PAX Twenty Aught Nine
The gamer weekend of the year – in “what I could remember” form
Tags: Life With Mike, Penny Arcade Expo 2009 Categories: Blog, Contributor Blog
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Sep 14th, 2009
I’ve been home from the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo for a few days, digested and decompressed, and am ready to review what was a really different year form normal. Within the next few days, you’ll see more interviews than I have ever done for Dignews go up, beyond that my “live-in-sin-in” came along for the ride this year. That was actually one of the best parts, because PAX is really something you need to experience before you get why it’s so awesome.
I spent a few days around Seattle before PAX, a real first as I haven’t explored the city much beyond the area around the command center, and grabbing some books and sushi from the U-District. Dan led us on a hike that covered a good chunk of the town in two days, and while exhausting, was the most fun I have in awhile. Seattle is a great city, and although I love Milwaukee, I am rather attracted to the surplus of coffee and books that cry out to me.
The show itself was huge, with the exhibition hall now expanded to twice its size. It cannibalized what used to be the LAN area and really allowed you to breath. The second building was closed, but the show managed to grab another floor, which had two more theaters. Getting to PAX always switches my brain into this hyper-serious mode where I want to spend as much time taking everything in. Reading the show floor like tea leaves, seeing which companies have enough to bring something new, and what conspicuous absences there are. I can tell you that the combination of a slower year and the bigger show floor meant a lot more indie games got attention. Arcade style downloads and even smaller publishers got some space. Although I should mention that about a good quarter of the floor now belongs to EA due to their continued Galactus-like appetite for game companies.
I’ll have a bunch of previews going up, but I have to say there wasn’t much I was “wet-your-pants” excited about. The two top titles for me were New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mass Effect 2. I also must sound my dismay that the third episode of Penny Arcade Adventures was not announced, as for the last two years those games have been one of my most anticipated releases. There was some chatter that there was a quip from Gabe and Tycho about something being in the works, hopefully we’ll get something at PAX East.
Oh yeah, that too. There will be a PAX in Boston for you geeks that don’t feel like making the trek across the country.
The end of the first day was a party for Sony’s MAG title which looks pretty neat and a party at the Baltic Room for EA’s Dead Space: Extraction. Previews have been written. I am certain that quite a few of you are interested in MAG, as it promises PC level online matches for a console. I made it to the concerts after the parties with enough time to catch the end of Metroid Metal, and the always-awesome MC Frontalot. The king of nerdcore rap is a perennial favorite of PAX.
Saturday I spent a lot more time wandering around the show floor. I was really excited to see a lot of smaller titles getting some attention. I was quite dismayed when I overheard someone trying to compare PAX to ComicCon. That would be terrible, the fact the show is focused on fans and not attracting the media means that the industry is focused on serving the fans, not themselves. It may sound a bit weird coming from someone who has always had a yellow badge (media) when at PAX, but I think that the reason I have more fun at PAX than at E3 is because of its spirit.
Moving on, after digging through the show floor, (as with previous day, I am not going to bore you with the details of what I saw, as it’s all going in the previews) it was time for an odd event, the launch party for the PC version of Resident Evil 5. Although I was happy for the time away, I wasn’t really all that keen on checking out a game I had already played thoroughly on the PS3 especially when Capcom made a deal with Intel to push the i7 processor using RE5, meaning what I had at home wasn’t going to come close to equaling what the PS3 rendered the title at.
It was back to PAX for Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. This was a great show, although it ran terribly late; mostly due to the fact that Paul and Storm had an encore of their own. That doesn’t even mention the fact that they are JoCo’s back up singers. I learned later that I should have been there right when the concerts started on Saturday, as Wil Wheaton gave an award to JoCo for his numerous geek achievements. This was in keeping with Wheaton’s position as the Secretary of Geek affairs.
That is one thing I really want to impart about this year, PAX is huge. Like, I missed out on things on every single day, and I am sure that as they trickle out I will really regret it. I did find out Johanen Vasquez of JTHM fame did a signing for 2K Games, I was really bummed that I missed that. I really have to say it is a testament to how awesome PAX is that so much great stuff happens every year; I’m cloning myself for 2010.
Speaking of awesome every year, I closed out PAX with Wil Wheaton’s Awesome Panel. Since he gave the keynote in 2007, Wheaton is a huge part of PAX. This was signified by having to wait in line for about two hours just to get stuck in the back. Sadly, the way the crowd was handled stuck us behind people who had gotten there after us. I was pretty bummed, as most of what I saw was the back of people’s heads. However, Wil Wheaton is really the geek Garrison Keillor so you don’t really need to look at him when he tells his stories. During the Q&A he and MC Frontalot reenacted the “Skit about Vocations” from Frontalot’s last record. As a warning to anyone who may want to bad mouth Jonathan Frakes, if this is done within earshot of Wil Wheaton, you will be punched in the face.
So that was the Penny Arcade Expo for 2009. It’s been almost a week now, and I miss it already. Not only is Seattle just a great place to be, PAX is just the best time to be there. Trying to explain what was so awesome about Wil Wheaton threatening the audience equivalent of a troll is just lost on most people. The game industry may be one of excess but this even is not about the industry, it’s about gamers. That isn’t just controller or keyboard jocks either; it is about people who keep dice and odd cards handy. So until next year, I’ll be counting the days.
[ Post the first comment | View related posts ]
Tags: Life With Mike, Penny Arcade Expo 2009
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Sep 14th, 2009 and is filed under Blog, Contributor Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
