MoGameCon 2023

Not *every* year, but most years me and friends try to make our 4 hour exodus to MoGameCon. This year was the first time in a long while that we did so. Unfortunately, we had to leave early. But we do have pictures and footage of our time in St.Louis and at MoGameCon. It looks like we got out of there just in time!

We left from Kansas City on Friday at 4 PM. We drove straight through to St.Louis and ate at a local spot called Culpepper’s. We were trying to meet up with friends, but it just didn’t happen! So we head back to our AirBnB. We were playing some Switch and watched ‘Invaders from Mars’ while enjoying some delicious popcorn. The movie ended and we crashed. Before heading to the convention, we had time to get some grub. So we went and had breakfast at Blondies, and it was absolutely delicious. Finally, we got to MoGameCon at 10 AM when they were letting in press and VIPs. We stayed until 1 PM and got as much footage and pictures as we could. We also tried to buy some stuff in between because we knew the good stuff might get gone once the crowd came in at 11 AM.

When we were there, we were searching for different things and took different pictures and videos of what we saw. Elliott was on the search for someone that would take a trade for a wireless controller he had in exchange for a PS1 Ascii One-Handed controller. His one desire in this world is playing an RPG with one hand and a beer in the other! Unfortunately, he never found anyone who would do that trade with him or maybe he just never found the controller he was looking for so he saved his item for the one day he’d find someone willing to trade. His pickups photo is just below:

Myself, I went to the convention with a different idea in mind. Usually I take a fair amount of Magic the Gathering cards with me to sell/trade off. Then I leave with stuff I didn’t have to pay for. Unfortunately, they didn’t bite this time around. They suggested that I wait for another person to come to their booth that might be interested. I didn’t bother returning because I would miss out on my other goal. My friend has been asking how best to play emulators and PS1 games. I told her the PSP would and that she would have the added benefit of the PSP games too. So I was looking for an affordable one. Finally, I told myself if I saw a Gameboy Camera, I would buy it.

Since I didn’t dwell on the Magic cards and put my nose to the grindstone, I lucked out on both fronts. I stopped by the booth of the Video Game Dads (they have a podcast, look it up). They’re also from Kansas City and so when I saw they had a PSP for sale, I laughed. I said something to the effect that I traveled 4 hours to buy something I could’ve bought from them back home! Anyhow, we worked out a deal since the UMD drive was kind of grindy. I told him it’s going to be for mods anyway and he was happy it was going to a good home. You’ll see in the video below just how clean and scratch-free it is!

The Gameboy Camera doesn’t have a fun story with it. But I did only see one at the place on first glance and to me, at $30, I just bought the dang thing! It felt like a good price and I thought that if I didn’t jump on it, someone else would’ve. And then I went over to Retro Tony’s booth (he has a YouTube channel, look it up), he had a ton of stuff on his table. But I’m someone who looks for deals and common games down below. Tony happened to have a box of freebies full of movies. I looked and found that I had most movies or they were on DVD which was a bummer. I did find one of the Harry Potter films on Bluray that I didn’t yet own. I said YES PLEASE and was happy to be one movie closer to the fully HP movie set.

Once we left the vendor hall, we went into the secondary room that had YouTube personalities (John Riggs and more). There was also a local wrestler, game tournaments, and some other activities happening in that room. I’ve met those people before so I just steered clear on the off chance that people would flood the room. Heck, they had the Sega Pluto prototype there (again) and I’ve even played that before. So I certainly wasn’t much for that room this year. But I did happen into the panel room in time for a Jeopardy-like trivia game about gaming. They had already chosen the teams but the audience all got raffle tickets and were able to win prizes as the game went on. This was put on by Game and Browse (they’re a YouTube channel, look it up!). It went very well and I won an audience prize of a Pokemon tabletop game!

You might be wondering why we left at 1 PM that day as I sort of mentioned before. Well, here’s the video of our time in St.Louis and MoGameCon. Wait until the end and you’ll see!