PAX: The Stuff You Should Have Checked Out

First of all, check out PAX if it’s at all feasible. It’s a good convention, makes you feel a little less like every person who likes video games is a weird jerk, an antidote to comments section of any website. Lots of neat stuff was on display.

I am almost certain I wasn’t imagining the fact that the Far Cry 3 booth had a tattoo artist. Which just… I’m not certain who, on the Friday morning of PAX, thinks to themselves “oh yeah, a tattoo. yes gotta get that done today” what the hell. There was also the typical mix of cosplay, from the amazing, like this Doctor Who thing or this incredible Mordin Solus to the weird like anyone dressed as Tingle. Oh, and I think I’m going to say anyone in a utilikilt counts as being in weird, horrible cosplay. Also some of the panels were cool I guess good times on the whole.

But! The important part of PAX is: to what games should you focus your rapt attention? What things will go from unknown to complete must haves right now?

Well… I’m hoping it’s absolutely none of the big names because I only had a Friday ticket and fuck waiting in lines. Seriously, they have to realize waiting in line for a preview trailer is the equivalent of beating your child, right? Like… it’s just… of course I know what it’s going to be like. That’s why I waited in line! I don’t need to wait in line to get PR material!

The Indie people on the other hand are desperate hardscrabble youths willing to put out. They all had extensive demos that I spent way more time with than expected.

The BEST GAMES AT PAX in no particular order:

-Spelltower: So, I really dislike the iOS. It’s somewhat irrational, mostly it has to do with Apple being just this side of madly cackling with every product release. They just definitely seem up to something and it makes me uncomfortable to give them money. And the nice bit has been that until recently it didn’t matter. The iPad is either a shitty computer or a giant version of your phone. This game though, so fun. It’s like Scrabble but good. You have, in the “real” Puzzle game mode, a few lines of random letters on the bottom. You need to make words in order to get the tiles to disappear. Every time you make one, the tiles rise another level. So like scrabble crossed with Tetris but more fun than that sounds.

-A Valley Without Wind: Okay I will admit I was incredibly wary of this one. I’m an AI War/Tidalis superfan so Arcen has my good will but it seemed like the art for this one was wicked wonky and it went from top-down to 2D platformer overnight for some reason. Really dodgy seeming! BUT then I played it. It’s a randomly generated metroidvania set in a weird post-apocalyptic world and you can shoot lightning at skeleton robots. AND every time you die, “you” stay dead, you pick a new character and can find your old shit and you can build towns over time and it’s just in general really neat. Also, I may have accidentally told the artist that I didn’t like his work at first accidentally. I like it now though, guy! It’s cool!

-Lawnmower Challenge: Another tablet/phone thing! This is just a simple, nice puzzle game. Straight up: mow lawn in the fewest steps. Adds complexity like keys and needing to cut down trees and etc etc as you go, apparently the largest level takes something like 800 steps for a perfect, which seems cool!

-Antichamber: This just is the bee’s goddamn knees. Alexander Bruce is the only man in games who understands what you can do with games. It’s a puzzle game which fine isn’t that innovative, but it’s in space that cannot exist. It requires you to think weirdly, it rewards you constantly with strange experiences, and it’s beautiful. It’s so much easier to do these weird escher worlds in a game than in any other possible medium and god damn this is a slap to the face of all other games, a slap wearing a glove that reads “try making something interesting booooom”.

-Guacamelee: So this is a pretty solid action/platformer that did not light my world on fire but also was just … happy. It was a happy time with a friend in co-op. Everything is designed so that whichever of you sucks never holds the good one back, you just sort of pop happily along suplexing skeletons and shifting dimensions. Playing around with switching between fire and water in the Temple of Fire/Water was pretty cute. Also! You can turn into a chicken if you want. And it’s even surprisingly funny.

-Super T.I.M.E Force: So I didn’t get to play too much with this but! It’s a game where you fight left to right, as tradition dictates, but when you die and restart, you fight along your past self. And you can save yourself in the past to grant an extra life in the present! It’s… super cool.

-Monaco: Holy shiiiiiiiiiit. It’s beautiful. It’s so cool. It’s like an action arcade robbery game. It’s a massively underused setting, that of robbing shit as a gang of gentlemen thieves, and it does it so fucking well. The map on screen is a blue-print, until you enter a room, and everything in your line of sight becomes “real”. I know that’s not the most important part of the game but making it look that cool says something about how much thought it’s had put into it.

