Every day is the "End of the Week"

     When I went to Portland, Oregon to visit my family, we came up with the idea that my uncle and I should go to Seattle and see the sights around there.  I figured that would be pretty cool.  I mean, I’d get to see the Space Needle and everything.  It’d all be pretty interesting.

Nate Donahue said on Skype:

    “Isn’t PAX Prime happening up there this weekend?”

Oh.  …OH.  OHHHHH MY GOODNESS!

     So, my enthusiasm thus sparked, we drove up to Washington so fast that I got a speeding ticket on the way up (no joke).  Since I didn’t have a pass with which I could get in the convention, I figured I would be able to just spend a few hours seeing the outside of the convention center, take a few photos of the cosplayers, and talk to a few people about their experience going to/coming from PAX.  But when I hit the street corner of the Washington Convention Center, there was a very nice scalper selling tickets at a 240% price hike.  I don't particularly like scalpers, and I don't like supporting them even more.  I knew what the right thing to do was.

Hey, desperate times, right?

     So now, instead of having four hours to laze about and chat it up with the convention goers, I had just that much time to see as much of the convention as I could.

Here’s the general breakdown:

Mojang had the biggest booth on the top floor.  It also had the best cosplayer, in the form of a total Creeper.

Literally.

     Notch was also there too.  He’s the guy on the far right.  The line to go speak to him would’ve taken forever and a day, and I had precious little time to spare.

     The new Minecraft Pocket Edition was also on display.  Currently it’s made for only one phone, but it works better than I would expect from a phone adaptation of Minecraft.  I don’t know how it’ll be made for more systems, since the actions normally used by the left and right mouse buttons are taken over by trigger buttons specific to the phone, but I sure hope they can make that work.

     The Digital Game Museum, a traveling video game exhibit,  was also on display, housing pristine copies of many old games lost to time.  They even had a full print-out of the fortran code that was used to create Colossal Cave, the very first adventure game ever made. 

     I managed to catch a peek inside at the Unicorn Room (decorated aptly) to see the beginning of a panel being shown about The Darkness 2, an upcoming FPS featuring deadly tentacles.  It looked amazingly entertaining (and really, really bloody).

     Then I walked onto the fourth floor, where all the A-listers had gathered to show off their stuff. (Click on any image for a bigger version.)

     Nintendo in particular had a very impressive selection.

     In a word: Incredible.  So much amazing stuff that made my heart soar with elation, though it was but a small taste.


     In my last fifteen minutes, I managed to catch a gameplay demo of Prototype 2, and watched as the power combinations had been improved and reworked to create something better than its predecessor.  In a dazzling display of fire and shredded metal, the demo ended with a massive helicopter uppercut.  That is, the main character delivered an uppercut to a helicopter with his hammer fist, and sent it flying like a baseball.  While this may have been amazing, the booth had one more ace up its sleeve, something that’d make me remember this day for the rest of my life.

     Today was the day I karate-kicked a helicopter.

     In short, holy crap.  This is exactly the convention I need to plan my summer around (after Comic-Con, of course).  I didn’t get to play any of the demos, unfortunately.  But the place is so big that I’d need to be there all three days to enjoy it all, and not just for the four hours I was there. 

     There’s always next year, though.  And maybe this time I’ll pay the normal price for the ticket.


     Here's a gallery of the pictures I took of the convention and of the ENORMOUS line to get in:
PAX 2011 Gallery


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