After walking through downtown for the first time since it's had a ceiling, we found ourselves upstairs in the convention hall of the Plaza. The Mini-Bosses, a Nintendo cover band, began playing soon after our arrival. Welcome to the Classic Gaming Expo.

Arcade machines set to free play lined the walls of the hall, including vector, laserdisc and other golden age games. I picked up 7th place in Tron, and attempted(with little success) to memorize patterns in Cliffhanger, an early laserdisc game based on Monkey Punch's Lupin III series. 1971's Computer Space was there, with it's funky and unique cabinet design. I played a horrible game of Punch Out, remembering how amazing the game appeared the first time I saw it as a kid. Space Ace and Dragon's Lair brought back memories of Poe's Pizza, a seedy joint my friends and I used to trek to through the desert(and past a meat packing company, where I swear we once saw a horse head) in order to blow our allowances.

Speaking of Dragon's Lair, Bluth and company were there to show off Dragon's Lair 3D, an impressive remake of the original. Instead of the memorization scheme, the game is now in the platform style, following the plot and scenes of the original game. I'm looking forward to its release.

One of the highlights of the show was the keynote speech by Al Alcorn, number three employee of Syzygy/Atari and the designer of Pong. His talk was amusing and informative, full of anecdotes from the golden age of the company and clarifying several stories and rumors that have been told and retold through the years(including the sordid tale of Jobs/Wozniak and Breakout). His autograph now sits above the Pong image in my copy of arcade fever, an excellent pictoral guide to gaming history I'd purchased earlier in the day.

But the adventures of my day do not end there! After the expo we met up with some friends, ate dinner and headed over to the International Market, one of the few novel grocery stores in town. While waiting in line to buy the half dozen bowls of instant ramen I'd randomly chosen using the pictures on the lids as a guide(Bowl hot noodle soup! Anyone read Japanese or Korean?), I found something I'd been introduced to by rusty at SXSW, the "nice light tasting snack" as the packaging proclaims, the Canadian claim to fame called Coffee Crisps. Now I'm not much of a candy eater, and I'm especially not much of a chocolate bar fan, but damn, these things are good. Or maybe they're just ok, and it's the result of wanting what you can't have syndrome. Either way, I grabbed a handful.

Maybe I'll write up random imported ramen reviews as I consume them over the next couple weeks.