I woke fairly late on day three something like 10am. The sunday is probably the wind down day of PAX there were few events I wanted to look into and I planned to spend the day on the convention floor.
I didn’t have the hotel for another night and so had to check out. Given tomorrow is labor day a free holiday I probably should have stayed on but I didn’t know that at booking time and wanted to save holiday.
So I grabbed all my stuff in a heavy backpack and headed out. I started the day right by getting a breakfast Burrito (at the excellent blue water taco grill) which contained scrambled eggs, bacon, pica de gallo, and medium salsa. I wolfed that down with a mountain dew for refreshment and thusly fortified I headed for the convention center.
It was even more packed than the other days, I fifgured it would be nice of I managed to get a play on Duke Nukem Forever so prepared for a couple of hours wait I tried to find the end of the queue. When I couldn’t work out where the end of the queue was I asked a lady in the queue and she informed me it was so long it was now fractured over the convention center interior into a series of mini queues. The total time was something like 4 hours to get to the front. I decided that was a little too much time to commit to one game. She pointed out by way of an alternative that me the queue to get something signed by the voice of Duke Nukem Jon St. John was pretty short but I passed on that too.
I started off with a game of Monday Night Combat, a XBLA title which was a class based multiplayer shooter with team vs team. It was pretty good fun even if I had little clue what I was doing. Each class seemed to have special abilities and could purchase upgrades by earning money in the ring (a bit CS like). It was all bright colours and chucky graphics and a lot of fun to play.
Next up I found a queue for Guild Wars 2 that wasn’t too long, while I was waiting a random woman wanted a picture of my tshirt (I was wearing my “Joss Whedon is my master now” which did get a lot of “nice shirt” comments so it has geek cred). The people in front of me dropped out so I was now the next in line. Half an hour later it was my go. The machine I was looking at had the 3d shutter glasses with it and it demonstrated Guild Wars 2 in full 3d.
The 3d after some initial false starts and face adjustment (wearing 3d goggles and a head set is tough they don’t work together very well) did work quite well. The sense of depth is impressive and it worked well with the detailed environments they have in the new game. One area where it was problematic was finding the mouse pointer since the mouse pointer and elements of the UI were often at different depths you could get lost trying to get the mouse pointer to click somewhere. GW2 seems to be a lot more of a story than before rather than “go kill 10 of x” it was more of a believable quest trying to rescue a kidnapped sister. It may derive down to killing 10 of x at the base but it didn’t feel like it. The combat has some of the more action orientated approaches from things like champions online where some skills you hold down. I played necro and had a sort of second mode I could briefly enter after filling up a death bar that gave me different powers. It all looked amazing but it also seemed to have been streamlined so there was less trecking around unnecessarily. You could exit instances back to the hub quickly and also teleport to known waypoints with ease. There was also a fair amount of voice work, maybe not full voice but certainly the main quests. It played a lot more like a single player game than an MMO and the group instances where everyone had the same task was a bit like the open/public quest of WAR or Champions where it was just drop in and out no need to organise or approach it as a predefined group. All in all very promising as a game and probably too deep for half an hours play to get much a grip on but still I think I’ll check it out on release.
The addition of 3d as main feature does pose something of a problem for marketing the product something the 3DS is definately going to face, since 3d is a major selling point yet video or stills are not capable of reproducing this (for the most part) advertising it except in person will have to rely on 2d images which may well work against it. Something that looks fantastic with full 3d may well look run of the mill in 2d.
Next I played an Alpha build of this game “Haunted: The Demons Forge” which was a sort of co-op two player hack and slash action game for the usual platforms. I played it with one of the producers from Bethesda. It was pretty fun a good mix of up close smashing with the big muscle bound Conan esq character and some snipey long range arrow stuff with the other scantily clad bow girl. Each had both melee and ranged tho they specialised in one and magic which they could also use to buff their partner increasing their power. It was full of lots of team work inspiring events and some nice set pieces and it also looked quite nice, the level I saw was a sort of haunted ruins feel to it. Not sure how this would play on your own I suspect even f it has AI for the partner it would suffer a bit. That comes out next year some time.
Refueled with a Chili Dog, which was fairly edible if a little messy.
Next I had a go on the Playstation Move or Kaz Hirai’s Magical Wang as it’s more commonly known they were demoing the excellent Heavy Rain with the new control system. I have to say it made more sense and felt a lot more immersive than the previous Sixaxis variant. It took some getting used to the controls but once you had the technique down the motion felt very natural to do the various things in the game world.
Having tried the wang I needed to test out the Microsoft wangless magical wang or Kinect as they call it. While I was queueing I saw a girl dressed in a wonderfully elaborate Halo Spartan suit play the dance game and win which was quite impressive given it completely covered her head to toe with a fill face visor. I only knew she was a girl because she had to take off her helmet to fix a bit that came loose on her boots. Anyway I played a game that was basically a wii sports for kinect done by good old brit developer Rare. Who of course haven’t made a decent game since they moved to microsoft except maybe Viva Pinata. It was two player and initially it felt a bit like I was flailing around at random rather than controlling things. After a few knockdowns I worked out what gestures the thing wanted and got better at making it do what I wanted. I eventually won my bout by repeatedly smashing my opponent in the kidneys.
