Those Gundam Guys at IPMS Las Vegas Region 8 Competition
This past weekend, Angel and I along with our wives, took the excuse of the IPMS Region 8 show hosted by the IPMS Las Vegas chapter, being held in Vegas; packed up a grip of our gunpla kits and headed out to sin city. They actually have a “Gundam” category as one of three categories under the Sci-Fi umbrella; so Angel and I were under the impression that were was a pretty good gunpla following. There were 5 entrants, 3 from So Cal, and 2 from Las Vegas, one of them being a recent transplant from So Cal. But regardless, its still damn cool they have a Gundam category in lieu of being lumped in with the rest of the Sci-Fi stuff. And we got to plug the crap out of SCGMC!
The event was held this past weekend on Saturday, April 18; at the Riviera Hotel & Casino. The place is the hotel that the movie Casino with Pesci and De Niro. The place is also shutting down next month to be demolished. So at the very least, we got to see the last hurrah of an iconic piece of Las Vegas history.
Like most contests we’ve been attending of late, we dropped in, filled out the paperwork, set up our kits, maybe chatted with a few folks then ran off. With the wives in tow, AND in Vegas, there were other priorities. We asked for more space as there was only 1 gunpla kit on the table. And when we left, there were 11, 10 of those belonging to Angel and I. Hopefully there would be more entrants. But we didn’t wait along for that and went off to have a nice brunch at the Wynn. When we returned to the room after our lunch, we were told that the room was closing in 5 minutes for judging, and didn’t reopen until about 3:45. In hindsight, we should have just hung out until the kicked us out, then went to eat. I did get to meet up with an old competitor Mr. RJ, whom I met well over 10 years ago at an OrangeCon event. He does mostly mods to 1/144 Zeonic kits with German influence and all hand painted. Pretty damn amazing skills. He took first place in the Gundam category. We also met another fellow name Keven who has a blog: http://topmodelplamo.blogspot.com/; you can read more about his entry on his blog. Hopefully he’ll make it out to the SCGMC show in November; Vegas isn’t too far a drive. After a quick chat, the room closed and we were kicked out.