What You Did There; I See It.

Here we are, at the end of another PAX East, alive and whole (well, save for that little empty space in our heart of hearts that we feel at the end of PAX). I have a lot of thoughts to unload, but to form them in a reasonable and legible fashion tonight would be an effort in futility, so you’ll all have to wait.

“But wait,” you may ask, “for what are we waiting?” (See what I did there? Bite me, dangling prepositions.) Well, today I decided to approach the day (with the exception of checking out the Portal 2 video) from the angle of seeing, playing, and learning about games that I didn’t know about before PAX. I hit up a lot of the indie and/or first-release games on the floor, completely forsaking the Sunday panels. A few highlights:

• Super Giant Games‘ enchantingly beautiful role-playing action game Bastion
• Trapdoor‘s hilariously bloody Warp
• Does Nintendo’s 3DS work with people with Strabismus?
• Retro Affect‘s clever and addictive Snapshot
• 82 Apps‘ lovely Civ-meets-Catan-meets-Risk-like iPad game, New World Colony
• last but certainly not least, Owlchemy Labs‘ Smuggle Truck, an iPad physics/accelerometer game about smuggling immigrants into the US (no shit.)

I look forward to filling you all in on what went down over the weekend, uploading pics, and getting some discussion going. In the meantime, what were your favorite parts about PAX this year? Least favorite? Why? Let me know!

Quick post from the PAX East media room – Day 2 has gone smashingly well thus far. A quick list:

• Got some good interviews in (keep your eyes peeled!)
• Didn’t come close to getting into the Rage demo (damn you, insane lines!)
• played Ubisoft‘s new Kinect-centric Child of Eden (beautiful)
• saw some really great cosplay (super cool stuff, really)
• didn’t get enough food (need to remedy that soon)
• snagged an invite to the Bioware meetup (heading to that in mere minutes)

I’ll keep updates coming as I have them! Stay tuned! Also, if you’re at PAX East and want to meet up/get drunk/know of a good party, add me on Twitter and say hi!

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.

• (+) Borderlands is one of the coolest games I’ve seen in a long time. I have it on the xbox 360, if you wanna play.
• (-) Borderlands has nearly consumed my non-work time.
• (=) My enjoyment with Prototype has been greatly hindered by Borderlands. In fact, since acquiring the latter, I have yet to replay the former. This is a shame, as I’m paying GameFly for the privilege of borrowing it. Conundrum.
• (=) My guild is working on, but struggling with, Northrend Beasts hardmode. Phase 2 is rough.
• (-) I am Thassarian’s Legplates of Triumph away from my 4pc. Tier bonus, which is still stupidly overpowered. I have enough emblems, but do not have a trophy. I still need a VoA 25 run this week. Wish me luck!
• (-) The past few weeks of Rock Band 2 DLC are of no interest to me. This doesn’t matter much, though, as I cannot even afford the Beatles Rock Band DLC that I do want. All in good time.
• (-) My downstairs neighbor apparently works nights, and hates it when I play drums. This will end poorly.
• (+) I have found a new hobby within WoW!




• (-) That hobby is going for The Loremaster on my death knight.




• (-) The folks over in Maine voted against equal rights. To their credit, it was a thin margin, which says to me that only slightly over half of Maine voters are bigots. Yep, I went there. You suck, assholes.

I’ll post something substantial on these or other subjects soon, but I have a lot of games to play tonight, and not enough time to play them all.

• (+) Yogg-Saron down!
• (-) Due to the need to cut costs, my hours at work have been cut. It is still manageable, but certainly far more scary now.
• (+) My enjoyment with Prototype continues with little obstruction. I find this interesting enough to discuss briefly, below.
• (-) Despite my awesome new gear, due to my spec still being 2h-Unholy, my dps still kinda sucks.
• (+) Not only did [Justicebringer] finally drop for me, so did [Greaves of the 7th Legion] and [Death's Verdict]. Three BiS items in one night (four, if you count my new [Thassarian's Shoulderplates of Triumph]). I am so happy.
• (-) This week’s Rock Band 2 DLC is of no interest to me.
• (+) I just discovered my friend Mandy’s blog – check it out.

I have a general rule about sandbox-style games, a certain manner in which I approach them. First and foremost, while I fully recognize the awesome idea of an open world, I generally find that sandbox games claim to be far more open-ended than they really are. Sure, you might be able to go many places, but we have yet to even develop the hardware, let alone the software, to be truly lifelike, to give true immersion. I’ve certainly read a dozen other blogs talk about current limitations/failings of sandbox games, and that isn’t really the point of all this, so allow me to skip to the point or, at least, the theory, the general observation. Here it is: