Line to Get into Keiji Inafune's Panel at PAX Prime 2015

PAX Prime 2015 On the Go

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Monday, 6:00
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The Final Round of the Omegathon has been revealed - a truly evil Nintendo-created level of Super Mario Maker.

Watch it for yourself on the Main Theater feed at http://www.twitch.tv/pax.

Monday, 5pm
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Expo is winding down and we're waiting impatiently for the final round of the Omegathon which will start streaming at 5:30 Pacific. While we're jittering in our seats, here are more PAX pictures for you:

  • Harmonics put smiles on a lot of faces with their announcement of Rockband 4, and having it here has been awesome. I've got a picture of an important thing - the initial setlist.
  • This giant Minion has a tiny Mini-minion in his front pocket.
  • Be afraid of the horrors of this Pyro cosplay.
  • There was a wedding on stage at the Gearbox panel, and they brought up all the cosplayers in the audience for witnesses. The people not dressed in costume were the bride and groom.

And remember, the Twitch feed is at http://www.twitch.tv/event/pax.
Monday, 2pm
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Fire got a game about the Dutch Revolution that has inspired a corollary to Rule 34: If an event has happened, there is a boardgame about it.

The Nxnwinad Team went looking and found a couple gems, and had this to say:

  • Universe Sandbox^2: (yayy, they're continuing!). Universe Sandbox^2 appears to be the beautiful love-child of a game designer's obsession with physics simulation. The arena is astrophysics from comets to galaxies - a truly universal scope. The realistic macro-scale simulation of galaxies (which required dark matter/energy to behave realistically) is impressive. The team includes an astrophysicist. Current possible atmospheres are earth/mars-like. They are working on support for more configurations but are limited by current scientific knowledge. Tweakable parameter fields (eg gravitational constant) let the player experiment with the system as the universe equilibriates. The "Unity" physics engine is used for the simulation. The designers plan to refine and expand the game (so long sales supports development) with more climate simulation and possibly adding the big can of worms that is organic life. Then you too can create life in a mere 7 days. They're also working on support for Steam Workshop, so it may become possible to share your scenarios and run those that others have created. As it says in the title, it's a sandbox so there is no explicit goal or story beyond what you build. Instead, the awesome speaks for itself, and Universe Sandbox^2 is worth support on Steam early access.
  • Burly Men at Sea: (or to quote the actual notes I got for this, BURLY MEN AT SEEEEEEAAAAAAA -- makes more sense if you know that she's a maritime engineer, and a huge fan of "The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil") This adorable story game in the Indie Megabooth. Three generously bearded fishermen, named Steady Beard, Brave Beard, and Hasty Beard find a mysterious map. What do they find when they follow it? The floor demo is 20 minutes, and the developer said the final game would be 60-90 minutes for a single playthrough. Apparently there are several ways to play through the story, though, so with multiple walk-throughs it looks like 3-4 hours to complete the entire game. The art is minimalist, blocky pastel colors. Sort of hipster-ish? but very cute. The developer said it would be out late this year or early next year. Squee!
  • Dark Echo: This echolocation game is in the PAX 10 this year. It has very minimalist graphics; just a black screen, white bouncing beams for sound waves, and red beams for bad things that will kill you. It's currently out for iOS, Steam, and Windows Phone (not sure about android, don't remember) and I definitely plan on buying it when I get home. There are 40 levels. If you're feeling masochistic, you can also replay all of them with much harder difficulty The soundscape really adds to the atmosphere. I fully anticipate creeping myself out playing it alone at night, but that'll probably be fun too. Highly recommended.
  • Tumblestone: This competitive puzzle game can also be found in the PAX 10 booth. It's sort of as if the visuals of Tetris met a match-3 game. I really enjoyed playing it with a friend I met up with on the con floor, and I bet it'd be a great party game. Up to four players.
  • Lunar Flowers: Lunar Flowers is a very relaxing puzzle platformer with gorgeous Japanese-inspired art. It has fairly simple mechanics, but the puzzles are well done and vary in kind. Recommended. It's not out yet.

Monday, 1pm
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One of the things I enjoy about these events is the standing pieces the various companies bring to decorate the place. Look at the end of the image-roll below for a couple of really cool ones:

  • The huge tentacle beast crashing out of the front window of the Annex and crushing a cop car is awesome, and it also has eldritch coils trailing into the lobby.
  • Dark Souls has this awesome statue. Look closely to see the way they created those dark strands drifting up from the fallen.
  • These Claptrap plushies at the Glitch booth my not be art, but they are artful. And annoying. They speak. JUST FOLLOW THE SOOTHING SOUND OF MY VOICE!

