Wednesday, August 31, 2005

PAX '05 aka Gamer Geek Heaven

Well I survived the weekend of August 26-28.

A week prior to PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) my car died, this ment that I would be bussing to & from the expo. Not my idea of fun. Luckily I was able to find someone who lived in Bellevue to let me crash at their place for the whole expo. Which ment 2 bus rides, much better.

Packed up 3 days of clothes, my medicine, shower stuff, charged up my Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra & PSP and I was off. Bus ride wasn't too bad, the Sound Transit busses are a lot nicer than the Metro Transit busses.

I got there about 2 hours before it opened. The line outside for attendees was pretty decent in size. Checked in & got my sweet "Enforcer" shirt & black "Staff" badge, & rode the escalator up to the 4th floor. At the top of the escalator they had the Bawls booth, great placement since everyone has to pass by it to get to any of the tournement areas. Wandering down the walkway I passed a DDR machine, the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) room, the computer LAN tourney room onto the Table-Top rooms where I would be working most of the weekend.

I got meet a lot of cool people, Rae, Paul, Christian, & many more who's names I can't recall right now. It was great to see thousands of people just enjoying gaming in all it's aspects, table-top, computer, console, etc.

The first game I played was the new 3rd edtion rules Dungeons & Dragons. I haven't played D&D since 1st edtion rules, in fact 2nd editon was out the last time I played. While it's changed slightly it's still basicly the same game. We fought a small horde of Orcs & won. Horray! And there was much rejoicing. :) Shortly there after I played Super Munchkin. It's a card game from Steve Jackson Games. Very fun to play. Basicly the Munchkin series of games is way of playing various genres of role-playing games quickly with a lot of fun & a bit of humor.

Interstingly enough the whole time I was there I never wandered into the computer or console free play areas, and that was part of the reason I went. Goes to show the power of all things gaming I guess.

Friday was kinda short, but fun none the less. Saturday was the first day though of the dealers/sponsers room, where a good bunch of game manufactures & whatnot set up. Nintendo & Sony both had booths, but Microsoft surprisingly really didn't. Kinda weird for having a gaming expo in your own back yard. The only thing Microsoft had set up was a booth for their playtesting department to sign people up. I did check in with them & talked with Kristin. She asked if I wanted to sign up, I told her that I had already quite awhile ago. She asked when was the last time I was in, I told her over a year ago. She then set me up to come in on Monday after PAX was over. (Shhhh don't tell anyone but I got to playtest Project Gotham Racing 3 on the Xbox 360....very cool, making me think about getting one sooner now.)

Nintendo brought out the big guns they had a playable version of "Legend of Zelda; The Twilight Princess" and had brought the most game stations to play all of their new games for all of their systems. Sony, while they had a booth it was kinda sparse. They had three game demos up, Ratchet Deadlocked, Sly 3, & Jak X. Which they were giving out demos for also.

Other booths included the Army with their new "America's Army Special Forces" game, NCsoft with most of their MMORPG's (City of Hero's, Guild Wars, etc), Brady Games gave away a ton of books, Sierra had "Fear" & "The Incredible Hulk" playable demos up & were giving away demos, Nvidia in special drawings gave away their top of the line video cards (retail around $500), Sabertooth Games showed their new card games, one based on Penny Arcade & one based on Warhamer 40,000, Turbine Software had a demo of Dungeons & Dragons Online and were giving away Beta Test keys for it and so many more. The guys from "Red vs. Blue" had a booth, Gameskins sold t-shirts & there was a Pocky booth selling mutiple flavors of Pocky & lots of anime related stuff like figures, soundtracks, etc.

I missed the Omeganaughts competitons, but they had the grand prize on display. Every NES game & accessory ever made & an Alienware Star Wars edition computer. SWEEEEEET.

I missed the concerts they had because of my shift, but I heard that MC Frontalot, MC Chris & The Mini-Bosses all kicked ass.

In the end it was one of the greatest weekend I've had in a while & will gladly volunteer again for it.