PAXEast 2016 On The Go - Welcome to PAX!

PAX East 2016 On-The-Go

Section: 

And we're under way at PAXEast 2016!

This one's going to be a little different. I'm not actually on-site this year. However, we have our very own
DominicKnight in the Press Room, and Greg "doubtingthomas396" Decker and Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch out there in the wilds with a bunch of the GWJ gang.

So they'll be doing the legwork and having the fun, and I get to do the typing and be there vicariously through them.

Sunday, 6pm


And that's a wrap, folks. The Final Round of the Omegathon has been fought. It was an unreleased gamed called Videoball from ActionButton Entertainment. Gempst and NotSoup stomped Aurelius and xxSoggyTacosxx to win the trip to any PAX in the world.

As far as DominicKnight was concerned, this was the greatest cosplay:
PAXEast 2016 - Cobra Bubbles Cosplay

(in case you don't recognize him, that's Cobra Bubbles from Lilo & Stitch)

Logitech was giving out some awesome t-shirts:

And Super Senso had these cool screen cleaners you can park on the back of the phone so it stays with you.

For me, the highlight of the show from here was the information that came out about Borderlands 3. I'm a big fan of the series, and I was glad to hear we were heading back to that story.

Thanks for reading. I hope you all had a great time, and I'll see you all again at PAX West 2016.

Saturday, 11:30pm


Everyone has been really great at sending in information. I'm soooo far behind!

Greg "doubtingthomas396" Decker sent in another report from PAX on Day 2, this time from the family perspective:

My goodness what a difference a decent navigator makes! The family and I arrived a little before nine and had no trouble getting a proper parking spot at the convention center instead of being shunted off to the CSI: Boston Wharf District Crime Scene Lot (F1). They also seemed to have gotten the hang of how to admit people into the building, because getting in was much smoother than yesterday.

We staked out a bench near the entrance and collected Street Passes while waiting for the Expo hall to open. I went from having one (my wife) to having 100 in the space of my time at PAX. I even completed some puzzles. This is the kind of multiplayer I can get behind: requiring the existence of other people, but no direct interaction with them. It's like the videogame equivalent of working from home.

But playing Mii minigames (Miinigames?) wasn't all we did! Oh no, we went to collect Fallout pins from the Bethesda booth and found out that the wait to buy them was an hour and they cost ten bucks each. So we went to the Behemoth booth and bought a Castle Crashers knight for my daughter and a Behemoth Chicken for my son. Their lanyards are top-notch, and they gave us two of those weird draw-string backpacks that I see kids wearing sometimes. They don't look very comfortable, but then I spent my high-school years carrying the entire contents of my locker in a 6000 cubic inch military-surplus duffle bag, so it's not like I'm one to talk.

On the way past Bethesda I did get a chance to glimpse the new Doom. Barring any stability issues, that's a day-one purchase for me. It looks like it's the sort of game I want Doom to be: lots of gunfire and explosions and not much in the way of exposition, as FPS were intended to be. I may even feel the urge to update my graphics card for it.

I also saw the demo for Shadow Warrior 2, which I somehow missed when I was at the Devolver booth yesterday. I loved Shadow Warrior, and I loved the remake of Shadow Warrior (the latter of which you can get in this week's Humble Bundle, if you're so inclined.) The sequel to the remake has me remarkably excited. I may not be able to get more Duke Nuke'm, but I can get more Lo Wang and I'm going to take advantage of that.

We spent a little time upstairs escaping the noise of the floor and watching the various cosplayers strut their stuff. There was some fine work on display out there. A few excellent Link costumes, and a whole lot of characters I didn't recognize. My running assumption under those circumstances is that I'm looking at a MOBA character under those circumstances, and I'm seldom wrong.

This year's grand prize for cosplay, however, goes to the young man in the wizard suit. His staff had a CD on top of it and the back of his robe had "Installation Wizard" embroidered on it. Anyone who puts that much effort into the cosplay equivalent of a Dad Joke rates a standing ovation from me. I bet he had an anthropomorphic paperclip for a familiar.

The last thing we checked out before the kids started to get overwhelmed was the arcade room. The program boasted a reproduction of a 1980's arcade, and I was surprised at how many 80's classics I'd forgotten. Like Crazy Taxi, Dance Dance Revolution and Mortal Kombat X. Funny how the memory plays tricks on you. Anyway, my son and I had some fun playing the original Mario Brothers. I played Luigi, because I'm the Dad and it's the Dad's job to play Luigi. We didn't do very well, but he made up for my rusty platforming skills by hitting the hell out of that POW block.

