Planet Aineas

PAX East

So this is the first actual video game convention I’ve ever been to. I’m used to attending anime conventions and totally did not know what to expect walking into this aside from “lol video game convention, there should be games amirite?”. Originally, I wasn’t going to be going, but a group of friends that I play a certain arcade game with convinced me to tag along, and who wouldn’t? These things are better with friends right? So I nabbed some badges at 30 bucks a day, since the Three Day badges were sold out by now.

I left Thursday via Megabus from Penn Station in NYC, the ride was 4 1/2 hours but there was Wi-Fi on the bus along with sockets above every seat. It was pretty awesome actually since I’m used to taking airplanes to my destinations! We arrived at 2:30 and took a cab to the convention center since it’s connected to the hotel we were staying at. It was relatively fancy and they even had a Starbucks in the lobby! (Though I don’t ever buy anything from there aside from tea.) The hotel room had a cool view too.

The view from room 1661

Starbucks in the Sheraton Lobby

Day 1: Friday – “Welcome to PAX East”

Friday was interesting, everyone wanted to see the PAX Keynote because Wil Wheaton was giving it, and to be honest, I don’t know much of anything about the guy aside from him being in Star Trek. I have never watched Star Trek so I felt kinda like a dumbass. I was in a queue line for the keynote at 11:51AM (much later than I should’ve been) because my friends didn’t try hard enough to wake me up to take me with them to stand in the line, luckily, they held a seat for me when they made it into the theater, and by that time it was already 3PM. Pretty crazy, it wasn’t a boring wait or anything, they had two giant screens setup with someone using a command line-esque interface to talk with the crowd while people in the back blew up three beach balls and tossed them all around the line for a good while. I had fun.

The keynote line, featuring tons of people and beach balls!

The keynote itself was pretty fucking awesome – I had no idea what to expect from this guy, but he was very personable and quite a nerd, which isn’t a bad thing at all! All of us in the room could relate I’m sure. He made a lot of good points about using these conventions as a medium to meet new people and enjoy your hobby the way you want to, because at the core, we’re all gamers, and he couldn’t have been more right. There’s probably a video of the keynote floating around the web somewhere and I do highly recommend that you watch it if you didn’t make the keynote. -> Keynote Link via YouTube

After the keynote, I took some time to roam around the other floors of the convention center. There wasn’t much to see, given a Friday, they’re never packed on Fridays. But there was a couple interesting displays. Splinter Cell Conviction, Red Dead Revolver, All Points Bulletin – all in playable demo form. There were also indie gamers on the floor as well, notable yyrGames who made a nifty game for the Xbox  360 called “Snake 360″ – this is a pretty awesome game to play with friends, do check it out over at yyrGames and get some suffocation battle going! Nvidia also had their GTX 470 & 480 graphics cards in rigs all across the floor. All in all, it was a pretty easygoing day.

(More on days 2&3 on the jump)

Day 2: Saturday: “So it begins”

A number of interesting things were happening on Saturday. Jonathan Coulton along with Paul & Storm were performing that night, and the wristbands for the concert were limited to 4k, so you had to be in the queue line EARLY to get one! That being said, my friends and I were all up bright ass early (holy crap was I tired later) and ran down there to get our bands, success!

Saturday Concert Get!

That line was relatively long as well knocking a few hours out of the day with no effort. Shortly after I ran around and took a view of the floor to see if there was anything new set up, for the most part everything from Friday was present today and not much seemed different. I took the effort to hop over to the Nvidia panel to see their product launch presentation, which if you didn’t know by now, was the new Fermi GTX 470/480 GPUs. They touted double the performance over their GTX 285, and showed Bad Company 2 in 3d Vision Surround, which is some new innovative technology they’re trying to push now. It doesn’t look all that spectacular to me and 3D glasses hurt my eyes, not to mention putting 3D glasses over my current glasses is very uncomfortable, and was the same for Avatar IMAX. I didn’t stay for the entire presentation since in the first half hour, they gave all the information on the GPUs anyone would want to know (Transistor Count, Frame Buffer, Memory, blah). ATI had a booth on the floor which was completely eclipsed by Nvidia’s products, their Tegra, 3D, Portable and new GPU lineup, you could actually pretend ATI wasn’t even there! I managed to grab an asston of swag, which I will show later, a nice shirt from Intel’s game (not the Core i7 EE unfortunately) and some other shirts from APB.  The swag was awesome on Saturday, as expected. There were a few, but not many people cosplaying, but I did manage to get a picture with a rather hot Bayonetta!

This Bayonetta could kick my ass anytime.

The day was going quickly and I wanted to head to the Jonathan Coulton concert but I couldn’t muster the energy to stand in line, and then sit for hours for the concert. So I chilled with friends in my hotel room and we enjoyed some drinks and card games.

Day 3: Sunday ” The Departure”

I didn’t actually do much Sunday, since I only had badges for Fri & Sat, so I waited around for a friend to come lend me this three day to get back in. It was a little slow, all PAX shirts and scarves were sold out, same stuff on the floor, I took the opportunity to run around and grab some extra swag where I could and said farewell.

Final Thoughts: This was the first time I have ever stepped foot into a convention based around video games. It was a nice experience, but I don’t feel there was anything spectacular on the floor that we didn’t already know about. No game present jumped out at me and made me run home to play (With the exception of Dragon Age [and that's because Wil Wheaton made it sound so damn good], which I own, but haven’t touched). There was Ubisoft, Rockstar, APB, Hudson,2k,  Aksys and a couple other developers present but what they presented was already out, or there in demo. The best part of this for me, was the community though, everyone there was pretty nice and I met a handful of cool people. Someone even taught me and some friends how to play Settlers of Catan, despite the fact that there was no room left for him to play, props to him, he’s awesome as hell. I would probably have to attend other gaming conventions to get a feel and come to a good conclusion with myself of how PAX went down. PAX Prime is coming soon, I don’t think I’ll be headed to that one but I hear that it’s going to have a huge ass turnout. Kudos to whoever makes it over there.