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- 8 years 3 months ago
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I've spent the last 3 days at Penny Arcade Expo in Bellevue WA. I happen to live in the area, so it's a short trip for me. I have a digital camera, but it's been MIA for awhile. So upon realizing on Friday night that a disposable camera wasn't going to cut it, I went out and bought a digital camera, a Sony Cyber-shot. These are the pictures I took on Friday and Saturday.
View from the second level. There's four levels in the convention center, but only floors 1,2, and 4 are open. They had a bunch of beanbag chairs set up on the first level, and a lot of people were sitting down there playing their DSs. I saw about 50 DSs to every one PSP, but unfortunately once I got there I found the batteries in my DS were dead as well.
The table with the prizes for the various competitions.
A close up of some of the prizes.
A better pic of the Sam & Max comic on the wall.
The 4th level, looking from the corner where the console free play is set up.
Some rythm games on the second level. There will be another pic of them later.
The line I waited in to get into the Friday night concert. It's hard to see from this pic, but there were two lines, one going to the left of the door, and one going to the right. The one on the left was for people who had wristbands to get into the concert, the one on the right was for people who didn't. the wristband line stretched around three sides of the building, and the non-wristband line went around one and a half sides. The two lines almost met. They were handing out the wristbands to the first 2,00 people. I got there too late to get a wristband, but someone who was leaving gave me theirs, so I got in. I later found out everyone got in.
This is the only picture that I took during the concert that even came close to looking good, and the last pic I took before the batteries in my camera died. Cheap camera + dark room + unfamiliar controls + no tripod = sucky pictures. That's the NESkimos up on the stage. They were the last performance of the evening.
The first act was a performance by the Video Game Pianist, the same guy that plays SMB blindfolded in that Youtube video, and yes he did play it blindfolded on stage. I was also impressed that he played all his songs from memory, with no sheet music. Optimus Rhyme was the second act. Can't say much about them, since I don't really care for their type of music, rap/rock. It was also way too loud for both of the last two acts IMHO. I left the concert during the last song, and I could hear the bass thumping in the parking garage two levels down.
I came back on Saturday to find even more crowds. Not surprising.
I wandered around and took a picture of one of the giant Penny Arcade strips they had hanging on the walls. This one has some colorful language, so I'm leaving it as a link.
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a126/Arklier/PAX/JackThompsonstrip.jpg
The trivia contest. Note the scores. It gets worse by the end. It was a Jeaprody style game where a contestant picked the category and if they couldn't answer, it would go to the next one. If none of them could answer, it went to the audience and the person who answered it correctly won a prize. I got called on and won a free game and t-shirt.
A pic I took during the last round. The score is 29 - 6 - 1. Ouch. The two guys on the right are going to be living this one down for awhile.
Went to the Ubisoft presentation next. The line was truly amazing. If I hadn't been in it, I would have taken a picture even more crowded than the one at the top of this post. Look at the first pic in this post and imagine a line that goes from around the far corner, all the way to the staircase to the right, and then halfway to the doorway on the bottom floor. Not to be deterred, I got in line. After a 45 minute wait, I did manage to get a seat. No Assassin's Creed was shown, they were expecting it up until the last minute, but the developer said it wasn't ready. First up, the new Splinter Cell. For this part, two of the Frag Dolls talked about the game.
Next up, Might & Magic Dark Messiah. Here's a pic of the keyboard layout, with one of the developers on the left, and an Ubisoft rep on the right. Again, this discussion focused on multplayer.
The only half decent screenshot I managed to get that wasn't blurry or left trails. Not due to the game.
I went into the exhibition hall before I went to the Saturday night concert. It was dimly lit, and the Sony didn't take pictures well in the dark. I managed to get a sort of decent pic of Nintendo's booth. We were all hoping they would bring a Wii, or at least the demo unit Wiimotes they had at E3, but all they had was handheld stuff that I saw. They didn't even have the Twilight Princess demo that was there last year. I love my DS, but come on, Nintendo.
After the poor performance in the exhibition hall and previous night's concert, I didn't even bother trying to take pictures during the Saturday concert, which is a shame because it was great. There were only two groups for the Saturday night concert, MC Frontalot and the Minibosses. You can find pics of the Saturday night concert here:
MC Frontalot: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/08/27/mc-frontalot-busts-rhymes-nerdcore-style-at-pax/
The Minibosses: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/08/27/the-minibosses-were-the-final-bosses-at-pax-concert/
I went home on Saturday night really fed up with the camera. The thing cost $180, so while it wasn't a high end digital camera, it wasn't a cheap one either. I wanted to go to one of the panels on Sunday, but two nights of staying up past 3 and getting up at 7 AM the day before took its toll, and I overslept a bit. Since I was going to miss the panel anyway, I stopped at Fry's and exchanged the Sony for a Canon Powershot A620. I think you can really see the difference in the following pictures. The crowds were a bit less, so I was able to use a camera tripod.
