Here's my account. I don't have that many pictures... the camera I used is dead and it uses SD cards that I don't have anything to pull the pictures off of. I didn't really take any pictures of cosplayers because tbh that doesn't really interest me. Most of the images are just stuff from the floor; the booths, big banners, big groups of people, etc etc. Also all the stuff I got.

PAX

I took the trip to Boston from Buffalo via Rochester with 4 other dudes. One I know from work, the other three I didn't know. We drove there in a massive Chrysler Town and Country minivan. The ride itself was pretty good because the minivan had a dvd player in it so we watched movies all the way through. We left around 9:30am and arrived in Boston around 6ish. We immediately checked in to our hotel and crashed and hung out for the night in the hotel.

Day 1

We arrived at the convention center around 9am and hung around in a queue room for an hour. When the event officially opened the mass of people poured into the Expo Hall. The first day was spent mostly walking around and just looking. This being my first convention of any sort, I wasn't sure how to approach the situation. So I just allowed myself to take it all in. For the most part I spent the time following the group as I didn't really have anything I was personally invested in seeing at the time. Our group split up early on and two of the friends left to do their own thing. My work friend, his friend and I spent the rest of the day casually visiting booths and looking at games. On the first day I only played a few things:

-

Dead Island: Riptide

-- It's Dead Island

Shovel Knight

-- a really awesome 8bit style action game where you play as a Knight who uses his shovel as a weapon. I was really impressed by this game. Here's the Kickstarter to take a look at the game:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yachtclubgames/shovel-knight

There's a lot of really cool booths that we saw. The League of Legends booth is HUMUNGOUS and was filled with people the entire time. Every 10 minutes or so they you would hear the crowd freaking out over some match taking place. It was ridiculous. Pretty close by there was a Shootmania booth which was surprisingly big as well. Also to my surprise, the only booth with Starcraft playing was pretty small and not many people around it. Other notable booths I saw: SONY with a THE LAST OF US demo (did not play, line was always too long). Blizzard was showing Diablo 3 on PS3 and Hearthstone which is a Magic The Gathering rip-off. The Pop-Cap booth was a carnival complete was various carnival games and was giving away tons of free stuff. There was a booth right in the middle of the floor with various wooden items. Table-tops, weapons, etc, it was all really cool.

I went to the Penny Arcade Q&A panel around 11:30 I believe. I'm not really a follower of Penny Arcade or anything so a lot of the references went over my head, but the panel was really good. The two guys are witty and good at funny/real responses. The guy who's bald (?) was dressed as a robot which I think came from a Kickstarter or something. That lead to some really funny moments. One guy asked a question about how to get over anxiety and stuff and the robot guy spent a good amount of time thoughtfully giving a legit response, after he realized what he was wearing and commented. There's was also a guy from Penn. who gave the guys three giant bags of Woopie Pies. Finally this one nervous dude went up and did this skit regarding picking one of the two as their holy leader. It was a little awkward. Finally this girl asked them to teach her a new word. They weren't able to because whenever they tried she knew was the word meant. She then was able to stump them by saying "Petrichor" which is the smell after the rain. Overall it was a really fun panel.

Eventually the day started winding down and we were getting tired. The Expo Hall closes at 6pm however I was not done because I planned on going to the Giantbomb panel at 9pm. So we stuck around the center. In the back wing of the convention center is a hall that is filled with these amazing beanbag chairs. There's probably well over 150 of them all along the floor and the entire area is dedicated to hand-held playing. So we plopped down on 3 bags and vegged out until around 7:30. During this time the two others slept while I played Persona 4 Golden on my Vita. While EVERYONE around me playing their DS's. Made me a bit jelly.

At 7:30 I made my way alone to the Phoenix theater and got in line for the Giantbomb panel. Within minutes the line was packed and after a lengthy wait we finally got in. I got pretty good seats but couldn't get a good picture of the guys until the very end. The panel was fantastic. So many notable things occurred that I won't spoil it for anyone wanting to watch an archive later on. It was hilarious and it was great to see the guys of Giantbomb in person. I wasn't able to stay behind to meet them as I had to leave but seeing them live really made that day worth it.

