PGC attends the sold-out show at The Wiltern Theater.Sunday night, Nintendo’s Fusion Tour stopped at The Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles with a rather large caravan of tour busses and semi-trucks. We attended to see what Nintendo has cooking on this tour, and were pleased to eventually learn that the show had been sold out.
As we drove up, we spotted the enormous line snaking around the corner, but by the time we had parked it seemed to have already been moving for a while. We couldn’t spot anyone from Nintendo to let us skip ahead, so we simply went to the end of the line.
There was a large security presence at the door, but upon feeling the object in my coat pocket, they simply accepted my word that it was a camera and let me in without showing it to them or anything. The Wiltern’s lobby is probably larger than what most venues will have on the tour, so there was a significant Nintendo presence. At the entrance was a contest booth for concert attendees to sign their lives away enter to win great prizes. And in the hallway just behind the main auditorium was everything else. There was an odd x-shaped cloth stretched out to serve as a video screen with footage of the fall line-up. A few representatives were wired up with GBAs, but as you might expect, most people were interested in the GameCube stations.
Nintendo had four stations set up with four games per station. Most of the games have already been released or were titles that people may already be familiar with. Metroid Prime 2 seemed to be the only game yet to hit shelves. Smash Bros. and Mario Kart were there for multiplayer smack-downs. Several racers were on hand, including NFSU, F-Zero GX, and SRS. Madden and WWE: Day of Reckoning represented the sports line-up, and Spider Man 2 and Terminator 3: Redemption stood-in for movie-licensed games. Then at the end of the row was the sight most Nintendo fans were looking for - sort of…
The Nintendo DS display is definitely large and visible, but unfortunately, at this point you have to be content with looking at it under glass as if it were a museum piece. The glass box is even partially covered so that you can’t get any sort of look at the back. During the teleconference a couple weeks ago, Nintendo seemed to indicate that the DS will be playable later on in the tour, but representatives at the show still seemed shaky on whether or not that would be the case.
Believe it or not, Nintendo really wasn’t the focus of the show. Once you got inside the auditorium, the only indication that Nintendo was affiliated at all was a pair of banners placed at the ends of the stage (and even those were taken down before Story of the Year went on). There were no video presentations, no T-shirts being tossed to the crowds, and (thankfully) no guys on stage in big-headed Mario costumes.
The Los Angeles line-up included Letterkills, My Chemical Romance, Lostprophets, and Story of the Year. Although I knew in advance, I was still disappointed that Anberlin wasn’t on this leg of the tour since I know several of the guys from back in Florida. All of the bands pretty much play punk rock in one form or another. Some might argue that one band or another actually plays emo, but whatever, this was pop-punk if I ever saw it.
Including intermissions (and again there was no one to say “Go play Nintendo”), the show lasted about three and a half hours with a packed house on both the floor and balcony. Anyone thinking that these guys might tone down their act because it’s a Nintendo tour is sorely mistaken: most of the bands used the f-word as often as they could and even admitted to doing it just for the fun of it. Not being particularly familiar with any of the bands, I just sat back and took pictures through most of the evening, but once Story of the Year came up, the energy increased to contagious levels. More than half of the room was singing along to every song, and that number only increased when the band played one of their hits. Despite security guidelines prohibiting it, a few people started moshing and crowd-surfing, but since the club has somewhat of a tiered floor, some of them appeared to “surf” over a waterfall. Story of the Year ran with the energy of the sold-out crowd, and were clearly helped by having a completely wireless set-up that allowed them to jump up on the speakers whenever they liked and even venture far into the crowd without missing a beat.
Overall, I’d say that the night was most likely a success for Nintendo, since they were able to expose the bands’ fan-bases to a fair number of games, and it was likely the first time many of them had ever heard of the Nintendo DS. Still, Nintendo would be better served to have a stronger presence on the stage in some form or another. Crowds are happy to fight for Nintendo T-shirts and squishy GameCubes flying from the arms of an emcee.
For more photos, click here.
Topic: RE: Nintendo Fusion Tour Rocks LA (Read 2368 times)
