Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Kry Reviews: PAX East



Penny Arcade Expo hit the east coast last weekend, in a show not lacking for attendance. The convention had pretty much everything your contemporary nerd can want for. Not to mention the choice of locale of Boston, which despite being an awesome city, I did not get to tour much of; I spent all waking hours at PAX, mostly.

PAX East 2010 was my first con since Origins 2002. This one was a lot, and I mean a lot, more packed. It seems foolish that there was never a gaming con held over here before (and very few nerdy cons in general). Well, with it being the first, perhaps I can forgive the prime error of selling too many tickets. The con was unfortunately oversold and/or the convention hall was too small. I found that out almost immediately on the first day, when I arrived half an hour early to go to the Keynote speech but found myself not even able to wait in line. This problem would rear its ugly head everywhere in the convention.

The de facto standard I found was an hour – hour and half wait for more niche panels (and that was only to get average seating). I didn't even bother with any of the bigger ones, as much as I would have liked to attend a panel by the Penny Arcade guys. The Exposition Hall had similar waits to try out any new games (Two hour wait for Starcraft 2, at least; good thing I got in beta already!). It was totally ridiculous and frustrating. Thankfully, I eventually found a nice reprieve with the tabletop game section. They had an excellent selection of tabletops, and more importantly, no wait to get them.

I got to try the more mainstream titles Settlers of Catan and Munchkin, both of which are great titles. I'm definitely hungry for more Catan. Seemingly everyone was though, as all the copies of that game were checked out several times for tournaments. A little bit of poor planning by PAX there as well. Betrayal at House on the Hill was a very interesting board game I got a couple tries in on it as well; it's a nice campy, horror-themed game that generates a 'haunted house' board randomly every game to keep it entertaining. One of my travel mates was ecstatic to play this game as it had gone out of print, and I will vouch that it was time well spent. Last, I tried Starcraft: The Board Game. Never again! That game is a complicated mess. I spent an hour trying to figure it out and was happy when it came time to give up.

Speaking of Starcraft, I hung out at the Blizzard/Nvidia section for a lot of the convention (by virtue of waiting in line, of course). I actually won myself a second beta key by playing in a Blizzard promotional 1v1 game. The game was Protoss vs Terran, and I came back from him destroying my main base with a whole lot of stalkers. I took the economy advantage back quickly with a well defended expansion and came in for the kill, ruining my opponent's day in the process. If people weren't dubious of my claims of having never played beta before, they certainly were after while I was exhibiting my mastery of hotkeys and build order, although my 60 APM was totally gosu.

PAX East 2010, clusterfuck that it was, was a show with a great amount of potential. I'm glad to hear that the convention has already been announced to reoccur, and in a bigger venue. I'm sure my complaints are well known by the show's staff, so I'm willing to forgive and forget in expectations of much greater things next year.