The “Break it Down” Blog

For those of you not farmiliar with PAX, it is the Penny Arcade Expo and is poised to become the replacement for E3. My friend, Laurence Hartje, has gone to PAX and is reporting on it for us:

8:00 am fucking sucks when you went to bed at 3:30 am the same morning… with that happy note aside, ON TO DAY 2!

Today the expo hall was opened – lots of cool stuff in there (spent a good chunk of the day there). Mythic was there demoing the Warhammer MMO, which looked nice, but they’re going to have a hard time breaking away from the “WOW clone” label [even though Blizzard was “inspired” by the original Warhammer Fantasy Battle table top game when they came up with the idea of “Warcraft” – but I digress…

Highlight of the expo hall for me, it had to be Buring Sea (www.burningsea.com) – Take Cid Meyer’s pirates, enhance the game play & graphics, and make it an MMO, and you’ve got my money. The graphics look stunning (great water effects) and there’s a great attention to detail (as you take damage, your sails/hull get shredded, which effects your speed/maneuverability). They are also big on player feedback and player-created content. They have already accepted a ton of player-made flags (to fly underneath your nation’s colors) and even some player created boat models (the developers assign the stats). Supposedly it is going to launch in June/July.

Nintendo was out in force, but alas, no Wii — It would have been a nice surprise The DS download station was having a hard time keeping up, you had hundreds of DSes all playing against each other in its vicinity, and people trying to download data from it. Talk about 802.11b collision central…

I didn’t swing by the MS/360 area, although I watched a few minutes of Enchanted Arms, it looked pretty nice.

NC Soft had a large presence, and was heavily pimping Guild Wars. There is a Guild Wars “live” event during the con – you pick a side, and received quests from “NPCs” around the convention hall. By completing these quests, you would receive points for your side. At the end of the con, the side that wins will affect the Guild Wars story line in the online game.

A game called “Fury” was present (that supposedly won “best secret of E3″) – it looked very similar to Guild Wars in the way it played – they only had a small playable demo, but you have no pre-determined classes, you spend points on skills, so you can outfit your character the way you want. It played pretty well, but was still in heavy development.

I made the mistake of entering the Pink Godzilla stand – it’s a local game importer… I came out considerably lighter in wallet, but I picked up Beatmania IIDX 10th Style, 11th Style, DJ Max/PSP, and the rhythm/cheerleading game that Ted recommended in the past (I’m too tired to try looking up the name right now)

As I was wandering around the expo hall, I was handed some free tickets to a 5pm showing for Snakes on a Plane at the nearby theater – so we packed up and headed over to watch it (I hadn’t seen it yet). It was probably the most fun I’ve had in a theater – we were heckling the whole movie – it was a blast (especially with all the Red Bull product placement, since Bawls sponsors PAX). Also, it was interesting with all the Sony references (the PSP was booed when it showed up onscreen and the mention of the PS2 vs. X-Box flight sim) that a NDS showed up on screen (which was cheered by the crowd).

Before the MiniBosses concert, round 4 of the Omegathon took place, where the remaining 8 contestants had to play Guitar Hero 2 (which isn’t out yet) on the stage in front of thousands of other gamers (don’t worry, no body used the whistle to cheat like in Mario 3 in “The Wizzard” (starring Fred Savage). Before the competition, Tycho and Robert (Penny Arcade’s business director) gave a demo of GH2 on the stage – too bad about 70% of the way through the song, the game locked the PS2 up… much to the crowd’s delight (I got some video as they were in damage recovery mode). While they rebooted the PS2, the crowd starting chanting “Sony Sucks”. I’m sure the whole thing (I was slow to switch cameras) will be on YouTube in the morning. There was also a GH2 versus match between MC Frontalot’s bass guitarist and the Minibosses lead guitarist – the Minibosses won (I don’t think the bass player had ever played GH at all)

Minibosses rocked! I was surprisingly entertained by MC Frontalot’s nerdcore (seeing how I’m not much of a nerdcore fan).

There was one minor issue today – the Bawls runneth dry – I’ve uploaded the photo… LOL — don’t worry, it is SFW

On to bed, and another day tomorrow! Photos available at http://kormac.myphotoalbum.com/view_album.php?set_albumName=album08