Dan Griffin's Blog
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PAX 2008 exceeded expectations
September 3, 2008
Penny Arcade Expo 2008 (PAX) took place this past weekend at the convention center here in Seattle. It’s becoming one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world, and it’s definitely already the coolest.
This was the first year I’d attended, though. What prompted me to attend? Well, for starters, I read a blurb (scroll to “Events,” about half-way down the page) in the Wall Street Journal late last week, claiming that 50,000 people would attend PAX. Plus, it was my birthday, so I figured I deserved to cut loose! Anyway, I’m glad I went.
First impressions: lots of young people walking around with their own Guitar Hero (GH) style guitars sticking out of backpacks. In fact, that style of game - GH and its competitor Rock Band - were the biggest theme at PAX this year. I counted at least three Rock Band stages, including one large one in the main Expo area, with long lines of people waiting to play. And there were at least three separate stations where you could play GH: World Tour - the new multi-instrument version, currently available only in demo.
Having played Rock Band, I wanted to check out GH:WT. In summary, the games are essentially equivalent. The station where I demoed it was a reasonably large “stage” in one corner of the Expo hall. It wasn’t elevated, but it had real stage lights and a few large LCD screens. We initially thought the the game was setup in “no fail” mode, but personal experience while on stage proved that was not the case! And now I’m reading blog posts that GH:WT won’t even support “no fail” mode.
We played Bon Jovi “Livin on a Prayer” and Pat Benatar “Heartbreaker” and had a great time doing it. The list of songs available at the demo station was pretty short, though. The publisher better include about 10 times as many songs if the new GH is going to compete well with Rock Band.
The drums setup for GH seems pretty cool - four regular pads plus two elevated pads as cymbals, plus a bass pedal. Still just four triggers total, though; the cymbals duplicate two of the pads. The bass pedal kept slipping forward on me; when are manufacturers going to learn how to make those things stick to carpet?
One additional observation - one of the cymbal mounts broke on me during our first failed Heartbreaker attempt. I didn’t even notice, but one of the attendants did. He promptly fixed it, and was really cool about it. I felt bad at the time, but in retrospect, I’m not a very big guy, and I don’t hit very hard. If the GH drum set breaks that easily, they’re going to get a bad reputation quickly. Drumset quality issues plagued early versions of Rock Band.
What else was hot? Wizards of the Coast had a huge sponsership presence, although I’m not much of a Magic fan. StarCraft II is pretty hot, which I find to be shocking, seeing as how the first version came out
more than 10 years ago. Functionally, the new version doesn’t look that different, although I can’t imagine Blizzard would want to mess too much with the winning formula of the original.
Warhammer Online had some buzz, but I was glad to see that the tabletop version is still being played as well (ah, human interaction).
Who wasn’t hot? Well, being a Halo fan, I stopped by Bungie to see what they had to show. Answer: nothing. Just a bunch of Halo death match pods. Boring. Come on, guys. What’s next?
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