gwax's rumblings

I spent this past week­end in Seattle at Penny Arcade Expo 2008, which is a great big con­ven­tion for gamers of all sorts and those of sim­i­lar per­sua­sions. I met up with Riad, Gautham and Ariel in Seattle and we had an awe­some time. Between the exhibit hall, the pan­els, the talks, the tour­na­ments, the freeplay areas and all of the other peo­ple, PAX was three solid days of fun. I highly rec­om­mend PAX, in the future, to any­one with any inter­est in video games, board games, the Internet or good times in general.

For me, the major high­lights of PAX were:

• Monsterpocalypse — Privateer Press was sell­ing pre­view releases of their new game, Monsterpocalypse. Monsterpocalypse is a col­lectible minia­tures game focused around destroy­ing oppos­ing mon­sters and cities. It is a very well con­structed game and a heck of a lot of fun to play; I pur­chased enough for two peo­ple to play and I intend to get more when the game is actu­ally released in October. I played two games at PAX, one more last night and I really like this game. Monsterpocalypse is awe­some and I highly rec­om­mend look­ing into it.
• Starcraft II — Blizzard had playable demos of Starcraft 2 up and it seems really good. Starcraft 2 seems to have kept the feel and game­play of the orig­i­nal while replac­ing some of the inter­face annoy­ances, improv­ing the graph­ics and adding a few more units. I am now really look­ing for­ward to Starcraft 2’s release.
• Demigod — I hadn’t heard of Demigod before PAX but, as one of the ran­dom things I saw in the exhibit hall, it looks like a lot of fun. I prob­a­bly won’t get Demigod because it seems like the sort of game that’s best suited to multi-player, which I haven’t really been in a good sit­u­a­tion for since under­grad, but if I were look­ing for a fun multi-player game, Demigod would be on my short list.
• Minibosses — The Minibosses, a rock band that exclu­sively plays cov­ers of video game music, were the last act at PAX’s Saturday night con­cert. I’ve seen the Minibosses before as they’ve played Steer Roast a cou­ple of times but they’re still great. There is some­thing par­tic­u­larly awe­some about hear­ing the theme song to Ninja Gaiden, Megaman 2 or Metroid played on elec­tric gui­tars, bass and drums. The Minibosses played a ~2 hour set that was solid glory and totally worth stay­ing up until 3AM for.
• MC Frontalot — MC Frontalot is prob­a­bly the best known and most pop­u­lar nerd­core hip hop artist. Frontalot is pretty good and an awful lot of fun. He puts on a great show and his raps are really enter­tain­ing and well tar­geted at the audi­ence. Heck, Frontalot is prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for mak­ing nerd­core what it is today.
• Pitch Your Game Idea — We pitched the oft-discussed in Fort Awesome game idea for Eco-Slayer, which met with mass audi­ence approval but didn’t win any prizes with the panel. The reac­tions and get­ting an hon­or­able men­tion from three of the four judges was pretty great. Shout outs to Mar, whose idea Eco-Slayer was originally.
• DTS — PAX had this won­der­ful sys­tem called the Distributed Tournament System; basi­cally they gave you two pins at the begin­ning of PAX to wear. If you were wear­ing at least one DTS pin and saw some­one else wear­ing at least one DTS pin, you could chal­lenge them for a pin. The chal­lenge could take any form you wanted, in pre­vi­ous years it was only for hand­held gam­ing, and the goal was to col­lect the most pins at PAX. I didn’t really col­lect as many as I should have but I had an awful lot of thumb wars, Indian wrestling con­tests and games of rock-paper-scissors. DTS made for a great way to inter­act with and meet ran­dom new peo­ple, even if it was just for a short com­pe­ti­tion and con­ver­sa­tion. Seriously though, I had some truly epic thumb wars, one even ended in a draw after about 15 min­utes of fierce competition.
• Other peo­ple — One of the best things about PAX was all the other peo­ple. Sure there were some annoy­ing socially awk­ward peo­ple but there were also a lot of really cool peo­ple. It was a great big con­ven­tion for peo­ple that like some of the things that I like and for which I, as a per­son, prob­a­bly fell within one stan­dard devi­a­tion of nor­mal. It was a nice feel­ing being sur­rounded, in a sense, by my peoples.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under art & culture, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.