Written Friday night about Friday afternoon and the start of PAX.
I'm typing this out on my incredible iPhone while Jenn, Pat and I sit on a ledge outside the main theater at pax. It's just the first day and already it's been incredible.
We started out by skipping the keynote, which apparently was incredible, but we were trying to catch some other things instead. We decided instead to brave the expo hall, which naturally was just packed. That type of environment just isn't my cup of tea, so I wasn't as enthusiastic being there as I was when I was looking over the booth list a week ago. The Valve booth was totally devoted to their new source engine-based game, Left 4 Dead. Being based on Source, and running on some incredible hardware, it looked great, but I have a hard time getting excited about FPSs anymore. I think I may have reached old man status in this genre now: I'll happily stick to my Counter-Strike (not Source!) and call that a day thanks. I was hoping that some of the guys from Valve might have been on hand, but in retrospect I wouldn't have had anything insightful to say to them given the chance anyway so I guess it doesn't really matter. Jenn picked up a couple Japanese soundtracks to our favorite Miyazaki films, and I picked up the obligatory "PAX 08" T-shirt. I really wanted a "Will Says: Don't be a dick" shirt, but apparently he's popular or something lately so there weren't any. The three of us also played our first xbox (360) game ever: Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball. That was mildly entertaining.
From there the first real event we "participated" in was a panel that was ostensibly supposed to be about violence in games, but was more of a discussion about a game publisher's first amendment right to release a game with adult content, a retailer's right to sell (or not sell) a game like that, and a consumer's right to purchase it. It was an interesting talk, and my fellow gamers surprised me with some questions for the panel that were pretty detailed and well thought out. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised-- the are geeks after all, but I wasn't prepared for the level of thought that was active in that room. It felt like a graduate student lecture.
It even ran long by a bit, and we went straight from the panel to the "queue room" to try to get into the Penny Arcade Q&A session. They let us in with about 15 minutes left, and I'm glad we didn't just skip it because Jerry and Mike are just hilarious. They had witty responses to pretty much every quesion from the audience, and Marrisa's Bunny even made an appearance on stage. We ended up staying in the theater for the Roosterteeth panel, which was also funny, but seemed to be somewhat...influenced by intoxication. It was great hearing the voices from RvB come out of real humans and not Halo characters though, and there were some great moments from these guys too. It jet seemed a little pale after catching the last 15 minutes of Gabe and Tycho.
Sent from my iPhone
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