-Skulls of the Shogun: So basically 4-player ghost-skeleton chess, but the movement rules seem more like Warhammer? Like, you get units at the start, you move them about in a certain circle radius, you fight other units, first to kill the general wins. After that there are tons of other minor and major tactical considerations, but the most important part is that it’s a super nifty board game essentially, with up to 4 players on one screen. Good times with good friends killing undead samurai.

-Miegakure: The only game Antichamber didn’t slap. It’s a reasonably simple platform/puzzler with the twist that you can move in 3 dimensions, but swap out one dimension with a 4th spatial dimension. So basically, you can travel through time/walls by moving through a dimension we don’t normally see. Like if you were a 2D person, the fact that a 3D person can’t be stopped by a circle would be weird. In Miegakure you get to experience what it feels like to look at 3 dimensional beings trapped in a cube and go “haha dicks just step around the walls”. Super cool.

-Kairo: A game about exploring massive, strange spaces and solving massive strange puzzles. It’s… I don’t know. If you’re like me you’re at half-mast just from the description. It’s all well and good to shit on Myst and everything, but I just have a real love of exploring strange spaces. STALKER, for instance, was less about shooting shit for me and more about finding weird old soviet structures warped by strange radiation. Same with Fallout. Looking at something in the distance and finding out why it’s there is just super cool. Like archaeology but with the boring edited out.

-Retro/grade: A shooter played backwards, and on the guitar. You move through “space lanes” by using the frets, you strum to pick back up the shots you fired, and you dodge the enemy shots that you’re backing into. It’s really neat. And surprisingly pretty! A fun rhythm … not shooter, catcher?

-Snapshot: Puzzle platforming again, but you can take pictures of things and drop them in the level to progress. It’s not like, crazy, you basically get a good way of teleporting small devices around to help you solve a puzzle, but it was solid fun stuff.

-Not Without You: I didn’t get to play it! But, it was a game about moving two little creatures in unison in order to get them into two escape hatches at the same time so they can escape a place! It’s cute, and insanely hard.

-Girls Like Robots: Simple fun slide-puzzle game. It’s really just a game about placing things in the right spot via a combination of trial and error and clever thinking. It’s hard to make it sound fun but I basically played until strong hints were dropped that I should stop playing because seriously stop taking up the booth jerk. Engaging, is the word.

-Nexuiz: Unreal Tournament. But… slightly different. Mutators that you can choose to activate, that’s fun. But basically jumping shooting fun times.

-Dragon Fantasy: A game starring the creator’s recently deceased father, that he obviously put a crazy amount of love into. Fun old-school RPG with a strange and affecting protagonist, a chubby ex-hero learning to hero again. He’s already developing the 16-bit sequel that looks cool as well!

And that is literally every game there. Because if you had a booth larger than my apartment with a single screen playing your preview trailer your game wasn’t really there, ass.

PAX East: Slam Bolt Scrappers

I have a friend who bought a PS3 exclusively for Metal Gear Solid 4. That friend is a stone-cold moron.

Slam Bolt Scrappers, a PSN exclusive, is enough to make me envy him.

It’s… it’s a very weird game.

It's more complciated than it looks.

Okay so, imagine you are playing Tetris. This is easy so far. Alright now instead of trying to keep the tower from growing, you’re trying to build the tower. Also, you get to choose what shape the blocks will be in. Also! You have to kill demons by controlling a little flying man in order to get those pieces. And if you feel like it you can take the fight directly to the other team (I played a game with two teams of two) and beat them up with your avatar. And as you build the tower, different color blocks create different mechanisms. For instance, Red blocks will form rocket launchers if you slot enough of them together, which then shoot at the other team’s tower and if they manage to totally kill it you win.

I think that explanation may have fallen apart at some point.

Basically though, the important thing about playing Slam Bolt Scrappers is that it’s great fun to be confused by it, but at the same time it really rewarded figuring out the mechanics. I’ll come clean: my team totally lost the round I played at PAX. But it was mostly because while we were flailing, the other team had figured out that because our tower had so few offensive emplacements, they could completely ignore defense, and go straight for as many red blocks in as many clever designs as they could manage. Our towers remained the same size for a bit, but their lasers and rockets dropped bits off of ours and knocked our little avatars out of the sky more than was necessarily called for, causing us to go even more on the defensive. The few times we blew bits off their tower, the blocks fell into some new and exciting deadly configuration.