Not sure about Kinect from this demo it was hard to tell from it how my actions were controlling it and how much control I had. It was possibly not the best app to try out to get a feel for it.
After that I tried this XBLA game called hydrophobia which was a sort of action platformer set on a massive ship (at some point in the future I didn’t get much of the back story from the demo) that is being attacked. It’s main selling point was highly detailed water physics and it did indeed work quite well areas would flood and if you opened doors from or too flooded areas the water would rush in/ flown out and it all seemed pretty impressive for something running at a good frame rate. I get the feeling this is used as part of puzzles and the various environmental states like water fire and so on will be used in the course of the game. The demo was a bit short just a few brief platforming sections but it showed a lot of promise one to keep and eye on.
Next I queued up for a very brief go on Star Wars The Old Republic or KOTOR the mmo as I like to think of it. Bioware taking the single player KOTOR idea and expanding it into an MMO. I only got 15 minutes on it so not a lot to get your teeth into. I played a sith of some description and it was a fairly standard MMO in a lot of ways set of skills with cool down timers. The quests were all fully voiced and the dialog for my character was also there which I find makes a surprising difference to feeling connected to the world. So with Dragon Age the lack of it did feel like a step back after Mass Effect 2. Supposedly it plays a lot more like a single player game with positioning and targeting making a difference to the outcome but that was hard to judge in my brief taste. It was very pretty and fun to play.
Once that was done I had to head for the Airport, the light rail back was crammed with geeks all off on planes home and the odd bemused looking commuter. I got to Seatac in good time and booked on the plane getting back to San Jose CA in good time picking up my car and then heading home where I am now typing this up before I forget 
So in summary Seattle is very steep and PAX involves lots of queuing so need good footwear and perhaps a folding chair. The early morning panels were a good laugh but need to better plan others. Concerts are well worth attending but eat up a big chunk of the day if you have to queue for them, if you can get the early bird wrist band by being in the first section of the queue in the morning this is worth it later on as you can just waltz in to the front of the line. The Friday seems to be the quietest day try to get the big things that will have long queues later done here. The conference floor is quite disorientating and huge needs some time to acclimatise and work out what to see.
So other things I saw that I didn’t play: Epic Mickey made by Warren Spector for Wii interesting looking game making use of the magic brush idea to alter environments. Fallout New Vegas, uncharatable people have called this just another mission pack for Fallout 3, and they’re basically right it adds a load of new stuff but it doesn’t seem to alter the game play in any fundamental way. It’s not Fallout 4 so much as it is Fallout 3.1. Torchlite 2 looked like torchlite 1 but now with co-op, no bad thing torchlite was a fun little low impact pick up and play hack and slash. Rift some other MMO looked fairly standard. End of Nations, some sort of pc RTS I did get on a machine for this but couldn’t figure it out looked fairly standard fare tho. Two worlds 2 looked fairly polished from the gameplay I saw hard to tell what sort of fun quotient there was. Aion the new thingy (can’t remember what their new thing was called) I felt a bit sorry for the Aion peeps they were right next to their bigger badder brothers in the NC Soft clan the Guild War 2 booth where all the machines were at least 5 deep of people and there were very few people even glancing at their new stuff. Assassins Creed Brotherhood new multiplayer stuff was what they were flogging long queue for that looked fun from a distance. Alienware, not sure what they were flogging I wanted to get a look at their gaming netbook running some games but all they had on them was some sort of tornament signup page they were running on their big rigs. Nvidia were pushing 3d and multi screen gaming (a couple of others like evga were also doing this) mostly existing stuff running with shutter glasses and 120hz monitors, the GW2 demo was using the same kit. Halo reach … meh it’s just halo nothing exciting there. Meddle of Honor looked standard. The new Tron game looked interesting tried to get a go on this but ran out of time it had some action stuff and some light bikes. ID’s Rage … they had a booth but that was it. Portal 2 line was massive. Dragon Age 2 line was massive. Hothead had some videos on their new project swarm looked lemmings esq. Telltale had a load of their games on display and a delorean out the back since they are doing a back to the future game but I didn’t see any new details.
Also saw the odd board gaming bit, flying frog had some sort of alien game I’d not seen like last night on earth I suspect. Some outfit were flogging ridiculously elaborate gaming tables for serious money along with racks for Japanese swords. Looked in vein for dice for pete didn’t find the ones he was after closest I came was someone claiming the worlds smallest metal polyhedral dice which were sub penny sized. Didn’t look that practical tho.
So there was loads going on at PAX that I barely skirted the table top areas on other floors I wandered briefly through but didn’t really look at in detail, there is so much going on at PAX it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
All in all I had a excellent time and would definitely look at going again next year. PAX itself is pretty cheap 55 bucks for the three days the major cost is in the hotels and plane fees to get there. The hotels they recommend are fairly classy joints and carry a premium but partly that is also location they are very convenient for the major locations in PAX so for convenience rate highly. I didn’t see much of Seattle proper my wandering was confined to the few blocks between Benaroya hall, the hotel, and the convention center. I would have liked to check it out as I hear good things but I just didn’t have the time. Maybe next year at PAX 2011 
