PAX 2009

I have to admit that when I got up early on Sunday morning I really didn't know what I was getting myself into. All I knew about PAX was that it was a medium sized gaming convention that's half LAN party, half product demonstration. That said, I never figured that it would be the type of thing 70,000 people would be going to. After picking Devon up at his house, We drove to the Washington State Convention Center, where we parked the car and walked a block to the Hyatt Hotel to pick our admission badges up. A perfect start to the day was seeing that the car parked next to us in the convention center garage had the world map to Legend of Zelda painted on the hood.

After getting something to eat at Subway and by chance meeting David and Stephen there, we went to listen to a presentation about pricing in the game industry. I thought it was entertaining, though it was a tad lengthy and wouldn't really make for good blog story. What would make for a good story is when we finally got down to the show floor to look at the different vendor booths. Everyone was there including Blizzard, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and many others. All presenters had many games on display, many of which were playable and all due for release in the future. Though many were showing off games that will be available in the next month, the ones I was interested in were those that won't be released for another 6 months. That said, there were 3 games I made it a point to play.

Mass Effect 2: Felt like the first game, though it seemed much more action oriented. Maybe it was just the combination of the pre-made class and the fact that it was on an Xbox, but it feels less like an RPG and more like and FPS. However, this made the battle in the demo seem a lot more fun and exciting.

Uncharted 2: Pretty much the same as the first one, though the graphics are 10x better.

Starcraft 2: This was the big game of the show for me, as not only have I been waiting for it to be released for the past 3 years, but it's also more than 6 months out. There were at least 10 demo stations, with one half of the machines setup for 1v1 matches, while the others were there to demo the single player portion of the game. Realizing that I would be destroyed by nearly everyone there if I were to play against anyone, I choose to demo the single player portion of the game. That said, what I played was capital A Amazing. The level I chose to play out of the two available was one in which I had to escort some civilians down a road infested with Zerg. As the mission went on, the Zerg would step up their attacks, giving a reason to create more units or at the very least create some sort of tension. Though it was a pretty simple early game mission, it still was a lot more creative than the base-destroying missions of the first game. One thing that I didn't have time to do was get into the pre-mission planning phase that happens before every mission. This portion is where you can do things like choose which mission to tackle next or which upgrades and units to buy. I can see this making the single player portion very popular simply because it allows players to see progression of how they are doing throughout the camping. Not to be cliche, but the worst part of the demo was it ending and realizing that I will have to wait 6 months to play the final game.

Even if I hadn't played these demos I would say that PAX is worth it to go if you can. I took home plenty of free swag including many beta codes, t-shirts, and posters. My only regret would be that I would have liked to go to more panels and investigated some booths in more detail. However, I guess that would be a testament to how much stuff there is to do.