AMOA 2015 took place March 24th-26th here in Vegas. Sean and I didn't find out about it til the last day and I already had an MRI scheduled and other things going on but we freed up a couple of hours to swing by between it all. We didn't have a plan to get in yet but a little after we arrived we ran into Julie sitting outside. Mike/Xero came out with a badge for her and between them they got us in! (Thanks, guys!)
Since we were so pressed for time, we just took care of the essentials once inside. We did a quick walk around the place, took pics together in a photo booth, said hi to all the familiar faces we found there, and paid a visit to each of the 4 music games we saw: Pump It Up Prime, Hit The Beat, Neon FM, and some ticket game called Grand Piano Keys.
Andamiro's booth had 2 music games including a PIU Prime machine and a Hit The Beat machine. We didn't play Hit The Beat this year but at a glance it seemed like it might've been the same as last year.
As for PIU, it was our first time playing Prime. In addition to collecting a few PIU Prime and Infinity flyers from the booth, I think we got the equivalent of about 3 songs each in on the machine and liked it quite a bit. We didn't have time to check everything out on it but we enjoyed what little we saw about as much as I enjoy Fiesta 2, Infinity, EX, NX, etc and as much as Sean enjoys Exceed 2.
Unit-e had brought 2 Neon FM machines, located just a few feet from Andamiro's booth, and had added some really cool new features to the game! We didn't have much time to find out all the details but a couple of things we did learn were that they now have the game available as a phone app and you can now battle people on a song from either another machine or your phone! We tried battling each other on a really hard song and had a lot of fun and a good laugh as well! We played a couple of songs on our own too. The buttons were really sensitive and the machines were great. Sean isn't as into that sort of game, I guess, but I LOVED it and we both had a lot of fun with it! We picked up a few flyers from the booth to add to our music game collection and then moved along. One small note about the game: not sure if it had already been but I hadn't realized til now that Neon FM is a ticket game!
Grand Piano Keys was a new, interesting one we stumbled across and hadn't seen before. Very simple concept but really fun, at least the first few times. The point of it was really just to hit the designated key in the correct order as quickly as possible without messing up and pressing the wrong button.
Though I'm sure our tight schedule caused us to miss a few friends we normally see at AMOA, we ran into several throughout the convention including Satinder, the rest of the Andamiro staff there, Lani, my ex Cesar Lara, Jose Vasquez (manager of Big Al's in Vancouver, WA), and Gary Balaban!
Inside one of the Andamiro games, we'd seen some really cool Andamiro tokens. At one point, we got to chatting with Satinder about PIU and asked him if he'd be able to sell us any of the tokens. He said they didn't sell them but after seeing the PIU token and arrow necklaces Sean and I had made he happily had their game opened up and handed us 12 tokens for free!!! Wow, thank you SO MUCH!
Back home later, we made a couple of those tokens into necklaces to wear, put a few in our dance game collectibles display case, and set the last 7 aside to turn into necklaces/accessories and sell to dance game people who want them. Couldn't hog them all, right? That'd just be greedy!
That was pretty much it for our 2015 AMOA experience. It was a quick one this time and neither Kyle's group, who'd been going for year's, nor Konami, who'd stopped showing up a few years or so back, were there but we'd still really enjoyed ourselves and were happy we hadn't missed out! Not sure how much info I can provide on the games we saw or other details of the convention but if anyone has any questions we might be able to answer feel free to send Sean or me a message!
Thanks for reading!
