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.

I ended up arriving late and had to wait for over an hour in the will call line to pick up my pre-ordered
badge. Which was mildly annoying since it was only a two minute wait to buy a badge. Right after I got out of the badge line I got in line for the keynote, there were a lot of lines at PAX.

Ken Levine’s keynote was entertaining. He gave a brief overview of his history as a nerd. From his early days of wanting to fuck the scarlet witch and his first awkward experiences with D&D all the way to his failed screenwriting career and his decision to go get into the game industry and join Looking Glass Studios. The theme of the whole boiled down to “We’re all geeks, love it, embrace it and go have fun together”.

I skipped the Q&A panel to hit the exhibit floor. After a quick walk around I stopped and checked out Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour . I discovered that Brawndo The Thirst Mutilator, did indeed have what I (and plants) crave. It’s pretty tasty but oddly not got sale. (I’ve since learned that it wasn’t for sale because the convention center doesn’t allow non-convention vendors to sell food or drink)

Nintendo was nearby so I checked out some of their stuff. WarioLand: Shake It seems like a decent platformer although depending on how much it’s used; constantly shaking the controller could get annoying. Kirby Superstar Ultra was fun but there really isn’t much new about it. After that, I had some fun creating a creature in Spore Creature Creator for the DS. I couldn’t do anything more than walk around with it once it was created which makes me what the game play would be like in that game. I finished off my day in the exhibit hall with Left 4 Dead which was amazing.

Next up I hit the concerts. It was probably the strangest concert I’ve ever been too. No one was really getting into any of the bands mostly everyone was just sort of hanging out listening. The OneUps were kind of neat but it sounded a lot like they were just jamming the whole time and not really playing songs. Freezepop isn’t really my thing but they ended up being pretty good. During their entire set, there was a guy nearby playing Final Fantasy Tactics which was odd. Freezepop’s encore ended up being a cover of The Final Countdown and it was really good.

Finally Jonathan Coulton was up. I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing him but figured it would be cool to see “Still Alive” from Portal performed live. Of course, I was completely wrong and he ended up being the best of them all, I suppose that’s why he was “headlining”. I enjoyed all his songs, my favorite was “re: Your Brains” there is nothing cooler than a room of people out of sync and groaning “All we want to do is eat your brains”. He also managed to Rick Roll the whole audience twice. The first time the video played over the projectors and most of the crowd started singing along. The second time was mixed in the middle of “Mr. Fancy Pants”. For “Still Alive” Felicia Day, who is like geek goddess, came out and sang with him. He ended the night with a sing along cover of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” which was unexpected and really cool. Over all, Day One was amazing.

Pictures still to come.