Today was quite possibly one of the most awesome days in the last week – if not few months – of my life. Check out the picture below for reason #1:

A whole team of SEGA-themed Cosplayers!

When I realized during a SEGA Scarf giveaway that a guy in a NiGHTS costume won it, I suddenly noticed there were more SEGA Cosplayers near him – Shadow, Sonic the Werehog (complete with fangs!), Nack the Weasel, Agent G., Blaze the Cat, Gerald Robotnik, and even Tikal! NiGHTS had a rockin’ costume too, though you can’t see the red gem on the chest in this pic. On top of it all, those are Chaos Emeralds they’re holding. Seriously, to all of you above – fantastic job!

Do you know your Phantasy Star history? The girl on the right showed up as Rika from Phantasy Star IV, and also did a superb job on her costume!

We also had Mark Sheppard (Battlestar Galactica, CSI, and he was even the villain on an episode of the X-files) around in the morning too, who is doing some of the voice acting for The Conduit! I got to meet him, and thought he was a really nice guy, and totally polite to boot – not always common for people who make it big in hollywood. Special thanks to him for the autographs in the morning!

 Early in the morning, Perfect Spiral from our PSU Community arrived at the convention almost an hour before it started just to get a good spot in line. He raced to our booth and won himself a free PSU T-shirt, among other merch – great job!

Since it was Saturday, we got to see a ton of actual gamers show up to play the games and let us know what they thought. The responses were amazing, and just watching people play games like MadWorld and The House of the Dead: Overkill was again entertaining in its own right – more gasps, crowd cheering, and wide-eyed, open-mouthed grins as gamers saw what SEGA has in store for the mature crowd on the Wii.

Special SEGA Takeout Boxes – shown here – had some collector’s SEGA Scarfs inside!

 It was a long day with lots of hardcore gaming, and our very own community member Iceman – a fellow SEGA fan who started the PSU Podcast with me in August of ’07, showed up too! It was the first time the two podcast hosts had met in person, and he gave us a great hand watching over the booth and guiding gamers as they played the games. A very special thank you again to him, we really appreciated it!

SEGA Nerds was also on-site, and I had a blast meeting their rep and getting to talk hardcore SEGA with him. Little shout out to all you SEGA Nerds that may be reading out there!

 The day flew by and just before things closed down, Iceman and I took a quick stroll around the show floor. We met up with Archie Comics, who create the Sonic the Hedgehog comic books, and it was an awesome moment, for me at least, since I grew up reading that series. I gave them my sincere thanks for all the work they do, and we snapped this picture of the Archie comics team!

The awesome team behind the Sonic comic book series!

The day now over and with only one more day to go, it’s hard to believe just how much fun this entire event has been (especially considering you’re watching a booth all day!), and how many awesome people we’ve been privileged to meet in the community.  Check out the full posting of pictures here on the SEGA Flickr feed!

Check back Sunday night for our third and final Blog entry here from NYCC!