Convention Report Sacramento: SacAnime 2010

SacAnime is a Midsized convention held at the Radisson Hotel that brings in 1000+ Otaku from all over California, and Northern Nevada. The price is reasonable with $25 for a Saturday pass and $35 for a full weekend at the door. You could save some money by pre-ordering for the convention. Sunday and Friday will only cost you $15, so if it’s the dealers room you’re interested in, you aren’t going to have to fork out a whole lot of cash to get in and get the goods.

The con was split up in two halves, which was a little confusing at first. On the right side of the hotel you found registration, the entertainment room (Main Events), Vendor’s Room, Autograph Area, and Artist’s Alley (the Smallpress Zone). On the left side after a little trek through the courtyard, you were able to find the Console Game Room, CCG Room, and Anime Viewing Rooms.

Special Guests included Vic Mignogna, Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Lisa Furukawa and Tom Kane. Entertainment Included Live Music, The Slants on Saturday night and Voltaire on Friday evening.  On Saturday we enjoyed the Sac Club Rave with Random DJSTD: DJ Jinrei, DJ Amaya, DJ Helsing who will be featured later this year at ACEN and Fanime if you want to catch them again.

A very popular activity when convention going is the Anime & Live Action viewing rooms. At the Sacramento Anime Convention there were only two of these, one for each genre. The Anime and Live Action viewing rooms were located right in the beautiful Radisson Hotel Courtyard, unfortunately the decorative fountain added an additional soundtrack of splashing and splooshing sounds that were almost as loud as the sound from the projector itself. It would have been nice to see the Viewing Rooms open 24 hours a day instead of from 4 to 12 on Friday,  10 to 5 on Sunday and a mere twelve hours on Saturday.

The Anime viewing room had a much larger projector but the projector’s placement was counter intuitive. The projector screen (which was not actually a screen and was fashioned out of some other type of noticeable material) was displayed across the entire wall from the roof to the floor. Bigger screen is better right? Not in this instance. If there was anyone sitting in front of you, you would have trouble seeing parts of the bottom of the screen.  This wouldn’t be too much of a problem for regular titles, but for subtitled showings it became a problem. It’s hard to watch something when you can only read half of what is going on!

We enjoyed lots of eye-candy at the SacAnime Convention. We were particularly excited over Team Love-Hate’s artistic display. If you aren’t familiar with Team Love-Hate they are local to Sacramento, California and they produce some amazing work. Check them out on their website.

The gaming room was a blast and offered up Console buy in Tournaments (from $2-5) in all sorts of games and the competition was fierce. Free play was also available on a wide variety of platforms (some of which were attached to bigscreen T.V.’s ). Many games were available from old school titles like Sonic the Hedge Hog and Golden Axe on Sega Genesis to BlazBlue and Halo 3 ODST on PS3 and Xbox 360.

We were pleasantly surprised with the dealers room. Sacramento is a small city and we did not expect three vendors for Gothic Lolita Clothing alone. There was even one vendor, Harajuku Hearts, selling Brand Gothic lolita, Metamorphose temps de fille and Putumayo clothing lines. Other vendors were selling discount Bodyline dresses, and another was selling her adorable gothic lolita clothing that she designed and fashioned herself.

There were additional vendors (Visual You) selling some Visual Kei clothing alongside their regular merchandise. Pawstar was there, who we are familiar with from the Anime Central Convention in IL. They carry fuzzy leg warmers, collars, wrist cuffs and more. We would surmise that they are responsible for much of the plethora of fuzz you see at anime cons these days. All of the regular stuff was there as well of course,  fan merchandise, manga, magazines, DVDs, Video Games, plush toys, T-shirts, keychains, and of course POCKY!

Overall we think the SacAnime convention was a lot of fun and definitely worth a visit. Cosplay was rampant, Con-goers were friendly and while the Panels were sparse, they were quite meaty! If you’re interested in seeing more of our photographs from SacAnime 2010 please visit the SacAnime Gallery (coming soon) or for additional convention information visit their official website, SacAnime.com.