Penny Arcade Expo 08

[blkmage]

So I had the chance to fly over to Seattle and attend PAX 2008. It was everything that I expected it to be: a physical manifestation of the Internet and the centre of nerd culture. The PA panels and concerts were really, really awesome. The waiting in line was long, but not too bad, because most everyone had a DS, and I had a blast picking up ridiculous amounts of mingle PP in TWEWY because of it. I also got pretty decent at Ouendan.

Interesting things that happened with respect to gaming:

I saw Starcraft II in action on the expo floor. I stood around for a good twenty minutes watching each race being played, too afraid to actually take the keyboard and mouse in hand and show everyone how terrible I am at it. Of course, it looks beautiful. I also saw people giving WotLK a spin, but it doesn't look new and shiny like SC2 does, which is understandable, since it is a WoW expansion.

I didn't get to see the actual Dragon Age demo, but I did see the toolset demo. Can't comment much on the quality of the tools, but when they went in-game to show off the little module that had been created, I was pretty impressed, since it's really the first time I saw the game since we'd heard whispers of it in 2004.

I'm not a huge Fallout fan, since I'd never played any, but all of my other friends were, so we checked out the Fallout 3 demo. My goodness, I am sold on the Fallout universe and I can't wait to pick up Fallout 3. In fact, I'm going to see if I can find Fallout 1 and 2 somewhere, because the concept and execution and the world of Fallout is really interesting.

Finally, the last big demo I went to was the Spore demo. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything too new in it since it only encompassed the cell phase and the tribe phase and I was really looking forward to the last two phases. From a technological standpoint, it is really amazing, and even though we still know so much about the first two phases, actually seeing the game being played through was really fun.