PAX

[Warudo Ecksu]

we got one of the hotels that are pretty close to the convention area so I dont think we'll roam around the city too much other than looking for places to eat. my bf said he found some pretty decent restaurants last year.

i wish it were thursday already cuz i gotta work today through wednesday ugh

[Correction]

I'm staying right by the convention center but I'm definitely a roamer. Last year I spent a lot of time at the Waterfront and Pike Place. I had a local guide so we got to the better sushi restaurants in town and ate a ton of shrimp.

[Azalee]

Was planning on going but my brother will be attending PAX and my mother will be in Idaho, so that leaves me to watch the house. It is okay though, because I am broke and I would probably spend too much money if I went.

[Eckoku]

was going too drive down from bothell, but the car broke down.

[Correction]

Felicia Day was on my airplane and I got to talk to her in the rent-a-car line.

Good way to start this year's PAX.

Last year the dude on my plane was Uwe Boll. No lie.

Things are looking up from the start, and that's encouraging.

[Elesirdur]

Last year the dude on my plane was Uwe Boll. No lie.

You really should have loudly accused him of being a terrorist so the passengers would rise up and beat him to death. I think the courts would consider it a service to humanity.

[Kyo]

All you lucky hookers, i expect good reviews of what you saw and played.

[Correction]

All you lucky hookers, i expect good reviews of what you saw and played.

Starcraft 2 - Graphically flawless in every way. At this point all they're doing is balancing the game.

Little Big Planet - I really wish Sackboy could jump higher. Everyone who's played it so far is surprised he can only seem to jump about 1.5 times his own height, and the game's physics is unforgiving about you just missing the edge of a jump. Some of their levels are really creative though, it's not all 'get the bubbles.'

Mirror's Edge - Their respawn mechanics are a little disorienting. Sometimes it feels like they teleport you to where you 'should' have started your last run, rather than where you wound up, making it a little hard to remember where you were.

They have 'The PAX 10' which is a bunch of indie-produced games. I didn't get to play too many of them but what I saw was pretty meh. I did like one of the games though.

The Maw - You're an alien fella with a gun that can leash anything, including the aforementioned Maw (big purple mouth with a single eye). http://www.mawgame.com/

It plays pretty well, it doesn't really feel like an indie game. It does boast the largest development team at like...10.

Audiosurf was there as well. The guy who wrote the whole thing and his sister were there promoting it, although if it's already on Steam, would you really need PAX for the publicity? I guess there are a still a lot of people who don't know about this title.

Heading out today to play some Fallout 3 and maybe get a kiosk for Starcraft II. Everyone who was playing yesterday was hogging the machines for a good half hour each, which makes a line longer than two people intolerable.

Highlights from the Friday Concerts: Someone threw a sock at Freezepop during Sprode and the audience 'sang' Final Countdown's main riff. Jonathan played two encores and had Felicia Day on stage to sing Still Alive. Awesomeness.

[Siegtaru]

PS3 keeps dropping in price so one can afford it soon. Wish it would drop as fast as the 360 is though >.<

It's down to 270 dollars Canadian in some parts of Ontario, 300 everywhere else.

I bought my PS3 for 400 last Christmas. Highway robbery

Oh and fuck Nintendo and PAX rules!

Are you fucking shitting me? My PS3 cost like 600+ Dollars Canadian last Christmas. D:

[Kyo]

Starcraft 2 - Graphically flawless in every way. At this point all they're doing is balancing the game.

Little Big Planet - I really wish Sackboy could jump higher. Everyone who's played it so far is surprised he can only seem to jump about 1.5 times his own height, and the game's physics is unforgiving about you just missing the edge of a jump. Some of their levels are really creative though, it's not all 'get the bubbles.'

Mirror's Edge - Their respawn mechanics are a little disorienting. Sometimes it feels like they teleport you to where you 'should' have started your last run, rather than where you wound up, making it a little hard to remember where you were.

They have 'The PAX 10' which is a bunch of indie-produced games. I didn't get to play too many of them but what I saw was pretty meh. I did like one of the games though.

The Maw - You're an alien fella with a gun that can leash anything, including the aforementioned Maw (big purple mouth with a single eye). http://www.mawgame.com/

It plays pretty well, it doesn't really feel like an indie game. It does boast the largest development team at like...10.

Audiosurf was there as well. The guy who wrote the whole thing and his sister were there promoting it, although if it's already on Steam, would you really need PAX for the publicity? I guess there are a still a lot of people who don't know about this title.

Heading out today to play some Fallout 3 and maybe get a kiosk for Starcraft II. Everyone who was playing yesterday was hogging the machines for a good half hour each, which makes a line longer than two people intolerable.

Highlights from the Friday Concerts: Someone threw a sock at Freezepop during Sprode and the audience 'sang' Final Countdown's main riff. Jonathan played two encores and had Felicia Day on stage to sing Still Alive. Awesomeness.

Good read correction thanks alot for the update, looking forward to hearing about ur time with fallout and starcraft 2.

