PAX Impressions Part 1

Yes, it’s been a bit over a week since PAX, but since I was still on vacation and still gathering my thoughts, I figured I’d wait until this week to post on it. I’m going to do this post in multiple parts. The first few parts I’m going to basically give my general impressions of the PAX, what I liked and didn’t like overall, and what I would maybe do differently if I went again. In the last part I’ll discuss the games I played and saw there in as much detail as I can remember. I think this will probably be 3 parts total, but we’ll see how it goes. So, without further ado…

Convention Organization

The convention has a somewhat overwhelming amount of stuff to do, which is certainly a good thing considering the number of people who decided to attend this year. But, it is a bit daunting and can lead to some confusion. PAX is basically divided into 4 different parts:

1. The Expo Floor -Basically where all the new, mostly unreleased games are being demoed, as well as other companies booths like mega64 or Razer.
2. Panels/Demos/Presentations - Includes playthroughs by the developers and forums like the Penny Arcade Q&As, the Gamer Dad panel, the Wil Wheaton panel, and even a gaming-themed Family Feud contest
3. Playing/watching games - Includes PC, handheld, and console freeplay, as well as various tournaments and of course the Omegathon, for which all rounds can be watched. Tabletop games also have tournaments and freeplay.
4. Concerts/Movies - Jonathan Coulton, Freezepop and others played, and/or you can watch various movies (or continue with gaming freeplay until 3 AM).

If I’m missing something specifically, it probably fits into one of these categories. In any case, within these categories there’s quite a bit to do, and I think perhaps this is where my confusion came in. I think I went to the convention mostly just to try out a bunch of new, unreleased games. In retrospect, however, I’m just not sure if this was the best use of my time.

The Expo Floor

With so many people at PAX this year, if you wanted to play any of the more popular games, it meant that you had to wait. You’d think that with the expo floor open for 5 hours on Friday and 8 hours Saturday and Sunday that that would be plenty of time to see all of the bigger games. Well, perhaps I just discovered that my patience had a limit. I found it extremely tiring just waiting around so I could play a game for a few short minutes. I waited probably up to 30 minutes or more to play some games, and that was usually by getting in lines as soon as the shows opened (I did this for Dead Space and Left 4 Dead). In some cases, the media made the line even longer, as they jumped ahead of me just when I was the next person in line to play Dead Space… TWICE. (Note to self… get a media badge if I go again). Sometimes semi-popular demos that had only 1 station setup and the demo would take entirely too long to complete, such as for “The Conduit”. Either way, waiting in line, even with a DS in tow, was just extremely tiring and typically boring.

I also happened to have a bad experience with the very first game I waited in line to play, which was Legendary. Gamecock had 6 sort of Arcade-cabinets setup for the game and it was quite clear that if you wanted to play, you had to get in line behind a particular arcade cabinet and wait for the person in front of you to finish. So, I did that. The person in front of me was actually pretty good at the game and ended up playing it for awhile, but I kept waiting. Finally when she was done, I stepped up to the booth when another guy forcefully shoved me away and insisted that he was next. I told him that he was wrong, and that I was waiting patiently in line for the cabinet. He just said “No” and then turned to the game. Welcome to PAX, I guess.

In any event, I also found it annoying that a lot of games were demonstrating their multiplayer rather than their single player. I understand that Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2 are going to have big multiplayer components, but is it really all that interesting to play when you only have a few minutes to try it out? The line for Gears of War 2 was too long for me to play, but I played Resistance 2 and Red Faction: Guerilla for a few minutes and just got immediately bored with them, though they may be perfectly fun when playing them at your liesure at home. With the exception of Left 4 Dead, which is different because of it’s co-op nature, I just found it impossible to stay interested in a multiplayer game when you only have a few minutes to play in a crowded environment while you’re standing up. And Starcraft 2 was there as well in multiplayer, but you can imagine that the lines for that would take forever (how long did your average Starcraft game take?), and I didn’t have the patience to wait to play a game that looked exactly like (surprise!) the original Starcraft.

Strangely, the sensory overoload of the show floor game me a feeling a few times on the expo floor that I really just hated games. This isn’t true, of course, but when there are so many games being advertised and shown, you start seeing weird similarities in them that sort of make you realize how kind of stupid games really are. I had thoughts like “Oh, you can grab onto those things that look like little indentations, just like you can grab onto those things that look like little indentations in all those other games” or “Skill points? You don’t say?” or “Yay, open-world gameplay” or “What marketing asshole forced a development team to create Afro Samurai?” (although I’ve now just discovered that it was apparently a pre-existing Anime as well… was this still a marketing evil genius?) Nothing is particularly wrong with ledges or skill points or open-world gameplay (the jury is still out on Afro Samurai) but seeing so much at once would just eventually kind of annoy me. By the time I saw a Dragon Age presentation on the final day, I was positively bored and somewhat annoyed (although maybe Dragon Age just didn’t look all that impressive to me either).

Overall, the expo floor was a bit of a mixed bag for me. It was great to actually play games like Dead Space and Left 4 Dead, but the waiting and a sort of sensory overload made it a bit of a drag sometimes. More on PAX tomorrow.