I realize that this post is getting rather old and dusty… But I haven’t been very good about writing, so I had it started so let’s see if I can finish it.
PAX 2013 was the first PAX I went to and it probably was the first convention I actually went to. The whole weekend was a lot of fun.
We had tickets for Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday most of our time was spent trying to get the Cards Against Humanity decks and going to panels. We actually hopped around quite a bit between panels. Many of which we went to about the first half hour and then jumped to the next panel.
Some of the panels were interesting, but ultimately I am not sure if they are my thing. They just seem a little more like watching someone else have a conversation. I feel too disconnected. Sure there are jokes and good information that can come out of them. I think I just want more. My favorite panels I think were the ones that were much more scripted, where they knew that they were going to talk about and it was more of a presentation than a panel.
Sunday we went to a couple of the panels but we mostly spent time wandering the floor. It was crazy to see how elaborate the booths were. They weren’t just a dinky booth that had signs on it, they were huge elaborate productions. There were statues and props. It was fun to see all of it, but I don’t really like crowds and I really don’t get the desire to wait in long lines to play a game that is either coming out or already out.
One of the panels that we went to on Sunday was “Three Old Guys Play Zork” panel. The panel was a little mislabeled since ultimately the crowd ended up playing Zork, people would go up and give commands for them to type in. But for some reason it was enjoyable. Maybe it was because they talked about the history of video games a little and then we essentially played an old story based video game as a whole crowd.
I did end up playing a couple games. It was a little sad to see the number of games that were for the iPad. I don’t game nearly as much as I used to, not that I ever really gamed that much. I don’t seem to have the time for the long RPGs, so now I want fun little games that I can focus on for short sprints. Like Jetpack, Mario Kart, Commander Keen, etc. But it seemed like so many interesting games that might fit in that realm were being made for the iPad, and I don’t want to get an iPad. Two of the PC games that stuck out were Dive Kick and Samurai Gunn. I wasn’t sure what to expect for Samurai Gunn. It ended up being much more about timing and strategy than I had expected and was a lot of fun to play. I kind of wish that they would work on the graphics a little more. I know that they were going for more of an older game, but I feel like they went NES and I prefer SNES. Dive Kick was a lot of fun for how simplistic of a game it was.
I think the most enjoyable part of PAX was seeing all of my new friends from the cruise again.
P.S. I was surprised to find that it doesn’t appear that there is an archive of PAX. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but I couldn’t find any copies of things as simple as schedules of panels on the internet.