Monday, 10am
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jdzappa was out and about, and found some great info for us:

Dungeons and Dragons: Sword Coast Legends - This game looks like it will finally bridge the gap between tabletop and virtual roleplaying. The game is set in the Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms, and the 40-hour single player campaign was written by a veteran Bioware writer with help from R.A. Salvatore. But the most exciting feature is the ability for up to four players and a dungeon master to easily create a new adventure on the fly. If you're in a hurry as the dungeon master, all you need to do is select the tileset, choose which kind of monsters you want, and overall difficulty. The game will then auto-populate the area with encounters and loot. The devs showed just how easy it was to create a sprawling catacombs in less than 10 minutes. DMs can of course customize an adventure as much as they want with building tools that look far more intuitive than Neverwinter Nights. They can also continue to add traps, monsters and NPCs as the game goes along. The classes, monsters and rules are all based on DND 5th Edition. Combat is in real-time but everything is based on an underlying die roll system that you can either hide or make visible.

Rage of Demons will have everything you expect from a Steam game (achievements, trading cards, etc) as well as in-game VOIP. The match-making system allows you to rate DMs and other players after a game so hopefully that will keep down on trolling. The game launches on September 29 and is available for preorder for $35. Website: https://swordcoast.com/

Sunday, 10:20am
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Well, that was exciting. A fire alarm here are the hotel right in the middle of the first round of panels for the morning made for an interesting time. It wasn't an actual fire, so that was good. And now that everyone's awake and we've all seen how miserable the weather out there is this morning for themselves, we're back in and getting back into the swing.

Saturday, 5pm
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Nxnwinad and Johnny are writing up the Firaxis panel with lots of awesome info about XCOM 2, and Beyond Earth: Rising Dawn. This windstorm in Seattle is playing hob with my internet connectivity, though, so it won't be up until later.

Saturday, 3:45pm
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That one kid with the really good cardboard Buster Sword is back in line for the FFXV panel due to start soon in Hydra. A few oddments have come across my desk:

  • Team nxnwinad also did a first swipe through the PAX 10 booth yesterday. She had this to say: "PAX 10 preliminary sweep looks cool, with standouts to me being a 3rd-person bullet-hell game, called Assault Android Cactus; a very minimalist echolocation labyrinth called Dark Echo; and a puzzle platformer, best described as goo-ball spiderman in space, called Grapple." You can get more info about all the PAX 10 games at the PAX 10 page. We'll be back with any hands-on impressions we get (as the lines shall try).
  • Cards Against Humanity is at the head of the running again for my personal "Oddest Show Swag" contest. I didn't think they could ever top the Pwnmeal, but they've done it with three flavors of popsicles with booster-packs frozen into the centers. (Pardon the awkward word on one of the wrappers).
  • The Kirkland Geek Gala has handmade artisan caffeinated marshmallows available for a donation. I tried the Chai, and it was nicely spicy, with a more solid marshmallow texture. They have a table up in the Diversity Lounge. For more details about the Gala event in November, you can go to http://www.kirklandgeekgala.com.

Saturday, 2pm
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I've got nxnwinad's team and Fire down in line for the Firaxis panel. They've staked out their turf and a power outlet, and they're in it for the long haul. While they're at it, I've got some stuff from their efforts in yesterday's Gearbox panel.

A Borderlands movie is in pre-production. They are aware that it has been historically difficult to make a good video game movie, but have great faith in the producing team. Lionsgate studios has brought in Avi and Ari Arad, who produced Spiderman and Iron Man. See the Variety announcement for further details.

They're also running a live play of Tales from the Borderlands, Episode 4 tonight at 8:30pm in Wyvern Theater (in the Westin Hotel) with voice cast members, gearbox execs, telltale folks. That theater has space for 500 people, and it's first-come first-served to get in.

They also talked a lot about their new property, Battleborn. They introduced a couple new characters and talked about their character-development process and mindset/goals. They kept a focus on having a bunch of possible distinct playstyles in one campaign or PVP. There are several possible modes for Battleborn: story mode (single-player, take 5 characters with you), cooperative and versus. During the initial design phases, one flying character was originally Axton with a chicken head, but that character has since been redesigned.

We're going to try to get to actually demo the game, but she said the videos she saw reminded her of Borderland's play. She's going to try to get her hands on it directly to see if that impression plays out.

In between all the game info, a couple got married onstage with the cosplayers in the audience joining the wedding party, and the president of the company did his annual magic trick (which she thought was pretty funny).

They ran out of time to talk about Homefront Remastered, but each person who attended got a code for a copy of the game for themselves and one for a friend.

Saturday, 1pm
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Oculus Impressions: (from Fire)
This is the first time the final consumer version of the hardware had been shown, and my minion Fire got a chance to run the 6-minute demo.

It fits over your head, with room to put it on over glasses. The displays are 1k for each eye. The demo he was in did not have free-look, so he was forced into a single perspective.

One of his main concerns about the technology is how it deals with people with visual problems. And it did impact his experience. The display would pixelate, because the focal point was wrong for his prescription. He described it as feeling like having an LCD screen a few inches from your face. For reference, his vision is very bad; his prescription is at -18 diopters.