At that point the kids were starting to get tired and cranky, so we bid PAX a fond farewell. I didn't get a Sunday pass, so this is the last of the show you'll hear from me unless I decide to watch any of the panels on Twitch.

Those of you who I didn't get to meet, I want to give my apologies. My plan is to be back next year for another round, and I will take the lessons I learned this year to heart and plan my schedule better.

Forum regular McIrishJihad sent in these reports on two up-and-coming games. See his pictures down in the Gallery at the bottom of the post.

Dragoon

I sat down in the Indie Megabooth with the Dragoon guys and got a quick playthrough. First up, you’re all dragons, who have been living in relative peace on your dragon island. Then humans came and started making villages and cities on our island. Of course, they also bring gold, which we dragons love, so I guess we could subjugate them (or kill them and take their gold).

So the game revolves around each player venturing out from their caves, conquering or destroying villages and cities, and generally collecting gold. After each player has taken their actions for the round, humans come and repopulate with more villages. Players roll 2 six-sided dice, which correlate to coordinates for the map, and tell us where to place village tiles, when to flip a village to a city, or when the thief gets a little richer.

There’s a little bit of everything for everyone. There’s a strict action economy, there’s movement and area control, there’s some direct player interaction (if you fight another player and win, you steal their gold!)

Dragoon was on Kickstarter last year during PAX East, and is in the middle of shipping out copies of the game to backers. You can get your hands on a copy soon, in your friendly local game store, with an MSRP of $75. But that comes with a carrying bag, cloth mat, and tons of HEAVY enameled metal pieces.

Larklamp

Directly next to Dragoon in the Indie Megabooth, under an umbrella, is another game that is on Kickstarter right now – Snyxtrap (Larklamp). This is a laser-cut “lantern”, which has open sides for you to slide plastic sheets in. There’s a light source at the top of the lamp, and when the sheets are inserted, the light and shadows from the plastic form the game board for you to play on. The designer plans on releasing more games, which can easily be swapped by changing out the plastic sheets.

Friday, 7:30pm


Greg "doubtingthomas396" Decker sent me this great writeup of his day at PAX:

Hey all,

I'm doing an abbreviated PAX this year, partly because I'm still recovering from pneumonia and partly because I don't want to leave my wife home with the kids all day while I gallivant about trying demos.

Anyway, after battling Boston traffic and Google Maps simultaneously (pro tip: Never listen to directions that tell you to "follow the signs" to get anywhere in New England. The signs are a lie!) I managed to spend four hours wandering the show floor, and here's a few of the wondrous things I found.

  • Devolver

    Devolver has a few new offerings on the block. One of which is Strafe, which is taking Devolver's characteristic love of retro graphics and making it more modern. And by modern, I mean 1990. Did you like all those Quake-engine games from the 1990's? Because that's what Strafe is. It looks pretty good, truth be told, in much the same way that all those pseudo 8-bit games from Devolver look pretty good. As always, they nail the "this is how I remember games looked back then" feel, rather than "this is what games looked like back then." We're richer for it, because it trades on nostalgia without being slave to authenticity.

    Another title up for review is Ruined, which reminds me a bit of Transistor for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. It's an isometric, third-person brawler and that's all I could tell from the look I got at it. I didn't get a chance to actually play it, but I look forward to trying it out when it comes out. Devolver rarely disappoints.

  • Indie Tabletop Booth

    A very elaborate little game called Moonquake was being demoed by an enthusiastic man in an orange jumpsuit. It looks a bit like Moustrap mixed with a three-card-monte mechanic. I didn't get to actually play a demo, but I did see the developer giving moon pies to people who received demos, so color me intrigued.

  • Indie Megabooth

    I got a chance to sit down with Halcyon 6, which is in early access right now and a recent game-of-the-week pick by yours truly. The developer described it as having some X-Com elements, in that you're "exploring" and expanding your space-base to add rooms and functionality, and I'm a sucker for a good tech-tree. He hurried me over to the combat, though, which reminded me a bit of FTL except you're controlling a fleet instead of a single ship. Everything was turn based, and there were a lot of options to play with.

    I found the combat to be intensely satisfying, because each ship was a different class with different attacks that had different effects on the enemies. You could use your tech ship to hack your enemies defenses, for example, and put them into a vulnerable state. One of your other ships could then cast an attack that specifically exploited that vulnerability to deal extra damage. I was able to get the hang of it fairly quickly thanks to an intuitive system explaining what debuffs were exploited by which attacks. After completely destroying the enemy fleet, the head of that enemy faction hailed me for a meeting, which revealed a faction-management mechanic whereby you have to choose which, if any, faction to ally yourself with.

