I was at PAX East over the weekend and good times were had by all. MC Wilson has some delightful pajamas, and I may or may not have made out with some of the L4D2 crew. Conjecture abounds.

All of that aside, there were a number of games and tabletop insanity going on at the Boston Convention Center. Here’s some stuff I played and what I thought about it:

Shank: If I was going to pick a game of show, I think this might be it. You’ve got knives, guns, a chainsaw, and some grenades. Your goal is to make a whole bunch of dudes real real dead. That’s pretty much all you need to know going into the game. The combo system is surprisingly deep, and I really hope the game gives you an opportunity to master it. Also, chainsawing dudes is really, really fun.

Breach: Ok, let’s just pretend that the ten minute speech about how this game is “real warfare” didn’t happen. Breach is a team-based multiplayer shooter with persistent experience rewards, fully splodable environments, and some pretty environments. It’s also coming to XBLA for $15. For that price I’ll definitely go for a moderny 1943.

Monday Night Combat: Hey, remember DOTA (Defense of the Ancients)? What if it had a love child with Unreal Tournament? You’d get this thing. Playtime was limited for me, but it looks like something that I’d enjoy. It has a fantastic cartoony feel and plays crazy arcadey. I’ll be interested to see more stuff about this.

Hey all, after some serious fun with jetlag I finally got around to uploading our photos from the trip to Seattle for PAX 2008.

Day One
Our Seattle Motel (No More Heroes…) and trip to Vancouver.

Day Two
Meeting up with M.C. Wilson, finding the first ever Starbucks, and queuing lots for the first day of PAX.

Days Three and Four
More show-floor and exhibition center activities, exploring Seattle and a trip to the SciFi museum to find robots. (No photo’s allowed inside but there were many awesome Robots to be seen!)

PAX day one was already filled with many awesome things culminating in a huge concert of explosive audio goodness. With that thought in mind we headed out to the events second day with only three hours of sleep, ready for whatever awesomeness could be thrown at us. Tonight was going to be the main event concerts including the Minibosses, who I’d heard about many times over the last few years.

We met up with M.C. Wilson pretty early on in the day and toured around a lot of the show floor. It was this fateful day that we decided to check out Wii Music, something I will most likely never forget. So I was happily watching some nice folk playing around on it for a minute or so then I turned around to M.C. to get his opinion and saw the biggest look of confusion on his face that I’d ever seen. Seriously, I wish I’d got this on camera but it was too late. We were ushered over by the booth guy and explained the premise of the title in as best a way as he could.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t ever going to help the fact that essentially you get a Wii Mote and move it up or down in time to generate some awful MIDI music. You could then send a video of your masterpiece to friends over Wii Connect 24, which they could add to if they so desired. I didn’t get it; as a musician or gamer this made no sense at all. Still there were actually people that really seem to enjoy it I guess so an audience is probably there somewhere.

We attended a great panel on the subject of “Are casual games killing off the core?”, which was interesting, well handled, and entertaining. Unfortunately, this hour long panel only scratched the surface of the subject and could easily have gone on for several times this length and still be unresolved. One thing I guess this did show was that this is a debate that needs to happen and that it is a really multifaceted issue that will need to be addressed sooner or later. I think myself and M.C. are going to have some further discussions on this in the near future.
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So I’m awake again.

The trip back from PAX was awesome, with nine hours of flight time beginning at 4:30 in the morning and with a 12-minute layover. Then sleep. Lots of sleep.

Posting was limited at PAX itself due to not having a laptop, and also due to simply being either too busy or too tired to write anything up via iPhone. Between way too little sleep, sixteen hours of tabletop gaming, various panels and booths, and a ridiculous amount of unhealthy food, it was a busy weekend. So anyway, here are some thoughts:

4E D&D: I played a ton of this over the weekend, and my final though is that it really isn’t that bad. The Wizards design guys admitted that they pulled some of the customization from 3.5, as well as narrowing the skill set, but they had reasons for doing so. By making a smaller skill set that covers more situations, one has better odds of actually having a useful skill. The customization was toned down primarily to push D&D away from the concept of min-maxing a character to death. Instead of your Ranger/Monk/Fighter dual-wielding holy flaming Kamas and being unhittable, or your Chain Fighter of ultimate broken doom, you have a few variations within a set class. If this sounds like MMORPG character generation, that’s because it is. This, however, isn’t as hideous as it sounds.
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Phil loves his F-Zero. I mean LOVES his F-Zero. This video shows you exactly that. F-Zero love at it’s finest.

Thanks to M.C. for taking this!

In 2008, twenty gamers gathered in Seattle for a competition. Only one of them could be crowned the champion– and more than the crown was at stake. The winner would receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the Tokyo Games Show, along with $5,000 prize money and an amazing home theater system. The Omeganauts battled fiercely, through Peggle, through Pictionary, through Boom Blox and Jenga and Rock Band; until at the end, only two of the Omeganauts remained. Their final battle, in video form, can be seen here.

M.C. Wilson sends us some video of Wii Music direct from PAX! Enjoy!

M.C. sends us more video from PAX. The first one is the massive line to get in, the other is more footage of Rock Band 2. Fucking Journey…sigh….

Having played Rock Band 2 earlier today, there can be no doubt that it’s a fantastic follow-up to the original. There’s also no doubt that it’s ready for release– in fact, we’ve seen folks being awarded the full retail copy of the game, complete with instruments, as prizes in some of the PAX contests. But if you’re still on the fence about purchasing Harmonix’s latest, perhaps this video of Darth Vader and a few accompanying Stormtroopers attempting to perform “You Oughta Know” will convince you.

The voyage begins. It is 5:30 am. I will arrive in Seattle at 3. Sleep at 3 am. Work ended at 10 last night.

I had to call and confirm my flight five times. Five.

So, I will arrive at PAX tired, goofy, and armed with e-mail and a camera. Hilarity will ensue.

It goes well. Many things were seen. Fallout 3 looks largely unchanged in dialogue and choices from the 1st two games, to it’s benefit. I remain immensely hopeful for this.

Mercenaries 2 looks fantastic save for the in-engine cut scenes. Characters are ugly and boxy. Gameplay looks glorious.

Left 4 dead will be a coop must have. That is all.

On top of this I’ve given 4th Edition D&D a shot, as well as Living Forgotten Realms. Both play much better than I expected, and I’ve made at least one tabletop convert this week.