Thursday, September 11, 2008

A Friend Killed Himself

I just found out today. A man I hardly knew, yet considered a good friend took his life on September 9th. Richard Houghton, better known to us at PAX as Shoun. Shoun was in charge of expo hall Enforcers at PAX. He had been an Enforcer since the beginning of PAX This was the first year I really worked with him and really just started getting to know him.

The weird thing is all of this emotion I'm feeling. I hardly knew him yet I feel like I've lost a good friend or a family member. I've had friends and family die from age or sickness, and had my time of grief. This is something that, God, is for the lack of a better word, weird. This is the first person I ever knew personally that took their own life.

And the fact that what I did see of him and know of him was the he was a cool guy. Great humor, easy going, helpful........yet nothing to indicate that he was unhappy or suicidal.

Grief

Shock

Confusion

Sadness

I feel all these and more.

I don't understand why. Why he did it. That's probably the biggest thing that stands out, why.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

PAX08: Lord Moon Meet Lord Vader

Well another PAX in the books. PAX08 had 58,500 people come through. Lord that's a lot of geeks and nerds in one place.

This year was a bit new and different for me. in past years I had worked in Table Top. This year I was in the Expohall......as a Gold Assistant.....with the most exhibitors. Talk about being dumped off the deep end. In the end not as bad as I thought it was going to be. There was the drawback of not getting all the swag and doubles for my annual giveaway at BRS, but I can deal with that. Besides Kathi from Turbine hooked me up with some awesome swag. Two limited to 1000 pieces of autographed artwork from Dungeons and Dragons Online. Nice!

Working the Expohall did let me see a lot of the games that are coming. South Peak had "Ninja Town" for the DS. It's basically a cutesy RTS. Pretty easy to pick up and play, I could easily see playing this on the bus ride to and from work. They also had X Blades, a fantasy action hack & slash with some lite RPG elements. I never got a chance to play it, but it looked damn fun. Big special attacks, with some bullet-time effects that looked hella cool. The game comes out next year. I'd say keep an eye out for it.

It was kind of interesting to hear the guys from South Peak admit that they screwed up Two Worlds, but they said they learned a lot from their first console game and have decided to go cross-platform with everything else they put out.

Atari had some cool stuff. Neverwinter Nights 2 which looked good. Again another I didn't get to play as to many others were playing it. Race Pro which looks to be Atari's stab at the Grand Turismo/Forza market. What I got to play of it was not a final build, but has some good promise. Real tracks, real cars, real driving and real damage.....though in this build there is not a lot of crunching to the cars, more of the bumper comes off and after a few more good hits a wrench appears on screen meaning the car is heavily damaged. And to go with that the fact the pit row wasn't active to repair your car.

I also got to play their newest Big Game Hunter game. I think one of their own devs said it best, "I'm ready to go home, drink a six-pack of beer, and play this game." I suggested they put a "slow elk" on the game. If anyone reading this knows Slow Elk Ale, then you know what I'm talking about. The beer label has a picture of a cow with a branch tied to it's head. This also prompted the idea of putting a Jackalope in the game.

The Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway didn't show off anything, but it was probably one of the busiest booths on the floor. If you allowed them to give you a "Hellcut" haircut, then you would get mailed the game for free when it was released. The "Hellcut" was a buzzcut with the word HELL spray painted on the back of your head (it was haircoloring paint). I was the 5th one in line. :D I know at least two women went through it too.

Turbine showed off their MMOs, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. Both looked damn pretty and when I saw the rigs they were running them on...full blown Dell gaming systems. If I could have just walked away with one thing.........

Cryptic had a playable build of Champions Online. I really like this game. It's was a bit like City of Heroes/Villains but better. Graphically it had a cel-shaded look to make it more like a comic book. The game had more action to it, not a lot of time waiting for your powers to be ready, a big improvement over CoX.

Sony was showing off the Resistance 2 multiplayer and of course LittleBigPlanet. I talked briefly with one of the Resistance devs and he basically said everything you can find online right now. It was interesting to find out he loved his Xbox 360 as much as his PS3 as we started talking about other things. Like the fact that someone at Sony corporate picked the worst email system ever to use company-wide. There were long lines for both games so I got look at them only. I want the big screen HDTV they had LBP set up on, had to have been a 50 or 60inch screen. I did get to play around with Echochrome on the PSP, it reminded me a lot of Crush, also for the PSP, so I may have to get it.

The Rock Band 2 booth/stage easily was probably the busiest. They had all the songs available, but they were not allowed to let anyone play the the GnR song, "Shackler's Revenge," but given GnR that really doesn't surprise me. The coolest thing there besides getting to play Rock Band 2 was at the Expohall party that was afterhours on Friday night. The afterhours party was so the exhibitors could get to mingle and have some fun before the long days of Saturday and Sunday. Expohall Enforcers got to hang out and mingle too. I got to sing Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" in a band consisting of two of the Harmonix devs. One on guitar and one on drums. My fellow Enforcer, Groove, played bass. The epitome of cool right there.

I did check out the Guitar Hero World Tour booth. They had four stations set up. I give you three guesses as to what a majority of the people played on it, and the first two don't count. Yup, Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher." Overall it looks pretty good, but drummers may have a hard time. My roommate who loves to play the drums in Rock Band pointed out the bass drum line is purple, which is kind of hard to see on the black "fretboard."

That is pretty much all I remember game-wise that got to see or do. Being a gold assistant I didn't want to wander too far from the exhibitor's I was in charge of, nor did I want to leave my area for too long. Most other games I wanted to check out (Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Microsoft's booth) were way crowded. Fallout 3 got especially bad on Saturday when Morgan Webb and Adam Sessler from X-Play showed up. Talked very briefly with Major Nelson about the new dashboard coming. And took a ton of photos (see my flickr account).

I did get to see part of Freezepop's concert and Johnathan Coulton's show on Friday night. Missed Saturday's show. :-(

Keith "Sir Psycho" and his girlfriend, Michella (I hope I spelled that right) came out to visit and attend PAX. They had fun. Keith got to play new songs in Rock Band 2, especially Steely Dan's "Bodhisattva," which evidently was the only time it was played over the weekend. Nobody knew the song so they just blipped over it. Met up with Bobby Blackwolf again and checked out his show live.

And of course got to work with again possibly the best all volunteer team EVAR!, the PAX Enforcers. We do so much for so little and it's all for a good cause.