Yes yes! I think it's just about that time to write up my experience at this year's Penny Arcade Expo. In short, it was amazing. This was my second year going and it easily topped it and that is saying something.
So to start off Friday's events I got a healthy 5 hours of sleep the night before (maybe) and my friends and I headed for the queue line for the show to begin. This time around they actually had a projector running random stuff and trailers.
Once the show opened we went immediately to the merchandise area to make sure we got the t-shirts we wanted before they ran out. Last year we waited and two of us, myself included, ended up with no shirts. After this we went into the exhibit hall, to which we then went around to find where all of the companies were set up and in turn, find where the games we wanted to see the most were. For us this meant finding where The Beatles: Rock Band and Borderlands were and see what the lines were like to play them.
There was also a group of pretty awesome Team Fortress 2 cosplayers who were waiting in line as well. One of which is probably the best Spy cosplay I have ever seen.
This post is going to look very cluttered from all of the pictures, but hopefully they are enjoyable to look at. Anyway, I got to play about 5-10 minutes of Borderlands and all I can say is that it wasn't exactly enough time to make any further judgments about it. The gun play felt like a first person shooter, so I'm happy about that. The problem with the demo was that because the people running the booth had to cycle out people so often and because there were so many people, they didn't reset what people were playing. This left myself in particular with only one magazine out of my two weapons to start, and left one of my friends in an area of level 9 enemies while being a level 3. Overall I still can't wait to buy this game day 1, and hope to see you guys on PC as well.
We then waited in line for the keynote with Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island and various other point and click adventure games. (Side note, this probably happened before we were in the expo hall playing borderlands but I remembered the keynote after so let's just got with it.) He presented an interesting speech
After the keynote was over the Penny Arcade Q&A started about 10 minutes after in the same theatre and it must be said, Gabe and Tycho are an amazing duo to listen to. Their interactions are very entertaining alone on their podcasts but adding in abstract
After all that we decided to get out of the madness and meet up with Tanuki and see what he was up to. He had to take a friend back to their hotel so we decided to meet up later at the 1UP Yours reunion panel.
Between this period of time my friends and I went back to the Expo Hall to play The Beatles: Rock Band now that we had the entire afternoon and evening until our next panel. We had already picked out what song and instruments we were going to play, so once we
So fast forward a bit after that, imagine all of us walking around the exhibit hall mesmerized by all of the stuff going on and just relishing in the fact we were among our people. We were home again.
Later that night we met up with Tanuki and went to the 1up panel. If any of you have listened to the old 1UP Yours, it was essentially that. They gave their opinions about PAX as a whole as well as what games people should make sure to check out. Also, Shane was giving out free copies of his Wii game to those who were worthy (through their questions).
After this it was around 11:30 or so and the only thing left for us on our agenda was to check out MC Frontalot when he came on, at this point we parted ways with Mr. Tanuki for the night. Over the past few months I had been listening to him a lot more to get ready for PAX and his live shows are pretty fun. He has a ton of charisma on stage as well as his live band and that energy came through in the crowd. He played a great set of music and had a few guests come up as well.
After he was done with his set it was around 2 or 2:30 in the morning so we went back to our hotel room and passed out fairly quickly.
So to recap:
-Wandered Exhibit Hall, got some swag (details forthcoming)
-Saw keynote with Ron Gilbert
-Saw PA Q&A
-Played Borderlands and Beatles RB
-Met Tanuki and his friend
-Saw 1Up
-Saw Frontalot
Stay tuned for I will write up a separate blog for both Saturday and Sunday. Hope you enjoyed reading.
EDIT: Holy donkeyshlongs I completely forgot that friends and I rushed to the Ubisoft stage demo of Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed 2. Conviction's demo was basically the same stuff shown at E3 with the little added video showing off the goggles. Assassin's Creed 2 however had a lot of never before seen stuff which looked really awesome. I'm really excited to see more from AC2.
Now off to bed
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