The first Philippine gaming console convention titled “GX-Con” was held yesterday, October 7, 2007, at SM Megamall’s Megatrade Hall where participants flocked the not-so-big place with a whopping attendance of approximately 2,000 people.

The said event’s theme was to showcase next generation gaming consoles, particularly the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Participants in this event may then play some of the games offered by the organizers for free.

According to Bryan Uy, one of the head event organizers, said that he and his team were very happy to have been the ones who organized this first major event in the Philippines.

“Gaming events [in the Philippines] have always been focused on online gaming.” Said Uy. We figured that it would be good to have an event that would highlight console gaming. We always believed that console gamers here belonged to the silent public and we’re happy to see them congregate now. We were right: there are a lot of console fans here in the Philippines.”

True enough. The moment the convention was opened to the public at around 10:20 a.m., The place started to get busy with guests, each visiting booths that caught their interest.

Participants in the event where a marketplace of genres, ranging from companies/communites that offered free game testing to stores that sold anime merchandise and action figure goodies. Noteable companies/communities that participated in the events were: Typhoon Games and Sanrio Digital (Hong Kong based companies) where they featured trailers of their latest games and Hello Kitty animation, The cosplay magazine PSICOM, Otakuzine: a magazine for anime lovers, The communities of Pinoy PSX, Pinoy-N and PinoyXbox: a group of gamers dedicated in playing games on their favored consoles, Lineage II’s Philippine beta testers, GameHopper: an online video game rental store, Toy Kingdom: one of the largest toy store in the Philippines, and Wasabi Toys: the Philippine’s premier hobby store.

The event not only highlighted the free game testing of next-gen consoles but also offered tournaments and cosplay contests as well. One of the things that seasoned the convention was the number of cosplayers that joined the event, almost taking up 1/3 of the whole population.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 6:51 am and is filed under Gaming News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.