Last week, I attended W00tstock 1.1. What is a W00tstock you might ask? Well, if you had clicked the convenient link I added you’d already know but since you asked here’s the description direct from Paul and Storm’s site:

For decades, geeks were ostracized, picked on, laughed at and punished by the sun’s harmful UV rays. But there is only so long that a people can be kept down before they rise up against their oppressors; and, indeed, the dawn of the 21st century has seen the ascendancy of geeks and geek culture.

We now celebrate that rise to power–and let’s face it, nerds pretty much run everything now–with w00tstock, a special event for geeks of every stripe. Television host/special-effects artist Adam Savage (”MythBusters”), actor/author/blogger Wil Wheaton (”Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Stand By Me”) and music-comedy duo Paul and Storm (hey; that’s us!) present a night of songs, readings, comedy, demonstrations, short films, special guests, and other clever widgets born from and dedicated to the enthusiasms, obsessions, trials and joys of geek pride.

It was the brainchild of Paul and Storm, who wanted to do some west coast shows but weren’t sure they’d draw a big enough crowd on their own. So they got Wil Wheaton and Adam Savage to join them and planned three initial shows; two in San Fransico and one in LA. Each one had special guests, in LA it was: Hard and Phirm, Molly Lewis, Felicia Day, Jeff Lewis, and Sandeep Parikh. There was also a hilarious video from RiffTraxs and a few short “Moment with Wil” skits.

It was a great time. For me the real highlights were Wil’s reading of “The Trade” from his book Just a Geek with musical accompaniment by Paul and Storm; the acoustic performance of “Do you Want to Date my Avatar” and The finale of Paul and Storm’s pirate song which was a free for all of geeky pirate jokes.

There were a few ‘technical difficulties’ along the way including mic stands all over the place, broken mics, crooked projectors but they did detract from the show. If anything it made it more entertaining, you could tell it wasn’t something they had rehearsed hundreds of times and were regurgitating.  Everyone was having fun even the performers.

Lucky for you, there will be more W00tstock in the future, there’s not official dates or cities yet but if you demand it, they might, possibly, maybe come. Also, should you be so inclined w00tstock 1.1 live at the Largo available online here. (Thanks to @Jules_Party934 for the link). I highly recommend it.

View all w00tstock tour dates

Alright this took a bit longer than expected but I’ve now gone through all the previous posts, separated them out and made them slightly less crappy. Ok so, technically, I did all that
sometime last week but at the time I wrote this I had just finished it all.

Penny Arcade Expo 2008

PAX 08: Day Zero
PAX 08: Day One
PAX 08: Day Two
PAX 08: Day Three
PAX 08: Left 4 Dead
PAX 08: Rock Band 2 & Guitar Hero: World Tour
PAX 08: Media Meltdown
PAX 08: The Conduit

Overall I had a blast at PAX. The biggest problem I had was there was way too much to do. Spending time in the exhibit hall meant missing the panels. Going to one panel meant you missed 2 or 3 other equally interesting panels and the exhibit hall. There were a least a dozen times when I ended up missing a panel or demo that I wanted to see because I was enjoying what I was already doing. Sometimes it worked out for the best. If I hadn’t ended up watching all of Nerdcore for Life I wouldn’t have gotten to see MC Frontalot. Other times I was too engrossed playing TF2, a game I already own, in the PC Free play room. I should have taken some time to look at the schedule ahead of time and figure out what I wanted to see and then setup some calendar appointments on my phone to remind myself.

Of course there were some issues with PAX. There were 58,000 people there over 3 days so it was pretty crowded at times. Some of the panels I would have liked to have seen filled up before I even considered getting in line for them. I didn’t have trouble getting to see any of the big events like the keynote provided I lined up early enough. It would have been nice if instead of making everyone sit in line for an hour and a half they gave out wristbands to the first 3000 people to show up and said come back in an hour. Of course then there would likely just be a line to get a wristband that would be almost as long.

