Chicagoland Spring Carnival 2013 at Logan Hardware, May31-June 1st recap

 

After attending Maryland Deathfest the week before, I was a bit worn out getting ready for CSC 2013 and after clearing out and setting up the room for the event, I was so exhausted, I wasn't sure if I would even be able to enjoy what I was putting so much work into. Boy, was I wrong.

For those of you who haven't made one, the CSC is a shmupmeet first started in my apartment and now is held at Logan Hardware record store and arcade in Chicago, IL. Lots of shmups, lots of dedicated classic arcades and lots of pinball.

Friday, I came over to Logan early to finish setting up and work with Zespy's crew on getting the pinballs and cabs all squared away. By 3 or so, the Canadian super duo of brentz and jonny5 showed up, fresh off a plane from Toronto and a few hours later, the party was in full swing.

People brought in all their gear Friday, with a crazy selection of pcb's. For the event, Zespy emptied a shelf in his office to keep pcb's on and even bringing 15 or so pcb's myself, we had half the shelf left. So many people showed up with pcb's that we took up most of the floor, the rest of the shelf and required some serious organixational skills to keep everything seperate. The list of good games that showed up included but wasn't limited to Gun Frontier, Ninja Emaki, Ketsui, Battle Garegga, Donpachi, Dangun Feveron, Dodonpachi, Thunder Dragon, Thunder Dragon 2, Black Heart, Out Zone and Twinkle Star Sprites, a perennial favorite. Zespy also busted out some games from his personal stacsh including a bitchin' Ninja Warriors dedicated and Major Havoc.

Saturday started off as usual, a bit sleepy and slow, but by 2, in full effect. This year, the score competition was Donpachi - JP version in honor of Cave's 'restructuring' that may never output another arcade shmup title. Compeition was intense, with Zerst taking the title and stuminator and drunkninja24 taking second and third respectively. Logan Hardware was kind enough to furnish the winner with a $25 gift certificate and second place with $10 and thanks to tOyrobo, 1st, 2nd and 3rd all received an amazing poster made for the event. Saturday continued late into the night and though I had quite a bot of running around to do, I got a chance to really enjoy a bunch of great games and some serious pinball competition against caldwert on Grand Lizard. I also set a new Ketsui high score for myself, but only bested my old score by like 200K, so I'm not gonna bother with an update.



One of the highlights of the weekend was watching drunkninja24's amazing Ketsui runs. The video is the first time I have ever witnessed Ketsui second loop play live and its pretty intense to say the least!

A huge thanks to Zespy and the staff of Logan Hardware for letting us take over their back room for two days, tOyrobo for the amazing poster, caldwert for bringing out 2 NEC XM29's, gunbird18 for bringing out his Aero City and all attendees for making this such a great event.