Pictures and After-Action Report: The Granado Espada PH Black Party

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Friends and More at the Granado Espada PH Black Party

[There will be pictures in this post - lots and lots of pictures! I'll be resizing them so as not to completely kill your browsers dead, but it's well worth it to wait while all the pictures are loading since they're pretty much integral to the story. In fact, as I often do for these after-action reports, the pictures and the captions ARE the story. Hope you can stick around to wait for them, since they're quite worth it.]

In order to celebrate its first year since commercial launch in the Philippines, IP e-Games piggybacked onto a Globe Telecoms event, hosting a Gaming Arena area on the first floor of the SMX Convention Center, the pet exhibit center of the SM Mall of Asia. The Gaming Arena boasted about a hundred or so PCs, and was intended to host the games being promoted that day: CABAL Online, Top Speed, Dance Battle Audition, and of course Granado Espada.


The Granado Espada banner at the Gaming Arena.





PCs! Lots of PCs!

Unfortunately all those PCs wound up becoming so much dead things. How ironic that a telecoms promotion that was supposed to extol added connectivity via both computers and mobile phones wound up providing an extremely inadequate Internet connection to this whole lot of computers. The lack of a reliable Internet connection had several repercussions for the event; the biggest casualty was this:


The Granado Espada PvP go-round, and any other tournaments that the other games might have wanted to put on, was unceremoniously bricked because there was no actual connection. Too bad since the GE tourney was supposed to take place on the Test Servers! I can only hope the PvP teams found the rest of the day at least as eventful as the tourney would have been. At least everyone who registered for the tournament was given a prize ^^

There was no PvP, but there was a lot of People Meeting People, in many cases for the first time, and in a few cases after a long time! Here's one of the surprise participants at the rest of the event: Sigrid!


[With thanks to Alex Crosse who took this pretty cool candid shot of me and Sigrid talking.]


The Black Party kicked off in earnest with the Trivia Contest, hosted by Grantoza and CM Aethrin.

[The telecom company also did not provide microphones, so we had to make do with that megaphone - and that prompted several rounds of jokes about being right back in Granado Espada, what with the game having Megaphone items to talk to an entire map at once, and the Microphone item to talk to the entire server.]


Part of the crowd that hung around the stage to join the Trivia Contest. Is it any wonder they were crowded so thickly when the prizes included video cards and such?

Lucky me to win one of the major prizes at this Trivia Contest; details here.

After a break, during which this cake was revealed and eaten with much relish, Aethrin got back on stage [I hope he enjoyed his chunk of the cake!] to hand out certificates of appreciation to the GE PH bloggers for, once again, going above and beyond the call of duty to keep the community informed and up to date with the game's latest developments.

As the certificate itself says:

For [their] stupendous efforts in chronicling events, news and features pertinent to the Granado Espada community.


The first group of bloggers honored: from left to right, Fiksdotter, Blacksword, Christus, CM Aethrin, Sigrid, and Southernsky.


The second group of bloggers honored: standing, from left to right, Churvanesska, Welling, CM Aethrin, Mena, and Artaxerxes. Kneeling, well, that's me [NineMoons].

Other bloggers were called but were not around, including Ogasawara and Craeon. [Craeon, that's the second certificate you've missed....]


The fan art competition drew a few contestants, and the prizes were won by StreyCat and Serpentes [a/k/a Hahaziah].

As a parting shot at the close of the Black Party, CM Aethrin suddenly yelled, "Okay, everyone who showed up in black, line up in front of the stage!" One scrum later, people walked away carrying GE mousepads [with Pirate Adelina on them] and other random real-life goodies. Whiteships a/k/a the lovely Feng Ling cosplayer snagged a limited-edition shirt, to her joy, after she'd been unable to buy anything in her size. I also got a shirt - but was able to trade it to Blacksword in exchange for his GE lanyard!


My parting photo: the Carracci crowd what attended the event, in what will likely be the last picture of this group under that name! [Since in two weeks' time Pachelbel and Carracci will cease to exist and instead become the single server Rembrandt....]

[Next Post: Friends and more - and pictures of us eating that cake!]