Pictochat was epic. It was a great way to pass the time while waiting in line although I’ve never seen so many digital renditions of the male genitalia as I did that weekend. Occasionally the connection was spotty probably due to the sheer number of people using not only DS pictochat but wireless devices in general. I think at least 2/3 of the attendees had some sort of wireless device usually an iphone/ipod touch. Speaking of wireless the wireless connection at the expo hall didn’t work the one time I tried it my phone’s crappy WAP browser came in handy more than a few times. Mostly for Twitter which I used for keeping track of everything so I could write all this up.

One of the most annoying issues was the sounds quality. Throughout the entire Harmonix panel there was some pretty noticeable feedback whenever someone spoke. Freezepop had three or four nasty bouts of feedback while they were playing. Most notably MC Frontalot had to do a sound check after their first song because none of their monitors were setup correctly. I don’t know who was doing the sounds but it was not great. Most to all of the PAX Enforcers are volunteers but next year I’d really suggest getting some professional sounds guys in there at the very least for the concerts.

I’m definitely going to try and go back next year, hopefully with a better game plan. I’d like to get more involved with the non-PAX community activities next year as well like the Tri-Wizard Drinking Tournament or the PAX Twitter Shitters Meet up. I really wanted to get involved with that stuff this year but it didn’t work out. PAX 2010 is in Boston so that pretty much guarantees I’ll be there, I might even be able to convince a few people to go with me.

Left 4 Dead is absolutely awesome. That’s really all that needs to be said but I suppose I should elaborate.

Left 4 Dead - Coop Zombie Survival Horror. nuff said.

They only had the 360 version setup so I wasn’t very good at it but I got the hang of it. The controls worked pretty similar to just about any other 360 FPS I’ve player with the addition of the left shoulder button making you do a quick 180 degree turn. The thing I really noticed was the team dynamics. This definitely isn’t a game where you can run off like a commando and kill everything without your team. At one point I attempted to rush into a room only to find myself overwhelmed with zombies. The neat thing is you can keep track of your teammates easily. Their outline lights up on your screen when they’re in a different room or behind object. White means they’re ok, and red means they’re under attack. Reading the previews I thought that might be a weird and hard to get use to it but in reality it’s just really useful.

Instead of just dying you fall to the ground and pull out your pistol. You can still shoot zombies but can no longer move. Assuming you and your team manage to kill off all the zombies, another player can come over and help you up. They can also optionally heal you if they’ve picked up a first aid kit and are feeling generous. Of course, if you don’t manage to kill the zombies, they’ll swarm you and rip you to shreds. That effect was pretty cool aside from the being dead part. Respawning works differently too. Once you die you go into a spectator view similar to how it works in CS. As your team moves forward they’ll eventually see your aura appear ahead of them. To get back in the game your team needs to find the room you’re in and rescue you. This basically boils down to getting one of your teammates to open the door and let you out.

I only remember 3 different types of enemies: zombies, an exploding fat zombie and a big muscle-y thing that showed up right before I got ripped into a million pieces by about 20 zombies. The random spawning system Valve created keeps things tense. Sometime you won’t see anything for a minute then you’ll run into a group of 4 or 5, or out of nowhere 20 zombies are swarming all around you and it’s all you can do to beat them off. One particular creepy instance came while rescuing one of the previously killed players. While my team was letting him out of the closet, I turned around to see a single zombie running towards. I started shooting at it but it jumped to the side and clung to the side of an information booth. Of course then the four of us blew it to bits. I don’t recall any of the Zombies randomly spawning behind us like they did in System Shock 2 which is nice in a I can catch my breath way. Another really neat thing I witnesses as a group of guy who were on a street, at first there was a group of like 4 or 5 zombies ahead of them. Then one of players somehow to set off a car alarm which caused a shit ton of zombies to come running in from all directions.

I think I can safely say this is will be the best co-op zombie game ever. In just 20 minutes of play time I had 2 or 3 “oh shit moments” and while watching other people play it was apparent they were having the same experience. My only concern is Valve’s recent announcement that the free updates for TF2 on the PC are going to be Pay DLC for the 360 version. I know both my laptop and PC aren’t capable of running L4D is a playable manner but I’m hesitant to get the 360 version only to miss out on extra content later on down the line. I may end up having to finally upgrade my PC to play this game.