    So for those of you keeping track: base-building, tech trees, turn-based fleet combat and RPG faction management. This is an ambitious game, and even in early access it looks quite good. I'll have to pick this one up sooner rather than later.

  • Unpub

    The highlight of day one was meeting up with Chaz and Damnable Bear to play an early build of a game called Kobolds from UnPub games Card Fortress Games. (ed: thanks for the correction)

    Kobolds is difficult to describe. My notes say simply "cooperative tactical action game with multiple playable classes and a s***-ton of enemies." That's about the size of it.

    You have a modular map made of six tiles, each with a grid on them. Three of the tiles have tunnels on them, which are the spawn points for the kobolds. One of the tiles has a town on it, which is where your characters buy items. The remaining two tiles have tokens on them to describe which direction is which.

    The players pick their starting character classes and set out to kill kobolds. Kobold heads are used to buy items, most notably dynamite, which you can use to seal off the kobold spawn points. Each player gets six action points per day to move, fight, trade, or purchase items. After each player spends all six points, a night phase is entered where the kobolds spawn and move based on card draws.

    The number of kobolds on the board quickly becomes overwhelming, and you have to do a lot of crowd management. It gets frantic at times, especially if one player gets cut off from everyone else. If the kobolds surround your city, you start earning demoralization points and once you've earned enough of those, the game is over. It's kind of the opposite of the victory-point system.

    The other thing about it is that it's a long game. We played for an hour before finally getting overwhelmed by kobolds, and the game struck me as something that could easily go longer with more experienced players.

    I'll likely be picking this one up when it's finally released, because even with the game as rough and unbalanced as it was, it was still a lot of fun.

I'll be back tomorrow with the wife and kids in tow. I'm pretty sure my kids will want something from the Behemoth booth, since Battleblock Theater is one of their favorite games of all time. Also, my son adores costumes and there were cosplayers aplenty wandering the show floor.

Friday, 6pm


Supergiant Games (makers of Bastion and Transistor) is on site and has brought their third game, Pyre.

It looks amazing, and they sold me with just the trailer's music. The whole thing looks amazing, and you don't have to take my word for it - the game's playable on the show floor in booth #8212. It's scheduled to launch in 2017 on PC and PS4 simultaneously.

Blizzard decided to make a splash with their Overwatch promotion. They've got a several cosplaying Ubers driving Overwatch-decorated Lamborghinis. Go take a ride with one of the characters.

Also, the Gearbox panel just ended, with the tidbit of information that if you want to get some hints as to what's in store for the Borderlands franchise, you should pay special attention to the easter eggs that can be found in Battleborn DLC.

For your evening enjoyment:

  • At 9pm, Jerry Holkins, Kris Straub, Nika Harper, Jeff Gerstman, and Paul&Storm will pay Quiplash in Albatross Theatre. If you enjoy snark, and want to vote on the best of it, come on down or join the Twitch stream at https://www.twitch.tv/pax2
  • the Friday night concert will start rockin' it at 8:30 with Bit Brigade, MC Frontalot, and The Protomen in Main Theater and on https://www.twitch.tv/pax

Friday, 5pm
----------------------

Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch just sent me a day's worth of first impressions.

Doing PAX a little light this year time wise, but big body wise -- the whole family is with me! The security lines ended up being nowhere near as bad as I thought, and as usual checkin for press and such was flawless. Here are some initial impressions, although we didn't put a ton of hands on time with anything, figuring we'll go early tomorrow and pick a line or two.

Overall Layout/Craziness: It's very clear at this point that more and more of the space is "sold" and less and less is available for things that used to be the core of a PAX experience for me. Several companies (Riot in particular) are no longer on the floor, but taking up HUGE swaths of convention rooms on other floors that used to be used for things like Console Freeplay or maybe a Steel Battalion setup. Tabletop continues to shring, and a decent chunk of table top is now really just vendor demo space. That said, it wasn't stupid crowded in tabletop this year.

PC/VR Land: The traditional "wait in line for an hour to get your LoL Fix" PC zone is still here, but augmented by a big VR setup shared by Oculus and Vive. I'm not sure I really want to wait an hour for it, but its cool theres a big hands-on presence here. Pro-tip: Microsoft also paid for a sad corner to promote playing games on their "Surface" tablets, but they were smart enough to ship only the $1500 laptop versions, so they play PC games just fine. We hopped in with no line to get a quick fix.

