon wrote a review you can find it here.