Yesterday was Manchester's #SonicConUK and I had a pretty fun time there! I got to mete Pete Murphy, who's been inking and colouring the Golden Axe strips I wrote for Sega Superstars, and had a nice chat with Abby Bulmer who also guested on an IDW artists panel.
I bought a few bits of loot: a Teknamy poster and some stickers from Abby; a Sonic pride sticker, and a teeny Megadrive controller fridge magnet which I'm tempted to try to turn into a pin badge at some point. The dealer's den was the largest at a Sonic con I've seen yet and had some incredible artists, though we needed some more STC rep I think 😁
Plenty of cosplayers around too including several flavours of Robotnik, though oddly no cosplay catwalk or competition, which felt like a missed opportunity!
The guests had their own room apart from the dealer's den, which I almost mistook for a green room since it was down a corridor. I think that could be rethought a bit, since it means there was less footfall for the guests' dealer tables, which felt like a shame.
I attended three main things, the IDW artists panel, a talk on speedrunning which demonstrated how to pull off a level wrap in Marble Zone (I need to try that), and the games room, where I got to try Knuckles Chaotix for the first time ever! (It was on a Megadrive Mini. I passed up a chance to play Superstars for it, haha.) I'm fully unsurprised this shared some dev staff with Sonic CD; it felt like some interesting ideas bundled up into something that didn't quite hit the mark, but it was more fun as a distraction than I'd heard it to be, and it got more fun the better I learned how to work out the controls. "Emergent gameplay" might be taking it a little far, but it definitely felt like a case of "here are some physics we made for you, have fun with that."