Going to the Penny Arcade Expo:

I have never in the past had the time or green to role out to a game expo of any kind. This year however I had the time and money right on time for the PAX (Penny Arcade Expo). Also living in Oregon, I’m simply a three hour drive from Seattle Washington. So I called up some friends and the four of us decided in two weeks we would be able to make the final day (Sunday) of PAX. It would be a new experience for all of us. If you have never been to an expo of this sort, I would like to inform you now, that it was totally worth the 3 hours in a car and 4 hours of sleep that I got on Saturday night. I can’t truly say that all expos are going to be as good as my experience at PAX. Although if you get a chance next year, defiantly go to PAX. It was a time that I will remember for the rest of the year until next year when I go again. The Enforcers that were there were great guys and gals I have to give them props for being there and keeping the insane crowd from killing each other as a huge mob at an AC DC concert would have. Thanks again guys and gals.

PAX is an acronym for Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a place for gamers to gather and experience the latest and greatest in games and play in torments of great size. Imagine if you will a LAN party of several hundred people. I will start with my experience being as this was my first time as well.

In the beginning there was a hotel. Prices of hotels are all jacked due to tourist season in Seattle. PAX makes deals with hotels around the area to get cheaper rates however one hotel that is close by says “no way do we want nerds in our hotel” so they wont cut PAX a deal. So PAX tells everyone not to stay there. We couldn’t get in on any of the hotels that were in the recommended list so we had to stay a whopping 8 miles away. There was plenty of parking when we got there which was great to see. This raised the question, “How many people are actually going to be here?” though.

This was our waiting line. People go all the way up the hill and around the corner into the building.

Don’t let the list fool you, there were no concessions on level 4, just a soda machine, so if your hungry pack a lunch and hide it in your backpack “or if you got a ride there just drive around for about 20 minutes till you can find someplace to eat. The food stands on level one consisted of nachos. They didn’t fit my diet plan however.

As you take in the scenery around you you’ll notice big name banners and the likewise…

Who goes to PAX:

Who goes to PAX? Well Gamers do obviously but the others are game developers, computer hardware companies, and funny guys are all of whom I saw on my one day there.

Gamers were there to check out the latest games and hardware and for the prestige of saying, “I was at PAX ’06!” There was also the tournament players who all wanted to get in on the LAN games there to frag the next guy. At the end of the night they had a grand show of the top two competitors form the LAN games and dragged them up on a stage to play a best 2 out of 3 head to head Tetris game. Lame right? No way! There had to be over 300 people all clapping along with the ever increasing speed of the Tetris music while the obviously younger competitor who looked to be around 14 or 15 years of age stomped the crap out of the older competitor who looked to be about 24 to 26 years of age. The crowed loved every minute of it and cheered them both on to good placement of their blocks, and gave great sympathy when they had bad placements. It was all good times and I am psyched to go again next year. I might even get a Nintendo DS so that I can fit in with the other 1000 or so people that had one. Out of all the gamers that I saw, and I have to say it was a lot of them, maybe 3% showed up in costume, 2% were ninjas or other asian anima based warriors. Most people were cool and if you needed to find something you could ask an enforcer, but some of the attendees were there for the free stuff you could pluck off the counters, some were there to find collectables, others were there to find the latest and greatest before their friends could, and finally the Fanbois were there to support their favorite company and or game.

So the game developers were all there to show off their work that they had been spending the last few years building, and finally get a real (non-virtual) pat on the back and a “good job”.

The funny guys were Red vs. Blue. They were there to support the gamming community with their DVDs and T-Shirt signing booth. As well I should mention the other assortment of booths selling gamer posters, t-shirts, and knick-knacks. However this article is based on the experience at PAX not the knick-knack hype booths so moving on.

Also you have the nerd core that comes to these types of things that dress up as their favorite game characters. I didn’t take the picture of many ninjas and samurais but I did manage to get these…

Pay no attention to the fat old guys in the back ground; this was a rare opportunity to catch these two not surrounded by guys who liked girls who looked like they were 14.

So would I recommend going to PAX next year, with all this said? YES defiantly. If you want to go with someone who’s already gone, let me know. I’ll be there next year for sure. I’ll be more than happy to make sure you don’t get lost.

Good Bad and the Ugly of PAX:

Good:

Auran – Fury, a game I just can’t say enough about. This game has been compared to Guild Wars more times than hookers have given out herpes. Don’t let the Guild Wars stink travel with Fury though. After playing six of their version of “capture the flag” matches I was hooked totally and had a great grasp on the system and how it worked.

The Fury team…

This is the Fury staff all kind of standing around. The team here as you can see them in the background as well all kept the game going smoothly for two tables each table holding eight players with two four on four matches going. As each match ended they would get the next match started. Auran also hired two very good “hypers” to get on the mic and toss out some blurbs and get people excited about Fury. It worked well but you could tell that the “hypers” didn’t know the first thing about a computer. I believe that when he said, “My computer at home has eight Megs or something like that.” Everyone in the area that could hear him knew that he hadn’t the slightest clue.

The pictures might be hard to see, but this is the spawn in point for the capture the flag game we played..

