PAX 2009

This weekend was the Penny Arcade Expo, and I had been looking forward to it for some time. It was the first 'Con' I have ever gone to, and it was all about gaming. For those that don't know, I'm a gamer. Have been for pretty much my entire life.

Most people toss me into the category of 'geek', and that is the title I run with. While it is in fact quite true...I am a geek, the engineer in me looks for the root cause, and the root cause of my geekdom is gaming.

Story time! Back when I was probably 6 years old, my mom purchased our first computer, an Atari 800. As part of that system, we got a few games with it (or soon thereafter)...Dig Dug, Star Raiders, Caverns Of Mars, and of course, Pac-Man.

God I loved Star Raiders...but that is another story.

Anyway...what we also got was a tape storage device (yes, cassette tape) and a BASIC programming cartridge. She also had a subscription to a magazine that contained, in the centerfold, a computer program, written in BASIC.

The first program I ever 'wrote' was copied meticulously, line by line, from that centerfold insert in my Mom's programming magazine (my first in a long career of cut & paste coding). Why did I do it? Because the program was a racing game I wanted to play. After I played the game I found I could 'tweak' the program and get different results. I could make the car go faster. I could put more obstacles in the road. In short...I could make the game do whatever I wanted it to do.

I was hooked.

Later, my mom got a computer from a mail-order computer class she was taking. A Kaypro 8086. It wasn't state of the art. The tech was a year old even when she bought it. But I fell in love with that computer, eventually using it far more than she did and I'm telling you, I made that computer sing. It ran successfully from the time I was 11-12 years old all the way through high school. I hosted a BBS on it. I programmed it to call every number in my local calling area trying to find computer modems.

If there was a game out that I couldn't play on my machine, I tinkered with that computer until it could. "System Requirements" just didn't apply to me.

This of course set me up for what I do today. Today I write programs and administer systems that deal in large transactions and boring financial reports. But the principles I learned in trying to tune that tiny little system for the games I was trying to play still completely apply.

If you manage the memory an application uses, it is a far more efficient application. If you throw away all the crap stuff you don't need on a system, the program you are trying to run doesn't have to compete for resources. These are all concepts that apply to absolutely everything I do today in my job, and I learned it because I was trying to make a video game work when it wasn't supposed to.

I said all that so you understand that PAX was my kind of convention. It is all about catering to the gamer, and I is a gamer. My wife, the kind soul that she is, politely allowed herself to be dragged along. She was pretty lost.

She is a gamer, in that she plays video games, but only to a point. She does play video games quite a bit...don't let her fool you with her protestations to the contrary.

But, she doesn't focus in too much on it. She doesn't get too excited about upcoming games. She will get excited about a new Zelda title, or some Harvest Moon something or other, but that is about the depth she gives it. But... despite all that she stood in line with me for 2 hours to watch a presentation about Star Wars: The Old Republic. An MMO that Shana cares nothing about. So she is a hell of a trooper and I've got to give her props.

Anyway, on to the games:
Aion:
Played it for a few minutes....combat system is annoying. The GCD is weird, and not at all like WoW...it will take some getting used to. But the most glaring thing I found is that it seems on a caster, you are constantly interrupted by EVERYTHING. Annoying, frustrating, and MADDENING are the only words I can thing of to describe it. I'm definitely passing on this game for a while.

Champions Online:
Played it for a few minutes, watched it for a while afterward. Really fun. Moreso than I thought it would be. The graphics look straight out of a comic book, and it certainly has a style all it's own. I had a guy with Rocket Boots that shot lasers out of his eyes. I'd swoop out of the sky on my rocket boots, fire lasers at the bad guys, and land and slash them with my sword. It was campy and it was like it was right out of some silly cartoon. But it was FUN. I think I'm going to give it a few months (it just launched recently), but I'm going to give this MMO a look.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
The demo we stood in line for was pretty disappointing, particularly if you had been watching this game's development on the internet. They ran through a few areas that we had seen before, on classes we had seen before, doing missions that...we had seen before. Oh, and they announced Coruscant would be a playable area. Which would have been sorta cool if they had shown anything about the planet in the demo. But no...just a couple screenshots. /yawn

That being said, I'm still probably looking forward to this game more than any other at the con. I played a very bad Star Wars MMO for 1.5 years. An MMO that is actually GOOD, will probably wind up sucking me in so much that I will need to be extracted from my computer via the jaws of life.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm / Diablo 3 / Starcraft 2
I got a chance to play the new WoW expansion and D3. Not too much to say about them since with Blizzcon being only a week or two earlier, it was kind of moot. There was nothing new there. I played the Worgen, which had a pretty awesome animation for switching between human/wolf forms...so that was cool. Diablo 3 was fun, and was very Diablo-esque. I really loved the original Diablo and D2, so D3 will definitely be purchased.

I didn't get a chance to play Starcraft 2 actually, but I'll probably pick it up as well. It looked interesting. I'm not generally an RTS kind of guy, but I did play the original Starcraft through the single player campaign and I had a ton of fun with it. And a few years ago, I even got some multiplayer action in with a Carpool buddy during our Ferry commute each day.

DeathSpank
I had never heard of this game before PAX. You can see the trailer here. This game looks WICKED. It has an art style that is unmistakably....DeathSpank. It is described as 'Diablo meets Monkey Island', and I have to say...I really want to play it. Here is the website. If you haven't seen it, check it out. (Side note, as an example of the humor in the game, there is an ability called 'Flock of Chickens' that you apparently get by killing enough chickens that the chickens perceive you as their god).

Some others
I also saw a little bit of some other games, but didn't get anything too deep with them, so I'll just do one liners:

Star Trek Online
Didn't get to play, but saw a demo somebody was playing; graphics looked awesome.

Brutal Legend
Looked neat, but didn't get to play.

Hello Kitty Online
Got a free disk to play this. Really. Janel will be happy.

Lord of the Rings Online
Got a free full copy of Mines of Moria. I think I may load it up and do a month's subscription just to check it out.

Warhammer Online
Tried to find them. Failed. Seriously, they must have been hiding somewhere.

TruBlood
They had an energy drink at the con. Seriously. Looked like the bottles on the show.

Totally Rad Show
Not a game. It's a show. Went to their panel. Met the dudes briefly. I'm a big fan of the show, so I was in nerd heaven.

Pirates of the Burning Sea
Still haven't tried this MMO, but walked by their booth briefly. I really might check it out with a demo or something. Who doesn't want to be a Pirate?