PAX day three was all about the exhibit hall. I went in with a mission to check out a bunch of games I missed the first two times and did pretty well I think

Champions Online seem to be pretty much be City of Heroes 2. That isn’t a bad thing though since I enjoyed CoH way more than WoW. I talk to one of the developers a bit while I was playing. Cryptic apparently bought the Champions IP so they could have complete control over it and were trying to expand the universe’s stories to for the game. They have cross-platform play between the PC and 360 working in test versions at the office but she wasn’t sure whether or not it would make it into the final product. She also wasn’t sure how DLC and expansions would work on the 360. I got a hopefully but no overly convincing vibe. The game itself played pretty well on using a controller but I could for the life of me figure out how to swap different powers in and out.

I checked out all of the PAX 10 games but the only one that caught my attention was The Maw, an Xbox Live game developed by Twisted Pixel Games. The basic premise is you play as a captured alien whose only chance of escapes means releasing a blob that will eventually eat the entire universe. You start out the game leading the blob around on a leash and as he eats more and more he grows larger and larger until by the end you ride on him. The blob gains different powers depending on what he’s eaten and I saw some sort of fire power and some sort of flying power.

I’ve pretty consistently had very little interest in Little Big Planet. First of all I don’t own a PS3 and secondly I had almost no idea what it was supposed to be and no interest to find out. After seeing Sony’s demonstration of LBP I still have no idea what it’s about but it did look kind of neat. Sony showed off a small jungle level that was created during the demo. Four players had to then race to the finish line which was rather uneventful until one of them figured out how to use the rocket cars. They then proceeded to kill everyone with it and crashed into the spawn point which caused everyone to die when they respawned.

I played Resistance Retribution for a few minutes mainly just to get a free hat. The controls were tough to get used to, the analog stick moves you, the ABXY buttons look around and the shoulder buttons fire. It was OK but it’s not really my thing so I’m biased. Other people seemed to like it. This was the first time I’ve ever used a PSP and I was pretty impressed with the PSP’s analog button.

I briefly played Sega’s Bleach: Dark Souls. Despite hearing a lot of buzz about the game it didn’t impress me much. I think they were going for an old school SNES type fighter look but the graphic mostly just looked meh. All I thought about while playing it was how awesome Smash Bros DS could be and why Nintendo hadn’t created one yet. I mean it’s just about the only Nintendo IP without a DS version.

Gearbox was doing a promotion where if you let them shave your head and paint Hell on the back of your head they’ll give you a free copy of Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. A free game sure is tempting but I’m not sure I could pull off the bald look. I also once again hit the PC free play area for some more TF2 LAN goodness. Mmmmmm

After I was finished with the exhibit hall I got in the very long line for the final round of the Omegathon which also served as a sort of closing ceremony for PAX. The Omegathon is a tournament featuring 20 contestants randomly selected from those who pre-registered for PAX. Over the course of expo they compete in various games that generally aren’t considered competitive games. The winner of the event gets $5,000, an all expenses paid trip to the Tokyo Games Show, and custom PAX versions of the 360, PS3 and Wii. This year’s games were Peggle, Boom Blox, Geometry Wars 2, Rock Band, Jenga (the real version) and a secret surprise game. I skipped all but the final round.

The absolute best marketing at the fair was in the Omegathon line. A could of people from 5th Cell showed up right as the line was forming told everyone that they had downloadable demos of Lock’s Quest available via DS download play. There were about a dozen people who took them up on this offer. Lock’s Quest is a tower defense game, but instead of just watching as the enemies pound away at your defenses you can have your character, Lock, who can attack the enemies and repair your structures. I mostly played the battle mode which was just straight up tower defense. I ran through part of the single player campaign but only got through part of the tutorial. It was a fun way to waste sometime in line and an interesting take on tower defense. Hopefully other companies will catch on and do the same thing in lines next year.