I could find very little to dislike about the game, frankly. I will say that it took slightly too long to play in my opinion. A round was about 8-10 minutes I think, which was still quite fun but dragged a bit (particularly for my useless hangers on who were relegated to watching). It’s also a bit of a mish-mash, and it’s sort of confusing. But then again, part of the fun was flailing about until you figured out the clever little rules that came into play during different situations.
So basically: super fun game for all of you who bought a PS3 that you should definitely buy.

PAX East: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Oh no, baby. These abs are allll real. Of course, my hugs will crush your spine like paper.

So, the one panel we actually stood in line for at PAX was Deus Ex: Human Revolution, coming out in August from Eidos Montreal. This is because me and Chris both played the living shit out of the first game. I’ve honestly spent more time on the demo for Deus Ex than I have completing several full games.

To me, the original Deus Ex seemed like the future of gaming. It wasn’t the world’s greatest shooter (enemy AI was completely laughable), and it wasn’t the world’s most intricate stealth game (hide behind boxes was the law and the whole of the law), or the world’s most in-depth RPG but it was all of those things. And all of those things were really fun to do! The majority of the nostalgia about the game is focused on the multiple mission options allowing you to stealthily get by people without killing them, but I think the part that made it great was that all of those options are pretty viable and interesting. Everyone talks up the stealthy infiltration of Liberty Island without mentioning that one of your possible starting weapons was a massive goddamn rocket launcher. You could, if you so chose, blast the living heck out of everything put in your path. You could also win an epic boss fight in 3 seconds by remembering a bit of dialogue from a while back. And whatever you chose to do, you could kit out your character just the way you wanted and see how awesome that made the next fight/sneaky bit. I know the moment I got the ability to explode missiles before they hit me, I couldn’t stop laughing at the pathetic humans attempting to stop my berserk cyborg rampage. The sheer level of attention put in to making you feel badass for figuring out your clever solution to a problem was impressive. Rather than feeling like a kludgy assemblage of disparate parts, every gameplay “pillar” tended to enhance the others whether directly or simply by providing an interesting contrast.

Combine all that with a rather fine, if slightly disjointed and poorly acted, little story of intrigue and some very well-done twists and moments of surprisingly poignant characterization and the game stands the test of time. Seriously, go back and buy it if you haven’t already. It’s like $10. Make yourself a sandwich for lunch today and give it a shot. It’s on Steam.

So. Given all that rampant nostalgia, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am super Deus Excited for Human Revolution. How was the panel? Glad you asked:

It began with a sweet movie showing off the basic storyline and giving us a vision of Detroit in a utopian future where it is a futuristic dystopia instead of just a modern one. Then, a man who bore a strange resemblance to a young David Spade coming on stage to introduce himself as a Community Manager which pretty much means guy who doesn’t yell at people for asking really awful questions. He introduced the two people who would be showing off the game, Game Director Jean-Francois Ducas and Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête. The format was the designer would play the opening mission of the game, and the art guy would talk about what was happening and why.

A few elements of the playthrough stood out to me:

- You recharge your batteries (seriously, there are little cell-phone style battery indicators that drain with power usage) using power bars specially designed for cyborgs. Awesome.

- Incidental character dialogue seems pretty decently acted overall. More than a few characters were willing to chat for a long time about the situation, and there were a few nice little tableau scenes where people discuss things like whether or not it was a good idea to shoot that guy because now we’re all going to go to jail for so much longer.

- They showed off the stealthy options for the most part in this demo, and they seem pretty nicely done to be honest. It’s based on noise and sight-lines, and seems pretty simple but effective. You hide behind things to not be seen, and you move slowly to not be heard. You can grab a stealth augmentation that makes you basically invisible for 5-10 seconds, but it doesn’t make you inaudible, so people will still come check things out if you’re making too much noise.

- The AI seemed slightly too easily confounded by stealthiness. For the most part, it worked pretty organically. They check over their shoulders, see things out of the corner of their eyes, and hear odd noises if you’re not careful. They do, however, come over one at a time after announcing that they heard something, and it appears that taking cover behind something makes the AI basically not see you unless they come to the other side of the object and then turn around. That caused a few laughs, as the AI stood inches from the player, and then said “Must have been nothing!” and turned around.

- Non-stealth gameplay seems pretty solid! Like the original, I don’t think it’s going to win Best FPS Ever awards, but it was solidly engaging, satisfyingly lethal looking, and used a pretty simple cover system that will hopefully highlight how awesome you become late-game if you choose a bunch of combat augmentations. They only showed off the more generic weaponry, but they promised a “BFG” and some other weird weapons as the game progressed.

