What You Did There; I See It.

First and foremost – PAX East photos! I’m notoriously terrible at remembering that I have a camera when I’m having fun, so I apologize that this small bundle is all I have to offer.

Quick and easy link to the photoset can be found here.

So PAX East – I loved it. There were aspects that were terrible, certainly (*cough* most panels *cough* – I’ll rant about the Girls On Gaming panel soon), but the sights, sounds, and pure gaming fun? Can’t be beat, and I can’t wait for next year. As everyone has already said, the Hynes Convention Center was a terrible location for such an event, but they tried and did what they could. The location was right (right smack dab in the middle of Boston Proper), but the failing was just that the convention hall didn’t have the customization required for such an event. The preexisting halls were too small to contain even a fraction of the people who wanted to be present for a given panel, and I foolishly spent the majority of the first day learning that it wasn’t really worth trying to get into any of them. Once I took that to heart and got to the wandering and sporadic gaming, I had a blast. Next year I expect will be even better.

Oh, and I totally would have OWNED the RB2 tourney had I decided to compete. Winning song was freakin’ Bad Romance. No shit. Come ON.

A few high points of PAX East for me:

• Competing in the Portal challenge – a brand new map incorporating anti-gravity and concluding with cake (!!). Completion entered me into a raffle for an Alienware machine, but I did not win. Bah.
• Playing Fluxx with my guildies – What do you do at a gaming convention? Play games, of course! There were long hallways full of awesome beanbags where we camped ourselves and played Fluxx and Bang! (though I never got a chance to play Bang!, it looked fun).
• Limbo demo - Limbo will be hitting the xbox live arcade sometime this summer, and it looks amazing. Dark, foreboding, simple in concept yet complex in execution. You play a small shadow boy in a dark forest world filled with numerous gruesome deaths, and you try to avoid them. That’s about all I was able to figure out from a few moments of play, but it was enough. I’ll be getting this game the day it comes out.
• Split/Second demo – This game was very, very polished, and while I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks once it releases, if I had to guess right now, my money on breakaway awesome racing hit of 2010 will still be Blur.
• D&D Multi-Touch Table – This thing is totally sick. I’d heard about this rich boy toy for a while now, but seeing it in action is something else entirely. *drool*

Tons more, for sure, but those are some of my favorites.

So one con down, another coming. In a little less than two weeks, ROFLcon will be upon us. I have a lot less guildies coming into town for this one, but I’m looking forward to seeing Eitri again, and hopefully kicking his ass at some Fluxx. I’ve glanced over the schedule a bit, but since it’s still a week and a half out, I figure a lot of it is still up in the air, and there’s no use in getting all worked up about a schedule that’s just going to change 8 times before the day comes. I’ll update more as we get a little bit closer to it (not to mention during).

Oh, and before I go – the Blur Multiplayer Beta Demo is in Open Beta status, which means that if you have an xbox 360 and a gold live account, you can download it for free. Check it out and hit me up; I’ll crush you.

First things first – if you have an xbox 360, you should see about getting yourself into the Blur Multiplayer Beta if you can. I got my code from The Escapist, via this link, though I’m not sure if they still have any available. I know that Joystiq had some as well, though I do not have the exact link at my fingertips (you could search it just as easily as I could, you lazy bastards).

It’s basically like Mario Kart (you know how much I love Mario Kart) meets Burnout Paradise, but with a leveling/skillup/loadout system. It’s super fun and I highly recommend it. I’m not sure when the beta ends (probably in a few days), but if you can get it, you should, and we should play. Also – I will crush you. My gamertag is Valiscariot. Drop me a PM on xbl and we’ll have some fun.

Second – Lady Gaga pack for RB2 coming this Tuesday. Who’s got two thumbs and is totally stoked? THIS GUY. Seriously, what a great party pack this is. I realize that it will completely kill my training for the PAX East Rock Band 2 Tournament, but I’m still not convinced I’ll participate anyway. As fun as it may be, I’m not quite convinced that I want to miss Saturday/Sunday panels because of it (not to mention the dozen or so guildies that will be in town for PAX). We’ll see.

Third – Bioshock 2 was everything I wanted it to be. Yeah, yeah, Yahtzee didn’t like it, but he doesn’t like anything – that’s his thing. It was a really good combo of old and new. Goodbye minigame of Pipe Dream, hello quicktime event that doesn’t suck (although I did find a bug in it – if you initiate the hack on a turret, and then auto-hack dart it while the quicktime screen is up, the quicktime screen stays up until you reload the game – boo!). The game was as long as I wanted it to be, the Little Sister events happened about as much as I could tolerate without getting annoyed, and there were enough Gene Tonics to make me wish I had more tonic slots. Well done. Multiplayer ended up being really, really sloppy, but fun for a while. The Sinclair Solutions addon didn’t really add anything I wanted to the game, but we’ll see what happens in the future. All in all, I’m happy.

I’ve somehow avoided buying FFXIII, and instead I’ve added it as the only game in my Gamefly queue. We’ll see how long it takes to get here. Gotta save money for PAX!