This is a picture of the city from when you spawn in after a PvP match. It did, unfortunately remind me a lot of a guild wars city.

For more information take a look at the website, “http://www.unleashthefury.com/” there wasn’t a lot of content in yet, but the PvP that they were showing was the “capture the flag” type game, where there were some bugs with green asses that you had to kill (They only had one HP) and then collect their green glowing ass and run it back to your base. While carrying the bugs’ ass you can’t use any skills (powers) until you get it back to your base. Also you ran about thirty percent slower.

This is our friend Jeff (forever know from the “Jeff’s Mom” jokes that have been circulating in every MMO that I have played in the last four years.  This is primarily because I bring them with me.) He caught hang of the game right away and quite the able gamer when it comes to picking something up and getting a grasp of how it works. He got the play system down pretty fast, and I figured out the technical bugs still in the game. So putting our heads together we will both be playing this game next year when it is released. We even signed up for the beta a few times each.

Red vs. Blue – Red vs. Blue was there, showing their support to the gamer community. They would charge you for a t-shirt like Abercrombie would, but they would also sign it without any issues and that made it worth it. These guys had a smile on their face even on day three. It made me want to buy a t-shirt but then again, I’m a thrifty kind of guy, and I just couldn’t pay fifteen to thirty bucks for a t-shirt.

Bad:

NVIDIA – The NVIDA booth had a line from their booth across the floor about half way across the entire room. Must have been popular right? Not really. They had three computers setup so that you take a survey that took about ten to fifteen minuets to complete. Then when you were done, you were allowed to acquire one entry ticket for a drawing to get BFG t-shirts, a new video card or other little things. Needless to say the line was only that long because of the lack of computers to take the survey and the avid NVIDIA fanbois couldn’t resist and needed to stand in line for over an hour to signup for a chance at winning the BFG stuff.

Creative – Soundblaster X-fi the king of lies.

One of the guys at the booth tried to convince me that they could mimic 3D positional audio through stereo headphones. I chuckled and said, “Ok I’ll try it.” I sat down to a game of Quake 4 and I played one quick match. I have to say I am still not impressed with Quake, and the claims of 3D positional audio being done through headphones stereo or not is a joke. I have to say the headphones created more confusion than anything else. I tried listening for things behind me and running around however there was just no way to tell. It sucked. Not to mention that out of the 7 kill cap, I fell off the map once by myself, and 5 other times the game had me walk backwards off the ledge as soon as I spawned. I only managed to kill my competitor once while he jumped around the map like a monkey on PCP. The few people that were standing there got a chuckle from the sniper rifle in the face shot at point blank range. Then he had spawned right behind me and got me in the back of the head while I fiddled with the running around trying to determine what sounds were behind me and in front of me.

NCSOFT – They had a good sized setup with two booths. One included just about every game they ever got out, and the other was for Guild Wars. The guild wars booth seemed to be popular and they gave away all sorts of goodies just tossing them out into the crowd and people jumped and fought to get full copies of the game. Throughout the day they gave away copies of the game in 14 day free trial form or 10 hours of game play worth, whichever came first. In my humble opinion, I’ve played the game, and if you’re new to guild wars 10 hours of game play is all you really enjoy from the game once you realize what kind of grind there is after you reach the cap level. The only fun I ever had was from level 6 to 17, after that, the game is boring and totally a grind. You have to make some huge self accomplishments in order to get into an good guild and do the big time PvP. It’s just not worth my time to play like that.

Flying Lab Software – They didn’t have much of a setup with just 4 computers and one large screen displaying Pirates of the Burning Sea.

This game had some great graphics but didn’t show a lot of content…

So for the pirates out there, this game was defiantly up your alley. (I'm sure the girl in pink would have been a nice bit of booty as well)

Ugly:

Wizards of the Coast – One of my friends used to work for WotC many years back and talked to some of the guys there, however they mainly gave out free copies of Magic the Gathering Online, mouse pads, and signed you up to win some artist pictures off Magic the Gathering game cards. Nice prizes for the give away but an overly lame display case and three computers that hosted a connection to MtG online. I am an old school MtG player and I really liked the game until it got political. This booth was just a sign of how money grubbing WotC really is and how much I dislike their views on how to make money from the gamer community. If your not sure what I’m talking about think about this. The new Dungeons and Dragons books released and then a few months later they revised them, then updated them, and then started publishing several other side books of rules and regulations for you to add to your game play. The card game sold well, but the fad fell out, and they created a virtual game, and now you can buy cards, but they are virtual cards and if you want new cards or expansion sets of cards you got to buy the virtual cards to play with other people, if you can find other people that is. The game is free, and the initial cards are free but to get anything good, you got to pay for the virtual cards you want.

Mythic – Warhammer Online was setup with a fairly large display and miniatures collection. Sadly the MMO was up with 6 computers. There was no monsters no NPCs just some toons that you could walk around in the world with. There was nothing overly impressive to see there at all. I would have to say the graphics looked like that of WoW with a touch of EQ2 and the characters all looked like WoW races without any Night Elves. I won’t play this unless someone buys the game and pays for my first month for me. Otherwise if I wanted to play WoW, I would go play WoW.

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