My PAX East Experience

      We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express not far from the convention. If I remember correctly, we took the red line to the green, and then the silver to the convention center. I've never been to Boston before, but the public transit was (in my opinion) much cleaner than NYC transit, and definitely easier to navigate, but it could be because it was a bit smaller.


      The level of excitement I was feeling when I first saw the convention center was extraordinary. First off, the place was huge. Tabletop and the Expo Center were enormous and provided from tons of room for dozens of games and booths. I didn't have any particular plans other than to meet the guys at the Kingston booth, and play the SWTOR demo that my friend Brian was dying to get his hands on.

      The line in the queue room was pretty long when we arrived at around 9 on Friday, but even the little things like the cheers from the crowd, the free Magic decks in the swag bags and the beach ball bouncing around in the crowd made it that much easier to wait and get hyped for what was about to come.


      I headed straight for the Kingston booth when I got in, and met Day[9], IncontroL, JP and djWHEAT who were all extremely nice and personable and signed my pass without a moments hesitation. Geoff in particular was really funny and seemed to be enjoying himself and the multitudes of fans coming to take pictures with him. Alas, I couldn't stay too long with the other Starcraft 2 nerds because their was much to be seen and do before the place really filled up.


      I met with Brian at the SWTOR booth which in itself was totally awesome. They had 4 or 5 TV's around the demo area, each showing a different class being used in the flashpoint (an instance used to demo the game, more about that later) and one showing a screen of origins which is the starting area in the game. Someone from the booth came around and told us that we would have about a three hour wait, which was fairly accurate because we stayed on the line for three and a half hours.

      Once we got in, we were greeted by several marketing people and a cute little video displaying the classes that were going to be used. I really have to applaud the whole set up because they enabled you to jump into level 32 characters knowing their roles, spells, and where to go to maximize your time inside the booth. Our group did really well, managing to take the final boss down to about 10% before we wiped. All in all, the game looks great and I'm looking forward to playing it when it finally releases sometime this year.


      I spent a bit of time after the demo to walk around and take in all the sights and sounds. From Portal 2 to Brink to Battlefield 3, all the heavy hitters were present and accounted for. A note about Portal 2: I heard from someone that the huge line outside the booth fooled a lot of people into believing that they would be able to play the game, but were instead shown a game play video. I could be wrong, but if that's the case it stinks for the people who spent hours trying to get an opportunity to play. Not being much of a tabletop player, I skipped that area the first day and went back to the Kingston booth to see what was happening.

      I'm not sure what time it was when I got back over there, but INcontroL was just starting up his games against anyone who wanted to play him. They offered plenty of chances to play him, but being a shy and lowly diamond player, I didn't raise my hand. I get nervous laddering so you can imagine how nervous I was to think about playing against Geoff and embarrassing myself XD. Props to the first few who got owned though, the games were really entertaining.


      Day[9] spotted Pokebunny in the crowd, and maybe I'm just a huge noob, but I didn't know who he was, having only seen his name on the forums a couple times. Once he stepped forward with his name on his sweatshirt, and I learned that he was 11th in NA, I knew the following match would be sick. A few minutes and many marines later, Pokebunny beat INcontroL (with some help from Day[9] haha) and won some sort of prize from Kingston. He then went on to win the SC2 tournament that night (I didn't get a chance to enter), so grats to him!


      I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around and eating until it was time to go back to the hotel. I thoroughly enjoyed my time and couldn't wait to go back again the next day.

      We were all pretty hungover from the night before, but the adrenaline was pumping and we got up extra early to try to play SWTOR again. Unfortunately for us though the line was wicked long and we didn't stand a chance. This goes to show you just how lucky we were to play the first day. “So now what?” I thought as I walked away defeated. The PC free play room of course! I split up from a few of my friends and headed up to the first floor to see what was going on. I was greeted by a most wondrous sight:


      The time limit was supposed to be 45 minutes, but somehow I managed to play almost of 2 hours of SC2 and TF2 before I went to the cafeteria to eat. They had great Asian steaks tips, but a pretty poor beer selection and bar staff. I took my food and sat in the catwalk connecting both sides of the convention center and people watched for a little while.

Later, as I was traversing the expo hall, I heard the cries and shouts of a commentator coming from the Alienware booth. Turns out they were having random teams of 6 play each other in TF2 for a chance to win a t-shirt. I entered with 5 other random kids and we ended up winning! A fun addition to the day for sure.


      A bit more traveling led to some crazy encounters with stormtroopers and Morgan Webb. I met up with my friends again and we played this wacky and wonderful game called Gatling Gears. I have no idea what it was about, but you drive these machine gun robot things around shooting at other robots and tanks and rocket launching people. Check it out if you have a chance and want a fun time-wasting Xbox360 game to buy, I know I will.


      All of that was fun, but the real kicker for day two was the TF2 tournament that I really didn't want to miss. I got there extra early too, to practice and make sure I could find a team that needed an extra player. Lucky for me I found just that team with a bunch of guys from TrashedGamers! (www.trashedgamers.org)

Now I need to add a little something about the organization at PAX. We signed up early and were on the line to play wayyy before the tournament started, yet the admins didn't call our name to play until an hour and a half into the tournament. I understand that they split it so that half a bracket was played at a time, but only after asking multiple people. In addition, when we were called we were told we had a bye! That is something that was figured out when they made the brackets, right? Maybe I am way off base here, but the two and a half+ hours spent waiting could have been better spent if we knew we couldn't get in right away.

Once inside it took another half hour to match us up with our opponents and set up our computers (TF2 kept crashing, mouse and voice problems, etc.), but once we were situated the game started.


      We beat the first team we were matched up against pretty badly, and were placed into the group of eight. That's as far as we got though, because whoever we played next totally destroyed us XD. It was great fun and I encourage anyone else who has never done something like that before to give it a shot, even if you don't have a team, because the people I met playing were some of the nicest and most genuine people I've talked to. In fact, it was like that for pretty much everyone there, which was really cool.

      When I got out of the tournament around 11, I went straight for the Cat Theater to catch all the SC2 action, but was met with the “Sorry, Day[9] and Husky is full!” sign. I expected it, but was sad nonetheless. Oh well, there's always next year!

      Sunday was a short and bittersweet day. The combination of daylight savings time (doh!) and excessive drinking led us to arrive at the convention center at almost 11. It's amazing how much PAX can take out of you. Between the walking, waiting and adrenaline rushes, we were all pretty beat when we arrived.


      We grabbed a bite to eat again in the food court (Italian...mmm) and took full advantage of the chairs in the tabletop section. We used the 30 card MTG decks they gave us to play a couple of games with each other and just relax. There was a long drive ahead for Brian (who had to drop me off and then drive home to New Jersey) so we decided to finally leave at around 3:30.

      We took our lap one last time around the tabletop section and expo hall, scanning the room for anything we could have missed our last two days. On our way out I spotted an awesome show match between JP and djWHEAT, but couldn't watch because my friends wanted to go. Still don't know who won (or how many games they played), but it was cool for the minute I was there anyway ^_^.