We left the convention center at midnight and ended the day around 1am, crashing in the hotel.

Day 2

Day 2 was a much more eventful day. Since i knew where everything was going to be I was able to spend more time thoughtfully moving around the event.

We got to the convention center much later than we did the first day, around noon, so less time was spent mindlessly walking around. Day 2 was buy-day for us. We spent a good chunk of time around the merchandise booths gawking at all the cool stuff. I myself spent around 10 minutes trying to talk myself out of buying an original non-Greatest Hits copy of Metal Gear Solid. I ended up successfully talking myself out of it but I sort of regret it. This one booth was selling a lot of cool stylized Game of Thrones posters and also some really awesome Master Sword replicas. They had foam and wooden, the former being only $20. I ended up getting the $20 foam Master Sword. Even though I'm not much of a Zelda fan, the allure of a really cool looking replica overcame me. Even though it's foam it's actually really solid and I personally think it's better looking over the wooden sword.

Later on in the day I spent some time looking at the NVIDIA Shield. I didn't get a chance to actually play it but the device it self looked OK. It weirdly concaves inward towards the analog sticks which looks odd but the games I saw playing looked pretty snappy. It's an interesting device. I also had a booth "babe" spend a good amount of time explaining to me what an NVIDIA GTX was while I politely nodded. They game me a SHIELD t-shirt with a sick neon green logo on the front.

Some games/stuff I saw/played on Day 2:

- That Penny Arcade RPG game or whatever. It's a 16bit or something RPG with clever dialoge... /shrug

-

DIVEKICK

-- A fighting game with two buttons. DIVE and KICK. Kicks do One Million damage and the characters only have One Thousand health. It's really funny. I spoke with the presenter for a minute and referenced some stuff said on the Giantbomb panel. I got a pretty cool pin for that.

-

STINKY foot game controller.

- This thing is weird. It's a game controller you control with your foot. It's essentially just used for WASD and I really didn't care for it at all. I demo'd it with Battlefield 3 and found it to be really awkward. Maybe something decent for a different kind of game.

-

Legend of Dungeon

-- Really cool dungeon crawling game. Characters have the pixel art look but the levels are 3-d with a sort of diorama feel. I had fun with it. Website:

http://www.robotloveskitty.com/LoD/

- This Tetris/Smash Bros style game which I didn't get the name of. Only watched it. Looked kinda fun.

- Another 2 button game but forgot the name. It's a game where you sled along a lane and use momentum to go over jumps and hills. One button lowers you to get speed on the dips and then you release on the hills. The other button is a reverse time mechanic. I told the guy the concept reminded me of Tribes and he said I was the second person to say that but he'd never seen Tribes. They were showing it with a custom controller and I told the guy they should make an all-in-one style controller that just plugs into someones TV and the game plays. That really took the guy back... no one had mentioned that to him yet. I said that was a really good idea.

- I did a roulette game to win a free game called... something, whatever it doesn't matter. I chatted with the guy there and he said he went to pitch a game at the "Pitch a Game" panel and his idea was "An old school racer style game except the engine noise is replaced with..." and we ended up finishing the sentence together "...dubstep". They said they shot him down pretty quick. I said it was because dubstep is too obvious now. He told me that one of the ideas that got the best reaction was a game where "You have this shirt that's really wrinkly and you can't get it un-wrinkled no matter what you do." I had to tell him I thought the idea was really good.

Near the end of the day we went to the official PAX merch booth and I was GOING to buy some shirts but the line was fucking MASSIVE so we decided not to. While we were about to leave my friend, who's a huge PA fan, said that Mike (Gabe) was standing right in front of us. We ended up meeting him, getting our pictures taken, and also our badges signed. My friend was fucking ecstatic about this. I thought it was pretty cool since literally a minute after we did this the crowd around him got damned big. We literally just stumbled on to him when he arrived which was pretty lucky.

Before we left we stopped at the big wood-centric booth and I dropped $100 on a war-hammer with Mjölnir engraved on the side. I spent around awhile trying to talk myself out of it... but I failed. It's really cool. I'll post pictures in a separate post.