What Community Games? No Rockband Setup that I could see, literally nobody interested in using the dance game stage, Jamspace was empty when I was there, and like I said, TableTop wasn't that packed. Everyone's still here, but they're just all in endless lines to play games I have little interest in or have already played a lot -- LawBreakers being the former, Overwatch the latter.

IndieMania: The GREAT news is the megabooth feels like a full 1/3 of the floor, and even outside the booth, there are a tone of cool things I've never seen before that I'm DYING to get my hands on.

My Targets: Sony's RIGS VR Sport game, Tokyo 42, Supergiant's Pyre, Bethesday's new Elder Scrolls Legends card game, and Embers of War

Friday, Noon
----------------------

DominicKnight has been sending me all sorts of cool information all morning. Let me start off:

  • Security is always a concern, and this year they've added metal detectors. And like all such changes, the staff and the attendees are still working out how to do this most efficiently. The lines were pretty epic this morning. Please plan on that when you're scheduling your visit. If you want to take the path of least resistance, consider not bringing a bag to avoid that needing to be looked at as well if you don't need to bring anything in. There are bags available within the Expo Hall from various booths to help you hold your
    swag.
  • PAX Arena is keeping up with the times and has 18 VR units available for people to try out for 15 minutes
    at a time. If you'd like to give that a try, head on down to the Arena and sign up.
  • And speaking of the Arena, there are several professional competitions and exhibitions scheduled there over the weekend and they're all being streamed on the Arena's dedicated Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/paxarena. Right now they're running Streetfighter V.
  • For lanyard collectors, Behemoth's 2016 lanyard is available for free, as always, at booth #4025.

===================================
Picture Gallery

PAXEast 2016 Indie Megabooth - Dragoon
PAXEast 2016 Indie Megabooth - Larklamp
PAXEast 2016 - Super Senso screen cleaner swag
PAXEast 2016 - Logitech t-shirt giveaway

Comments

The Tabletop area was simultaneously smaller than last year AND less crowded than last year. Clumber & I were speculating that it's because WotC isn't a sponsor this year, and therefore there's no enormous swath of TT tables reserved for a Magic: The Gathering tournament.

They also released the TT MtG tables after hours which was nice. So smaller TT but better use of the space.

The Quiplash panel last night was hilarious by the way. Loved that they brought a custom Boston/PAX themed set of prompts.

To echo a bit of what Julian said: The show this year feels a lot like a mini-Twitch Con or something (more than usual). Very big focus on steaming or steaming friendly games in the panels. Feels a little like tail wagging dog, but not surprising given current trends and the likely amount of money Twitch is dumping into the show. Basically "if you're not doing video then why are you here" is the vibe I'm picking up.

Didn't see many media badges yesterday roaming the expo floor either. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Stupid wifi flaking out

I've seen way more media badges today (on the floor) versus yesterday.

Saturday is always a much bigger day than Friday.

I have a bunch of stuff sent to me to get up, but my Daily Planet job is getting in the way. Watch this space for all sorts of cool things.

Counterpoint to the lack of Rock Band... Someone was running games of JS Joust right outside of tabletop when we left for the Tamo and they were still there when we came back about 5 hours later.

Going to save the reports for some before-bed or Monday Morning reading. However:

shoptroll wrote:

Basically "if you're not doing video then why are you here" is the vibe I'm picking up.

If it's truly emphasizing on Twitch, I imagine it's more than just video, but "If you're not Let's Playing". Which disappoints me, but at this point I've come to expect it.

Hope everyone had a good time. Hopefully next year I'll be experiencing that same sleepy, tired, happy feeling of riding the train back home.

I wanted to just chime in, since they're friends of mine, that Kobolds is actually from Cardboard Fortress and not Unpub games - Unpub is just the name of the booth.

If you want to link as well - http://www.cardboardfortressgames.com/

Damnable Bear wrote:

I wanted to just chime in, since they're friends of mine, that Kobolds is actually from Cardboard Fortress and not Unpub games - Unpub is just the name of the booth.

If you want to link as well - http://www.cardboardfortressgames.com/

Was Unpub just letting them crash?

Unpub is a shared booth for unpublished games, so it's like a 'thing' - other devs were there as well. They just had the best spot

It's the Indie Megabooth of tabletop games that haven't been picked up by a publisher.

Thanks for the correction - I've fixed it above and added the link.

I probably should've checked this thread while I was at PAX East. Ah well.

Anybody headed to PAX South?

BinaryTB wrote:

I probably should've checked this thread while I was at PAX East. Ah well.

Anybody headed to PAX South?

We've got a thread for that! https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...