[Correction]

Oh and I just remembered, Freezepop had the house lights turned almost completely off during 'Plastic Stars' and everyone had a DS/PSP/mobile phone/laptop held up and swaying. The guitarist just kind of stood there and said 'that's the coolest thing I've ever seen.' It was a pretty impressive effect (they had big projection screens of the camerawork and you could see the audience doing it).

[Kimiko]

Wasn't Chronotron also listed as one of the PAX-10 finalists? Basically a flash based puzzle-platformer with time travel elements.

[ertyu]

So today I decided to wait at the left 4 dead line.

Holy
Fucking
Shit

WHen that game comes out, everyone go get it somehow and play. My friend and I were tearing up through hordes and hordes of zombies. First off, the game relies almost completley on team work. Also, it has a different kind of AI than most other games. Is your team doing well? The game is gonna spawn more zombies and throw more shit at you to try and take you down.Is your team doing shitty? The game is gonna take it a bit easier on you and isn't going to punish you. It had a very creepy feel to it and the sheer amount of enemies there were was just.... orgasmic.

After that I went to check out fallout but the lines were way too long, so I just stood there and watched some guy play (who sucked ass) for a few minutes. Game looks really good though, im gonna try to check it out again tomorrow.

Went over to the rock band 2 stage, got up there with my friend and they made me sing down with the sickness @_@ I was pretty nervous but I did pretty well, lol. Game looks amazing, there are gonna be like 500+ songs by the end of the year supposedly.

After that I went to check on Legendary. I played for a little bit but the game is kind of.... not good. It just seemed really unpolished. Now I realize that's probably because it's not near completion, but right now I can say that it wasn't all that great, good premise though.

Walked around the floor some more, I didn't even see a mirror's edge demo, so I'll try to check that out if correction said there was.

I went to check on starcraft II but the lines were ricockulous, so I just watched some other guy. Graphics look amazing, like someone else said it just seems like blizzard is polishing up the old favorite and bringing it up to modern standards, while making some much needed game adjustment and expansion.

That's all I saw as far as the show floor, i'm gonna stop by the aquarium tomorrow morning hopefully and check that out the first few hours of the show before I go check out the floor once more than go watch the final round of the omegathon, check back! =P

[Kyo]

Good shit, the stuff ive seen on left 4 dead said the game was shaping up very well. Anyone play resistance 2 yet?

[Correction]

Ugh, the concerts ran so goddamn late. Not sure why but they didn't get started until it was nearly 10pm, which resulted in the Minibosses coming onstage at around 1:30 AM. By then people were passing out and some just left during their set due to exhaustion. The Cthulu-themed band was pretty cool though.

Starcraft II: It controls and feels exactly like Starcraft.

Which is to say it's a tremendous improvement on the slow-as-shit playstyle that Warcraft III promoted. No creeping, no fucking exping your 'hero.'

Map designs are interesting as well. They're now putting destructible doodads near natural expansions on some maps, like they did on some tournament maps back in the day.

It feels pretty natural to play starcraft II. I'm extremely rusty but I did get my build queue up and running. Oh yeah, build orders. Vitally important. You'll come to remember what it was like to mess up, build one too many SCVs and not have your factory up in time to etc. etc. etc. Everything is tuned to favor the same kinds of players who dominated Brood Wars; the Boxers of the world.

Fallout 3: My concerns about the combat system were relieved. It isn't 100% Baldur's Gate style pause-anytime combat. It's real-time until you go into the paused mode, at which point you spend your AP any way you wish (on as many targets as you wish) then let it all play out in slow-motion, at which points it returns to real time combat and your AP regenerates. So you have to conserve your AP until you really need it if you're fighting multiple enemies. The most effective strategies are the same as those fighting against really bad FPS enemies. Draw them into a room with a choke point and hold it while they stream into your position and kill them off one by one with aimed hits.

They also showed off a lot of the other details of the game at Bethesda's demo. Weapon creation was compared to Alchemy in Oblivion. You take a bunch of components and put them together to make a new weapon. They showed off a craftable rail spike gun (i.e. a pneumatic gun that fires railroad tie spikes) and then cleared out an entire market full of Raiders with the Powerfist.

And the good/evil decisions are back. Right at the onset you have a decision between trying to help out a troubled town or to incinerate it with an undetonated nuclear bomb.

Bethesda's presentation was incredible. They handed out these little cards with 'attributes' on them like Charisma, Strength, Endurance, etc. Turns out they were loot tokens that you could take back to the Fallout 3 display in the expo hall later and collect goodies. Most folks got a poster made of the most unrollable paper I've ever seen. A lot got the little hand puppet from the PA strips made for the game. A few lucky folks got tee shirts or a signed poster. And then the prizes got incredible. Some folks got a Viewmaster with stereoscoped screenshots from the game. Some folks got a personal demo of the game inside the booth with the producers of the game. And one lucky fucker got:

a 360 elite
5 years worth of Live Gold subscription
16000 (yes 16k) points on said subscription
A copy of the game, Survival Edition (including the metal lunchbox, artbook, Vault Boy bobblehead and Pip Boy 3000 alarm clock)
The aforementioned demo in the Fallout 3 booth.
And all the other loot (signed poster, hand puppet, tee shirt).