First up was the panel on 'new' media such as blogs and podcasts. I won't go into it much, since at least one of the speakers is going to be doing a podcast or audio blog. There were people from both Joystiq and Kotaku there, so just check out those web sites in a day or two.
After that I went to the tabletop panel and took a few pics there, but it was just people sitting behind the same table and talking about D&D, Magic, and various miniature games. After that, I went down to my car parked on the lowest level of the parking garage underneath the convention center to go get some food. On my way, I snapped off another pic of those rythm games to see how the new camera handled movement. Not too bad, eh?
I was surprised to see a bunch of people playing DSs in the elevator room. Turned out that during the first handheld competition (Tetris DS), they had someone who wasn't entered keep jumping in and screwing up the rankings. So after that, they moved all the handheld tourneys downstairs to the lowest level of the parking garage. I snapped off a quick pic.
When I got back, I went to the to the exhibition hall. This during the final round of the Omegathon, which was very late in the day so some of the booths had been taken down. There was a Guitar Hero 2 booth that I saw on Saturday, but it was gone by the time I was there with the good camera on Sunday. So without further adiu, here's the pics I took in the exhibition hall. Some with flash, some without. You can kind of see the Ubisoft booth in the first pic, though none of the full on pics I took of it came out.
View coming into the hall.
View from the back corner looking towards the entrance.
View from the opposite wall looking towards the entrance.
Booth near the door with card games using video game characters.
Foundation 9 booth next to the one above.
Rockstar's booth. I was kind of disappointed. All they had there was Table Tennis.
Pirates booth.
nVidia's booth.
Eets booth. Didn't get a chance to check this one out much, but it looks fun. I'm all for the indie little guys.
Red vs. Blue. Two pics here. I got a laugh out of the shirts they had on their table, so I took a pic of them too.
Creative Labs' X-Fi booth. It's a new line of sound cards, some of which are targeted at gamers.
Next up, Newgrounds. They rented a huge booth, about twice the size of most of the other booths along the walls. It took me two pictures to get the whole thing, since I couldn't stand back far enough to get it all in one.
That's it for the booths along the walls. The larger booths were all in the middle except for the Newgrounds one. Once you got inside and got past the Ubisoft booth which unfortunately I can't show, you ran smack into the Microsoft booth.
Couple of people playing Lego Star Wars II and Age of Empires III. I was surprised they had a section for games on the PC.
The line of 360s. You knew they had to be here.
Behind the MS stuff was the Nintendo booth. I was rather disappointed with Nintendo, since they didn't bring anything but DS stuff. I think I might have spied Final Fantasy V running on a GBA, but that's it.
While I was taking pictures around the Nintendo booth, they were giving out prizes and having the winners have their picture taken with Mario. Yes, it's a girl. Not sure if this is related to the Mario Kart DS tourney.
To the left of the Nintendo booth, there was the Guild Wars booth that you can see in the second exhibition hall pic. I thought the pillar in the middle was kind of neat, so I took a closer picture of it.
In front of that was a huge tent set up for America's Army, complete with PCs covered in jungle netting and a real Humvee.
In front of that was the Turbine booth, but the only pic I have of it is this one. There was a huge crowd on the other side of the booth, and all you could see from the other sides was giant screens that I wasn't sure would come out well with some PCs set up in front.
NCSoft's booth was the last of the video game related booths. It was kind of small compared to the other booths in the center, probably because they were also running the huge Guild Wars booth in back. Basically this banner attached to a free standing kiosk with people playing Auto Assault and CoH/V on PCs set up on all sides.
Next is some stuff from Privateer Press in the exhibition hall that wasn't related to video games, but I thought looked cool. The convention does cover tabletop games too, after all.
After I left the exhibition hall, I went upstairs to the PC competition rooms. They had one large room with two sections, one for PCs provided by sponsors, and one for the people who had signed up to bring their own. Here's a pic of the PCs provided by sponsors. Picture about 30 more rows of these off to the right.
They wouldn't let me in the room, so I had to go into the hall to get to the PC BYOC side. Out in the hall they had this signboard with a statue of Fruit... Well, if you read the strip, you know what the character's name is.
By this time it was within 1/2 hour of the convention closing and all the PC competitions were over, and so most of the BYOC PCs had been packed up. I think we all felt like the guy on the left at this point.
It was a very long three days, and I came home sore every night, and I'll probably be sore for another few days from standing in lines and carrying around camera equipment, a laptop, and all the swag I brought home. I'd do it again in a second, though.
That's all my pictures from PAX, and I hope that at least a few people that couldn't make have enjoyed them.-
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