Tuesday, March 30, 2010

PAX East 2010 Friday and Saturday

Friday was the actual beginning of the con. I spent the morning walking in Boston, and checked out the Boston Public Library. There is some incredible artwork and architecture in the building, I highly suggest checking it out. Then it was back to the convention center for the start of the show.

This began the first part of standing around in lines. This was a big part of the experience. I liked the games that were done in the queue room, but after a couple days it got to be a little bit stale. There's a real opportunity for other vendors to leverage this time to do game demos and presentations. Wizards of the Coast could pick a couple people out of the audience and teach Magic the Gathering, or a game development company could do a live demo. There's a lot of time that vendors could reach a lot of people, and the people in line could be entertained while they wait. I felt this was a big missed opportunity.

After a bit of a wait (actually a couple hours) we finally got into the convention center proper. I went straight up to the expo hall and checked it out. I was a little underwhelmed with the Nintendo booth, but started my crazy campaign of Pokewalker connections. Went over and checked out the Split/Second demo which I really liked. However, I waited too long and didn't make it into the Wil Wheaton keynote, which kind of bummed me out. I heard it was fantastic.

Hung out in the handheld area for a bit, no one was really working on anything, and then met up with the rest of the crew later. We toured the expo hall and checked things out, then grabbed dinner at the mall. Back to the expo for another wait in line, and we prepped for the Friday night concerts starring the Protomen, Anamanaguchi, Metroid Metal, and MC Frontalot. Frontalot especially, being one of the biggest reasons I'd come to PAX. The wait was killer, things were late getting started, and I was kind of bummed to wait so long. But finally things got kicked off, and the longer the show went on, the better things got.

Finally MC Frontalot came on, and the show was great. He performed several songs from the new album Zero Day, full of great tracks. I picked the album up at the convention, even though it's not out yet, yay! I especially liked his performance of First World Problem from the show and of course the Penny Arcade Theme. I went to bed happy at 2am, and only the first day was over.

Saturday dawned late, since most of us were wrecked. I got to the floor late, and saw my first glimpses of some of the great cosplayers: dudes in Gears of War and Fallout 3 armor, ladies in Bayonetta getup, partners and groups. Cool to see. Went back to the expo hall, hung out in the room for a bit, and then back down to get our game on. We played a couple games of Settlers of Cataan, a couple with complete strangers. That was a ton of fun. All throughout PAX we had people asking us to game with them, it was a great community. We played Settlers to finish out the night, and went back to the room to crash in prep for the last day.