- NO SWORD. NO SWORD EVER. Well, except the cool arm-blade things. There were about 20 people who asked about that.

- The Augmentation screen seemed interesting. Once again, you pick a part of the body first, then you pick from a series of possible cybernetic augmentations. This system has been altered a bit though. They provide a pretty complete “tech tree” of what you can get up front, so you won’t be just sort of guessing whether you’ll want to pursue a certain line of augmentations.

- You won’t be getting all your new augs from stuff dropped around the level. Instead, you’ll be getting “points” based on mission performance, levelling up, and other factors (and well, occasionally stuff dropped around the level). These will be your currency for unlocking/upgrading. They explained that it’s supposed to reflect the idea that your augs are all “on” at the start of the game, but you only become comfortable manipulating them over time, and that’s reflected by your unlocking them. They likened it to a baby having arms and legs for a while before they coordinate anything with them.

- Hacking, although they only showed the simpler levels of it, seemed really interesting. It’s a game whereby you need to get from a starting point to an ending point through a series of “Nodes” with branching lanes connecting them. Go the wrong direction, or take too long, and you might end up having security activate and chase you down. Like I said with the Mini-Games article a year ago, it seems to tick all the right aspects. It’s something that takes a bit of skill to do, can be done quickly, and provides a reasonable way to “cheat” if you find it boring. Plus, the game design itself means that you can avoid this mini-game almost all the time if you’re willing to just run and gun, or gather the right intel.

- Takedowns are really neat! I mean, okay, they’re a bit old-hat by this point. But it’s a much much better way of dealing with stealth gameplay for minor-to-middling mistakes. Now, when someone finds you snooping in a room you’re not supposed to be in, you can snap their neck instead of circle-strafing while they run for the guards and then deciding to reload your save anyway.

- They mentioned that they’re still balancing everything out, trying to find the fun level. So guard perception distances, whether or not things take energy to do, and a few other configuration tweaks are all under discussion.

- They mentioned wanting it to feel “Deus Ex” like 3, maybe 5 billion times.

- This is a really really pretty game. The art design is choice. Even elements that make no sense, like easy-access swing-up vents, are stylish and well-considered given the gameplay.

- They didn’t show off the “conversation warfare” but they did mention a system that seemed basically similar to hacking: you can either know exactly what the person’s feelings/motivations are by finding things in the environment and talking to people, or you can sort of brute-force it with augs that give you a social advantage. Or you know, shoot them. The emphasis on multiple gameplay pillars seems really solid throughout.

- There are three difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, and Deus Ex

That’s about all I can think of for the panel! The presenters were really nice guys, they answered a lot of questions and showed off a pretty big chunk of gameplay. I’m more excited than ever for this game, guys. You should be too!

Here’s a shitty video someone took at the panel! Possibly without authorization! It shows a small chunk of the gameplay.

 

PAX East: Brink

So, I’ll say this right now: my friends were dead goddamn weight at this event.

“OOOOooooohhhh” they said “ooooh we don’t want to wait something like an hour or more in order to play a game we’ve never heard of just because you want to give it a shot.”

“OOooooohh”

Also, they were shitty photographers.

So, I didn’t actually get to enjoy the sheer splendor of playing Brink (scheduled for May 20th 2011 release, developed by Splash Damage) for real. I was relegated to peering over shoulders like some sort of street urchin. That said, it looked really nice. I love the art style, I liked the way the game looked in motion, and I liked that people seemed to pick it up pretty quick. People had 20 minutes to play, and most of them managed to get decent in that amount of time.

In honor of my look-but-don’t-play experience, I will treat you loyal readers to a bunch of Brink footage that’s come out since the last time I mentioned the game.

First off, a trailer emphasizing the cool stuff you can do as different classes:

The character customization is really quite crazy. Unnecessarily so. But I love giant elaborate character customization systems so that is just gravy.

Annnd here’s something nifty with a bunch of the guns featured in the game:

Honestly though, you know what excites me most about this game? I’ve heard characters with like a dozen accents. It fits the setting, it’s an under-appreciated aspect of customizing a character, and it’s just neat.

PAX East Impressions!

 

 

 

What’s PAX East, you say? Generally a good time is what!

