Penny Arcade Expo

So, once again the Penny Arcade Expo is this weekend. For those of you who don't know, the event also known as PaX is "the  largest  gaming  festival  in  North  America  representing  tabletop,  console  and
PC  gaming." This year it's being held at The Washington State Convention and Trade Center, which is why I mention this. If you're a fan of games and live near Seattle, it's worth the $30 admission for a day.

Among other things, we're hoping to get some info on Left For Dead and the new Rock Band games (Guitar Hero, too). There's also going to be a screening of Nerdcore rising as well as performances by Freezepop, Jonathan Coulton, and Freezepop. If you go, be sure to say "Hi" to me (Tyler), I'll be there getting the latest news for ARSON. If you're not going, subscribe to our feed; we'll be liveblogging the whole thing here.

Friday:

Just met a bunch of the PAX10 finalists, most of which you've probably heard of, and a few of which you certainly will be soon. Here's the full list:

• The Amazing Brain Train - Grubby Games
• Audio Surf - Dylan Fitterer, Elizabeth Fitterer, Paladin 3D, Pedro Camacho, Albert Park, Flynn Joffray
• Chronotron - Scarybug Games
• The Maw - Twisted Pixel
• Polarity - Howard Braham, Daniel Bryner, Przemyslaw Iwanowski, Stanley Rosenbaum, Gaurav Shrivastava, Samuel Spiro, Allison Theus
• Project Aftermath - Games Faction
• Schizoid - Torpex Games
• Strange Attractors - Ominous Development
• Sushi Bar Samurai - Molly Rocket

Looking around the expo floor it looks like a lot of the right companies are here; with any luck we'll be able to get some more information on some of the more seceret games to be released this year. The talk of the expo at the moment is the Left 4 Dead booth, but by the looks of it, Bethesda seems to have done a pretty good job with the Fallout 3 booth and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Saturday:

As predicted, the Left 4 Dead booth has the biggest crouds, but to me it seems mostly up to hype. Looking at the game, it doesn't seem to be much more than the Counter Strike: Source mod it was derived from.

Both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 4 are represented, as well, and it's a toss-up as to which is better. Rock Band has the awesome graphics, but Guitar Hero seems to make up for it with some sort of strange touch-strip control which I hadn't previously seen. Useful? No, it's probably confined to the realm of the solo buttons in Rock Band, but it looks really cool. In terms of crouds, Rock Band is clearly pulling in more people - unsuprising, since they have live demos and the Guitar Hero folks have got some people they paid to play the game. Another huge difference is that Guitar Hero tried to make their setup look more like an actual rock show. This seems to be for the worse, since it gives the impression that they're trying to cover up some inherent suckyness in the game. Much remains to be seen on both of these two games, however.

As predicted, Fallout 3 was under-hyped, but it's certainly an amazing game. If you haven't been following the development of this game, it was basically set to be an exact sequel to Fallout 2 when the studio developeing the game went bankrupt, and was picked up by Bethesda. They've turned the Fallout series into what looks like an amazing game, while keeping most of the elements of the original series. It's basically an FPS RPG, but unlike all of the previous games that tried to do that, it doesn't look like it sucks.

One thing which really sets the Penny Arcade Expo apart from many other expos is the BYOC room. If you somehow managed to get a ticket early enough, you're in for a 1,000-plus person LAN party. Even if you didn't, a seperate side of the room allows you to play on donated PCs, which, despite what the description suggests, don't suck. Keep in mind this is 30-minutes of play, not really a traditional, up-all-night LAN party, but still pretty fun. If you don't have a BYOC ticket this year, you should still show up for this.

The last event of the night is the concerts. Not to forget about the Omegathon, they started out the show with a band-versus-band Rock Band 2 battle. Everyone went crazy when they started playing Eye of the Tiger, then stopped cheering and got upset when they realized the second band was going to play the exact same song. Understandable from a competition point of view, but we really would have liked to have heard more of the setlist in this game.

The actual artists performing that night were pretty awesome, though, so overall I'd call Saturday a huge success.

Sunday:

The only thing which really made Sunday different from Saturday was the panels which were happening, so we decided to forego most of this day and just show up for the concerts. If you got into BYOC or really like socializing with people it's worth going, otherwise one day is enough.

Overall:

Looking back on the experience, PAX was an awesome convention. Even if they decided to just drop the expo hall entirely, hanging out with 50,000 gamers, playing Xbox Live games with people who happen to walk by you, and the concerts make this an awesome expo. Whether you just want to have fun, or want to see what's happening in video games for the coming year, PAX is what you're looking for. If I'm lucky, perhaps I'll be asked to cover PAX '09! Maybe.