But even with the issues, he still really liked the experience. He'd been worried the technology wouldn't work for him at all. If you'd like to ask Fire directly about his experience, go ahead and put it in the comments here.

If you're onsite, the Oculus Live app will let you schedule a chance to try it out for yourself.

Saturday, noon
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This has been a busy, busy start today.

The incidence of anime hair and huge weapons has been over nine thousand, thanks to the Final Fantasy XIV panel in Hydra, and there's an awesome cosplay installation. So cool things abound, but crowd management is a major thing. Now that the crowds are loaded in, we get a moment of peace.

Behind all those awesome polished cosplay pictures is a huge amount of work. There was a gorgeous rendition of a Guild Wars 2 Asuran, with her Elite Power Suit. The whole thing is to scale, and if you compare the final picture below to the screenshot in the wiki, you can see how faithful the reproduction is.

I could write an article on the construction. In order to make it portable, it's a sculptured foam skin velcroed together over a PVC-pipe frame. It's strong and stable enough that she can get up inside of it the way her character would in the game. The whole thing comes apart and folds flat enough to fit in the back of a Civic, and it can be assembled by two people.

Her character costume was also beautiful work.

Friday, 3:30pm
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The team headed out for Gearbox did make the line, so they'll be back with the scoop on any new releases. The others came back with a few shots of the Expo hall merchants. Check out the image-roll at the bottom of this page:

  • It wouldn't seem like an Expo Hal without Pikachu.
  • Think Geek is here, with a selection of great merchandise and a good coupon. My son-in-law is trying hard to talk himself out of that ocarina.
  • Mojang's area is pretty easy to spot.
  • Alienware is here with a truck-full of computers.

Friday, 2pm
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I've got one team getting into the Gearbox panel, and I fear the other may have been eaten by the giant tentacular monster breaking out of the front of the Annex, but here's a bit to start with.

  • At 3pm, an XWing Dogfight tournament is starting on Level 3 of the Olive 8 hotel. I had a dogfight with Itsatrap down at Verne and Wells several months ago, and had a great time getting shot out of the sky. I am not exactly the scourge of womprats. Check the Tabletop schedule for a lot more tournaments.
  • Check out the daily Rocket League tournaments at the Paramount Theater. Signups are open from 10am to noon Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Or if you don't want to get into the fight, have a seat and cheer on your favorites!
  • There are plenty of celebrities on hand for the festivities, and there's an autograph area set aside on Level 2 of the Westin hotel. Check the schedule for the likes of Patrick Rothfuss, Felicia Day, Igarashi, and more.

Friday, noon
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With all this year's changes, the iconic pictures of the giant line waiting to get into the show were made a little more difficult. There's no Queue Room - they wound one line through Freeway Park and down under the WSCC, and had another in front of the Annex. The best I've got at this point is a shot of the line for Hydra Theater for Keiji Inafune's panel about Mighty No. 9 earlier today.

However, fear not! I've got two teams of cub reporters out and about finding cool things, and they will come back with their haul here soon.

A wild Pikachu flies above Expo at PAX Prime 2015
ThinkGeek's booth at PAX Prime 2015
Mojang's area at PAX Prime 2015
Alienware Computers display at PAX Prime 2015
A Cosplay Installation in Progress at PAX Prime 2015
Asuran Power Suit Cosplay Assembled at PAX Prime 2015
Cards Against Humanity swag popsicles at PAX Prime 2015
Giant Tentacle Beast Crashing Out of the WSCC Annex at PAX Prime 2015
Giant Tentacle Beast from inside the Annex at PAX Prime 2015
Dark Souls display at PAX Prime 2015
Claptrap Plushie from Glitch booth at PAX Prime 2015
Minion cosplay at PAX Prime 2015
Pyro from Team Fortress 2 at PAX Prime 2015
Wedding on stage at Gearbox panel at PAX Prime 2015

Comments

Just a shout-out to those who aren't lucky enough to be in Seattle, but the Main Theater and Hydra rooms have their entire content streamed via Twitch.

Schedule for Main Theater | Main Theater on Twitch
Schedule for Hydra | Hydra on Twitch

And of course, this means that everything from these two theaters is archived and available on Twitch later down the road.

Always curious to hear VR/Oculus impressions. Don't know if the crack team has a Touch demo lined up but evidently you can tweet at Oculus to "win" a slot.

Thanks for the streaming links Irish - they're going up in this next update, too.

And Badferret, my minion Fire is trying out the Oculus as we speak. I'll let you know when he gets back.

My understanding is that the fire alarm may have been caused by the #PAXRUMBLE panel (and it's smoke machine)...

That is the case. And the one that just went off was a false alarm. This day is turning out all sorts of interesting.

Good to see Assault Android Cactus getting some love. I tried it at PAX East 2 years ago after seeing it highlighted on RPS a few months prior and enjoyed it.

Thanks again momgamer for some "in the trenches" reporting!

DocBadwrench and I are in 308 if anyone would like to join our board gaming.
Edit: Done and gone for the night.