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.

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.