The final game of the Omegathon was revealed to be Vs. Excitebike for the Famicom Disk System. One of the guys easily beat the other, 4-0 in a best of 7 matches. It wasn’t a very exciting end but it was pretty cool to have be watching a video game competition with that many people all of whom were into it as much as I was. Gabe and Tycho then took their turn at the competition and Gabe bested Tycho 4-1 which was apparently the second year straight that Tycho has lost. With that PAX was over. I had a great time and was sorry to see it end but there’s always next year.

I started my day at PAX a little bit later than I would have liked. I woke up and wandered down to the Pike Place Market to check it out a bit.

When I did get to PAX the first thing I went to check out was Starcraft 2 which was disappointing. Not that SC2 is a bad game but the lines to play it were really long, at least an hour and a half. The game itself looked like Starcraft with updated graphics. The Terran Thor units looked pretty sweet and combines with some siege tanks tore through a Zerg base in no time. The interface looks basically the same but with more stuff; they still appear to limit the number of units you can select at once to ~36ish. Nobody had that many units in the demo so I’m not exactly sure. The interface took up a lot of screen real estate; it would have been nice if they had slimmed it down a bit more. I’m sure SC2 will be a blockbuster no matter what. Blizzard makes good shit.

Rather than waiting to play I decided to go to the History of Harmonix: The Rockening panel. This was basically a bunch of Harmonix employees sitting around and talking about Harmonix and how everything came together behind the scenes.  It was a little boring at first since it was mostly just them talking about games they made but I did learn some interesting facts there. Disney made one of the attractions at Epcot, it’s a music game (go figure) where you wave your hands around and it makes different sounds. I remember playing with it when I was at Disney and thinking it was kind of neat. I believe it’s location in the imagination building after you get off the Figment ride. Harmonix is also the world’s largest maker of drum sticks. There was also a Q&A section where one guy asked a really technical question about how they did the voice detection in Karaoke Revolution using the PS2 hardware and another guy complained that he couldn’t re-download “Brass in Pocket” on his 360. The answers were “None of us worked on that” and “you need to talk to MS about that”. The panel picked up a bit at the end and Harmonix made two announcements. First, they are going to be releasing a PAX Pack for Rock Band, featuring Darkest of the Hillside, MC Frontalot and Jonathan Coulton. The second was a new play mode in Rock Band 2 called the Bladder of Steel set list. Harmonix noticed that a lot of people were completing the Endless set list in RB1 and decided to kick it up a notch. The bladderless set list requires that you beat all 84 songs in the game without pausing or failing. That seems pretty impossible to me but I’m almost positive some will have done it within a week. Although it seems like disconnecting the controller might allow you a brief respite but who knows maybe they’ve prevented that.

After the panel I check out the table top lounges and then headed back over to the exhibit hall. While there I bought a SNES controller. I also checked out the PC free play room which was probably a bad idea since I ended up playing TF2 on the LAN for about an hour. Eventually I ended up in the Handheld lounge where I played some Mario Kart DS over Wi-Fi and watched people draw penises on Pictochat. Pictochat was a really fun thing to have while waiting in lines. It was a bit laggy at times but when it worked it kept me entertained.

I should also say that Brawndo failed utterly today. Before I had got there yesterday they didn’t have any cups AND wouldn’t let you take the cans. Which made it a bring your own cup event; this was cleared up before I arrived yesterday. However, when I got to their booth at about 11 am today, I discovered they were out of Brawndo. Apparently used up all 40 cases of the stuff on the first day. Today they just had a bunch of empty cans on the table and a pad where you could write your info down for chance to win a year’s supply of Brawndo.

After doing a bunch of non-PAX related stuff (dinner, wandering around the city) I decided to watch the first half of the Nerdcore for Life documentary and then go see what they were playing for “Geek Movies”. Nerdcore for Life turned out to be more interesting than I expected so I watch the whole thing and then seeing as I just watch a documentary about it went to see if I could get into the concert downstairs. I didn’t have any problems getting into the concert and MC Frontalot came out at almost the exact time I joined the crowd. Even though I didn’t know any of his stuff I enjoyed the concert. After MC Frontalot was the MiniBosses. I was tired and not really into them at all so I went back to the hotel after the second song.