PAX is a convention the was begun in 2004 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, better known as Gabe and Tycho, creators of the smash hit webcomic “Penny Arcade”. Basically, there have been some industry conventions and expos geared more towards insiders and press for a variety of game-related things for a long time, the big ones I know about are E3 for videogames, Gencon for tabletop/card/board games and the San Diego Comic-Con for comic books (and games and movies and…)

So, being giant dorks with an enormous and dedicated fanbase that shared a passion for a variety of games, Gabe and Tycho figured hey why not hold a just “we all pretty much like games” convention?  The first year drew a (relatively) small number of people, about 3,000. People were generally entertained, a massive LAN party was held, and a game competition called the Omegathon began the tradition of holding a tournament that featured an eclectic variety of games, in keeping with the spirit of the thing (the first round of the initial Omegathon was a dice game, the last was Pong).
So, good times. It grew, though. Shit did it grow. It’s sitting pretty at about 90,000 attendees in Washington and has spun off recently, producing PAX East in Boston in 2010. PAX East began at 50,000 attendees and has also grown crazy a lot. Between the original PAX (now called PAX Prime) and PAX East, basically almost 150,000 people attend these things over the course of the year.

And one of them was me! I was there! That’s what you should take away from this: it was important this year because I was there. Some other people I knew were there too, but they shouldn’t really figure in your opinion. They were there as dressing, mostly.

It was a nice time!

Initial impressions:

Pros:

-Really crazy big convention center, plenty of room for all the events

-Many interesting games on display on the Expo floor space with various levels of actually having shit to do at them. Some were tiny little booths where you could try an indie game on a Calecovision (Fez still isn’t out, and yet looks to be fucking finished), and some were humongous ridiculous extravagances without actually having anything anyone could play.

-A huge room dedicated to tabletop gaming stuff, including a “library” where we could try out games that crazy people who are super into boardgames buy that cost like $90

-The “Freeplay” area, though we only used it for like 40 minutes, was really pretty great. Just check out a game and some controllers, take it to a console in set up in another room, and hang out with friends. It was pretty fun to wind down there after they closed the main expo floor.

-There’s a charity that passes out cookies for donations. That was awesome.

-There was a stage for Dance Central, a game designed to test the limits of your shame, which was pretty entertaining to walk by.

-The one presentation we all went to, the Deus Ex panel, was pretty excellent.

-Brink. Brink Brink Brink Brink. I never actually stood in line to play because the Hangers On were pretty insistent that waiting an hour for a game they didn’t care about was somehow rude but it looked completely sweet.

-The Enforcers, a sort of ad-hoc community policing/organizing group were all pretty nice and helpful!

-We figured out that so long as we got at least 3 free shirts, the con paid for itself (assuming $15 per shirt)!

-Other people in attendance were generally very amiable, if shy!

-Getting to see shit earlier and in more detail than normal people makes you feel like a wizard!

Cons:

-Lines were insane, like Disney World. I got to play exactly a single game for actuals, because a group of four people isn’t going to just stop for an hour because one of us saw something interesting

-The panels on Saturday just weren’t really interesting. I mean, seeing a demo of Deus Ex was pretty neat because well shit that’s the game that powered my tiny heart for like 2 years when I was 12, but a lot of the ones I looked at seemed to be some form of “we show you something you saw already on Gametrailers”. I wouldn’t have minded more panels not promoting something. I was disappointed I missed the “You’re not a game designer” one.

-There was a lot of wasted space, and a ton of crowding. The Portal line snaked around the booth twice.

-There was way too little signposting, making it hard to find places. And I mean the entrance from the T and the actual main entrance queue were on opposite ends of the building. Also, it was tough to tell where shit was/what shit was on the expo floor. The space on the expo floor was very cluttered, and there wasn’t a clear design to the layout. Some booths were unclear about whether or not there was anything playable at them (*cough* Portal. The free shirt made up for it)

-Lots of events are really long and mutually exclusive. My friends and I could have played one game of D&D for funsies, but it would have meant missing absolutely all other content at the expo.

-Everything needed more space/consoles/computers/whatever. Because literally the entire crowd basically wanted a go at all the things there, there wasn’t ever a lull in any of the lines.

-The lack of a cookie brigade in my everyday life, now that it is apparent, is heart-wrenching.

Overall, it was a pretty positive experience. Fun times, good crowd, lots to see, and no one went home with any bruises. It was uniquely congenial, feeling like something put together more as a party than a trade show. I highly recommend that if you’re into anything remotely like a game, you check it out next March.

I’ll post in detail about a couple of things over the week! In the meantime, you won’t see those posts because I will not have made them yet.