Going to try to play some mirror's edge and time permitting, more SC2. Probably not going to have time to check out much more than that today.

[Vuitton]

I got the poster and the tshirt. =[ I really wanted a hand puppet.

[Kyo]

Ugh, the concerts ran so goddamn late. Not sure why but they didn't get started until it was nearly 10pm, which resulted in the Minibosses coming onstage at around 1:30 AM. By then people were passing out and some just left during their set due to exhaustion. The Cthulu-themed band was pretty cool though.

Starcraft II: It controls and feels exactly like Starcraft.

Which is to say it's a tremendous improvement on the slow-as-shit playstyle that Warcraft III promoted. No creeping, no fucking exping your 'hero.'

Map designs are interesting as well. They're now putting destructible doodads near natural expansions on some maps, like they did on some tournament maps back in the day.

It feels pretty natural to play starcraft II. I'm extremely rusty but I did get my build queue up and running. Oh yeah, build orders. Vitally important. You'll come to remember what it was like to mess up, build one too many SCVs and not have your factory up in time to etc. etc. etc. Everything is tuned to favor the same kinds of players who dominated Brood Wars; the Boxers of the world.

Fallout 3: My concerns about the combat system were relieved. It isn't 100% Baldur's Gate style pause-anytime combat. It's real-time until you go into the paused mode, at which point you spend your AP any way you wish (on as many targets as you wish) then let it all play out in slow-motion, at which points it returns to real time combat and your AP regenerates. So you have to conserve your AP until you really need it if you're fighting multiple enemies. The most effective strategies are the same as those fighting against really bad FPS enemies. Draw them into a room with a choke point and hold it while they stream into your position and kill them off one by one with aimed hits.

They also showed off a lot of the other details of the game at Bethesda's demo. Weapon creation was compared to Alchemy in Oblivion. You take a bunch of components and put them together to make a new weapon. They showed off a craftable rail spike gun (i.e. a pneumatic gun that fires railroad tie spikes) and then cleared out an entire market full of Raiders with the Powerfist.

And the good/evil decisions are back. Right at the onset you have a decision between trying to help out a troubled town or to incinerate it with an undetonated nuclear bomb.

Bethesda's presentation was incredible. They handed out these little cards with 'attributes' on them like Charisma, Strength, Endurance, etc. Turns out they were loot tokens that you could take back to the Fallout 3 display in the expo hall later and collect goodies. Most folks got a poster made of the most unrollable paper I've ever seen. A lot got the little hand puppet from the PA strips made for the game. A few lucky folks got tee shirts or a signed poster. And then the prizes got incredible. Some folks got a Viewmaster with stereoscoped screenshots from the game. Some folks got a personal demo of the game inside the booth with the producers of the game. And one lucky fucker got:

a 360 elite
5 years worth of Live Gold subscription
16000 (yes 16k) points on said subscription
A copy of the game, Survival Edition (including the metal lunchbox, artbook, Vault Boy bobblehead and Pip Boy 3000 alarm clock)
The aforementioned demo in the Fallout 3 booth.
And all the other loot (signed poster, hand puppet, tee shirt).

Going to try to play some mirror's edge and time permitting, more SC2. Probably not going to have time to check out much more than that today.

man thats some serious fuckin loot that dude got, would be sweet to win that shit.

[Kang]

Are you fucking shitting me? My PS3 cost like 600+ Dollars Canadian last Christmas. D:

I got the 40 GB ps3.

[Correction]

Left 4 Dead: Rivaling Mirror's Edge and Fallout 3 as the top non-Blizzard game I'm looking forward to most. The gameplay is intense in a way I've never seen cooperative play get before. Getting pinned down by a zombie and waiting for your teammates to get you out of it is a rush. The friendly fire component is a little annoying but the good news is that it never really does much damage. There is however an extreme urgency with which you must kill the zombies, as getting 'infected' with a gaseous beacon can summon another horde of zombies on your position immediately, so keeping a relatively clear perimeter is job #1. This is one game where you will not want to put up with people screaming 'penis' into voice chat over and over; if the team doesn't work together and respond quickly to threats your chances of surviving the level drops like a rock.

Mirror's Edge: Fuck gabe & tycho for plugging the game at their Q&A because that made the lines intolerably long. It was an hour or more into the wait that the machine crashed for the twelfth (or so) time, at which point the EA guy just turned it off and merged the lines behind the one that seated a neverending Parade of Suck. It's not hard people! Don't slide when you should have jumped! Listen to the directions being spoken out loud by the demo narrator! And don't charge unarmed into a crowd of 5 guards! It was agonizing watching people play badly for an hour and then not even get a shot at the game. It's mesmerizing but there were some pretty bad bugs in the demo they had at their kiosk (the aforementioned crashing, some graphics glitches, etc.)

Final Round of the Omegathon was a lot like previous years: a complete blowout. But at least the loser kept it more or less exciting in a few races.

[Correction]

http://i38.tinypic.com/34fdwsk.jpg