I have posted my pictures from PAX East here on Flickr. Not surprisingly, there isn’t a single picture of me. There are several of my host for the weekend, Jeff, but none of me. Nor any of his awesome house in New Hampshire. Or of his Doberman puppy. I am quite horrible at the picture taking thing. Something I am planning on remedying in the coming months.
PAX East was a great time. I unfortunately did not get to see Wil Wheaton do the keynote, but I did get to see NVidia release their GeForce GTX 480 GPU that supports 3D gaming technology. Quite impressive. And Battlefield: Bad Company 2 which supports 3D using this card, looked very nice. Of course they were using a high-end rig with triple monitors to demo it, but that isn’t too unreasonable of a setup for a dedicated gamer. 😉
Of the many bands that were playing for the Friday and Saturday night concerts, the only one we really had any interest in was the Video Game Orchestra. And even with them only running a skeleton crew of about 15 people, they were very entertaining to watch and listen to. The ‘band leader’ is quite the music nerd and a ham when comes to talking to crowds. But he did keep everyone involved and engaged. Many of the cosplay pictures were taken at that concert.
There were several good displays on the exposition floor from Alienware, Turbine, Tritton, NVidia, AMD, Rockstar and a ton of independent game houses. I saw a bunch Xbox Live Arcade games that looked to be a lot of fun. There were also a few booth babes, a surprisingly rare species of expo attendee that have almost become extinct since E3 toned itself down.
The Alienware booth was running hourly tournaments of multiplayer BioShock 2 and Aliens Vs. Predator to win a free PC. Free swag was also being handed out by taking a quick survey and then playing a ‘slot machine’ app to see what you won. I got a t-shirt and a canvas bag out of the deal, as did my compatriots. None of us got the free USB drive. Also on display were several custom rigs, many with water-cooling setups, massive video cards and awesome hard drive arrays. Oh, and pretty pretty lights!
There were several Free Play rooms running everything from Xbox 360 and PS3s to Contra on 8 Bit NES, ColecoVision and a working Atari 2600! Two rooms were dedicated completely to the original Xbox game Steel Battalion which is so immersive it comes with a specialized controller that costs $150. It makes the piloting of a Mech more realistic with clutch, accelerator, and breaking system plus an actual eject button. If you take too much damage, it begins to flash and if you do not hit the button to ‘punch out’ within 5 seconds, you ‘die’ inside the game. There was no replaying of your character after that. Really cool to watch people playing and fighting using that game. There were also several spots that had RockBand running in one form or another for people to play in front of their own little audience. Quite the display of talent…..:-p
There was a first for me during the weekend as well; I played my first ever game of Magic: The Gathering. There were free, ready to play decks of the new Planeswalker series in the Penny Arcade swag bag. The group of us sat down Friday night with several beers and I learned how to play. I had always thought the game was more complicated then it truly was and I am surprised I never got into it in college when a bunch of folks I know did. It did give me a +2 to nerd cred by the end of the night! Now I have two Green Magic decks in my possession. Perhaps I can find folks around NYC to play against.
What was really good about the weekend though was hanging out and reconnecting with friends, playing more Xbox then I have ever before, drinking good beer and eating good food. I’m glad that I went, and I am definitely thinking about going again next year.