We left around 6:30 on Day 2 and went back to the hotel. We flirted with going out which I wasn't against but everyone was beat. So we hung around the hotel and then went to bed early.

Day 3

Day 3 was presentation day.

We got to the convention center around 11am and immediately made a bee-line to the

Saints Row 4

theater. The line wasn't too bad and we spent around 20 minutes waiting.

The presentation itself wasn't very long but it was great. It showed a ton of cool weapons including a gun that shoots DUBSTEP. They also showed the various superpowers you have. It looks A LOT like Prototype but polished and not super janky. Your character also has a freeze power and a super run. It was great to be able to watch that. I am sold on SR4

Next we wondered over to the

Splinter Cell: Something

presentation. This theater was not closed like the SR4 one so we didn't get in line, instead we just hung around the sides. The showing was clearly to convince "hardcore" fans of the series that it's still about stealth. Everything was geared towards being stealthy and using the various tools you would expect. It was cool.

After that we waited... and waited... and waited... and waited in the

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag

line. We literally waited for like 45 minutes to watch the presentation. It was fairly lengthy and did do a lot to instill good-will. From exploration, to sea-battles, to stealth focused stuff, to the character and setting. It was a good showing. They also gave us blow-up pirate swords.

These three filled a good part of the beginning of our day. After this we headed over to the indie booths. Here we chatted with a number of devs and saw a few games. Some stuff I remembered:

--

Lords of New York

- an adventure game set in 1930's NY. You play as a low-tier mobster as he tries to rise the ranks. You also play as a cop trying to take the mob down. Apparently there's some poker elements. It had a really nice art style.

-- Played with this controller that I wasn't sure what the point of was. Apparently it has adjustable everything from triggers, two sticks, to buttons, also some additional buttons in the back. I didn't even realize it was a 3rd party controller at first since it felt just like a 360 controller. I did get to snap a pic of a Dante cosplayer playing Metal Gear Rising which was pretty good (he was terrible at the game).

--

TOWER OF GUNS

- this is a really cool rogue-like FPS game. It has randomly generated levels and played like an old-school shooter. The dev said it's like The Binding of Isaac combined with Quake. I played it for about 10 minutes and was impressed. It's made by one guy and looks and played pretty well. It's a little rough around the edged but shows a lot of potential. It's on Steam Greenlight and he says he wants to get it up on the Early Access section of STEAM. I told him I would buy it if he got it there. Here's the site:

http://www.towerofguns.com/

I watched a friend play Hearthstone, the Blizzard "Magic the Gathering" rip off. It was ok. They gave me a WOW Hearthstone keychaine which was cool. Then later on I played the REAL Magic the Gathering at the Magic booth and they gave me a really cool pin.

I waited in line for awhile to play iRacing which is something I've wanted to try for a while. I got into a 6 man NASCAR style race and ended up killing it and wining the whole thing. I was able to employ some pro skills and avoided all the crashed/poor racing. The race itself was in awesome full cockpits with racing chairs, racing wheels and pedals. That made my day because I completely did NOT expect to win. I got a cool shirt out of it too.

One of the last things we did was spend around an hour in the PC Free Play area and my friend talked me into playing League of Legend with him. I didn't really like the game but it was fun playing against other people. During us playing one of the LoL devs asked me if this was my first time playing. I said it was and he gave me a LoL key that boosts some in-game items for beginners and also a LoL lanyard. Was pretty cool.

The last thing I did was buy a Gold Minecraft pick-axe replica and also a sick Game of Thrones poster.

Day 3 ended pretty quietly after checking out some mechanical keyboards (which I want to get now). We headed back to our hotel. I spent the night collecting all our stuff, checking in on my family, and then going to sleep. We left Boston this morning around 8:30 and I got home about 2 hours ago.

I had a great time at PAX. I saw a lot of stuff. Played some cool games. Bought a lot of dumb stuff. I definitely want to go next year with some friends I know more.

In the next post I'll be showing off the pictures of stuff I got and some other images from my phone. All the other images will go up later when I get them off my camera.