After spending an arduous flight with an Italian guy digging his arm into my side, I arrived at PAX - the Penny Arcade Expo - in Seattle.
I crashed with an old friend, who happens to be one of the ubiquitous "enforcers" - the expo's cadre of volunteers who help with everything from setup to giving lost attendees directions. PAX needs the enforcers. The expense of maintaining a show of this size with paid workers would make it impossible to hold the expo. There were 58,500 people, making PAX as big as the biggest of past E3s - Electronic Entertainment Expo - and bigger by 40,000 than the next biggest video gaming expo, E for All. Only 450 Enforcers manage all of these people. They work tirelessly for little more than knowing they helped make it fun for the attendees.
The biggest part of any convention is the keynote address. And for the average geek, "Bioshock" lead designer Ken Levine's keynote told an instantly recognizable story.
Levine's experience growing up in the '70s was a mirror image of the experience of nearly every attendee at the show. His story ended with an explanation of how he ended up in charge of 2K Boston and why he still loves video games to this day. It was a perfect segue into three days of seeing the latest and greatest games being released in the coming year.
The best part of PAX isn't the myriad soon-to-be released games filling the expo hall - it's the two floors of video game consoles, the concerts, the panels with gaming celebrities and the atmosphere of nearly 60,000 people gathered together for the sole purpose of professing their love for their favorite pastime.
The gaming never stops at PAX. Even while concerts from the likes of nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot and geek folk singer Jonathan Coulton were going on, hundreds of people were cheering just as loud to their friends, new and old alike, jamming out on "Rock Band." The Nintendo DS is so popular that people hold them up at the concerts like lighters, forming a veritable sea of doubled white rectangles in the dark.
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The gaming really will never end if the industry keeps raising the bar every year. Displayed at PAX were hundreds of new titles. Some are coming out in less than a month, while others are likely to not see store shelves until the fourth quarter of 2009.
November
Picking up from last week, November is another big month in gaming. The new "Prince of Persia" is being released on Nov. 18, and it looks to be worth the wait. Combat is being reduced, though not simplified, by forcing the Prince to fight one boss at a time and never throwing waves of critters at the player like previous "Prince of Persia" games did.
Another game from Ubisoft is "Far Cry 2," which might come out in October, but no release date has been announced. "Far Cry 2" looks like a typical first-person shooter at first, but that impression goes away when the player gets past the
opening screen. The gameplay is based on missions, and the AI allows the player to accomplish them however he or she pleases. Also notable is the dynamic map-building mode.
Finally, Valve releases the highly anticipated "Left 4 Dead" on Nov. 18. Four players (or AIs, if necessary) team up to fight off a horde of the undead in a uniquely cooperative game.
Meanwhile, another four players can team up as undead leaders and kill the humans, giving the game a team mode. Even when the boss zombie players are present, it doesn't stop the general horde from trying to eat the players' brains.
2009
Too many games to count are coming out next year in the game industry's diabolical scheme to take all of the public's money.
The two big ones are Blizzard's blockbusters in waiting, "Starcraft 2" and "Diablo 3." Unfortunately, "Diablo 3" wasn't available to play at PAX, but "Starcraft 2" was. I can say without reservation that "Starcraft 2" is the game to beat for 2009. But BioWare might be the developer to deliver on that challenge, as its self-described "spiritual successor to 'Baldur's Gate'" is looking ready to play three months before it is supposed to come out.
The Future of Pax
Probably the biggest announcement at PAX this year was that a second show was going to start up in Boston in 2010. It will probably happen in the spring of 2010, and the twin forces behind Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, don't think it will negatively affect the attendance of the main PAX in Seattle. It will be a great relief to the people at this year's expo who traveled from as far away as Nova Scotia and Florida.
The crazy people who flew in from Australia probably won't care that much.
After having such a good time at PAX 2008, I'll definitely go to the 2009 show - rumored to take up even more of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center than this year's expo. However, I'll be going as an Enforcer next year, as well as a reporter, because the Enforcers get invited to all the best parties.
