This is coming in late only because I was so tired from being up so late yesterday. Phew... Without further ado, Day 2!
I'll add this here, because it just came to mind. While I was walking to another showfloor, I saw that guy from the Sonic livestreams:
Sorry for the blurry picture, but I was taking it as I was walking. He was playing some trivia with the audience while showing off Sonic Forces. Not really a Sonic fan myself, but I thought someone might get a kick outta this
This day at the showfloor was all about the indies! But first, I paid a visit to the Bethesda booth to see how long the wait would be to try their VR demos.
Three hours ._.
It was three hours. I think I should've considered that lucky, because when I checked back later, the lines were completely capped for the day. To be honest, I'd totally wait 3 hours to try Fallout 4 in VR, but there are other things to see and not a lot of time, so off I went! All said, Bethesda had a pretty awesome booth (it was actually four booths combined into one megabooth). They had all their games in full force -- Wolfenstein: The New Order, the new Evil Within game, Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, and Dishonored.
Here's their cool Wolfenstein booth:
From here we went straight to the Indie Megabooth. The very first thing I saw when I arrived was Super Meat Boy Forever running on a few Nintendo Switches. I found out that if you pressed the Home button, the console would return to the Dev Kit menu, so while no one was looking, I snapped this pic:
There you go! The Switch Dev Kit UI in all its glory xD
I didn't make too many stops in the Indie Megabooth. I mostly just ogled the various games and kept walking. In the back of the booth, I found this!
There was this cool little shop that had Nintendo plushies for sale. They even had some colorful Squids from Splatoon! Really cute <3
Moving on, I stumbled across a Cartoon Network booth where they had an OK KO! game. That's a show on Cartoon Network if you weren't aware. So I gave it a try...
Aaaaaand I was utterly lost .-. That's my brother in the picture, playing for me because I couldn't figure out what to do. I still don't know what kinda gameplay this game has because I had no idea where to go, haha. It honestly seemed like some Flash game you'd expect a one or two man team to put for free on Miniclip or something. The pretty colors looked appealing from a distance, but the game is just ehhhhh.
We ran across the Xbox booth on our way to wherever the hell we were going next (we were just wandering at this point, haha). There was an Xbox One X on display in a glass case, and another one blown up with its various layers (motherboard, casing, etc.). Just... just look at this:
It looks fine and dandy at a glance, but when you really start to look at it... It's asymmetrical!! Do you see how the left end of the console is kinda hanging over the base? That's not a trick of the camera, that part is literally just sticking out for no apparent reason. The right side maintains the same leading as the rest of the box over the base, but the left side... I... My brain is screaming. Do not buy this console if you have OCD!!!
After this very troubling encounter with Microsoft's latest mental breakdown, we headed upstairs, where there was even more showfloor waiting for us. We ran into another area full of indie games and booths from local technical colleges with game dev programs, like Seattle Art Institute and DigiPen. As we wandered, two people got up off these blue beanbag chairs in front of two TVs playing The Escapists 2. Why not?
I've never played The Escapists, but hey, it wasn't so bad! They had the full game running here, and I accidentally loaded up an existing save on some super hard prison. I didn't even know the controls, so that went as well as you'd expect.
On the other side of these screens were another two screens with an upcoming Nintendo Switch title on them called Yoku's Island Express. And wow, was it something! I don't have a picture, but let me describe it. It's a pinball platformer. Basically, you control this little ant creature attached to a large ball and use the L and R buttons to control pinball paddles scattered across the world in order to traverse. You can also move the ant thing left and right to control the ball if its on the ground. Here's what I mean:
Very innovative and something I'll keep an eye on! Never played anything quite like it.
And now, probably the best exhibition in this whole event -- The Nindies Arcade! A small room they let a few people into where you can stay as long as you want and get to try out almost every new "Nindie" title Nintendo showed off in their Nindies reel in the last week and chat with their developers. The showfloor opens at 10am while this room opens at 11:30am, so around 11:40, we made our way here. We waited in line for about 40 mins to an hour to get in. Apparently most of the people in the room were family members of the developers and so were taking a long time, haha. Take a look at it:
Only a couple dozen people in a small room with all the Nindie titles scattered everywhere and developers showing their games off. I could write an entire article on my impressions of all the games I tried here (nearly all of them!), but I'll keep it short and tell you about a couple cool interactions!
I met the lead writer of Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic narrative-based adventure told from multiple perspectives about a highway in Kentucky known as "Route Zero." I had this one odd burning question, so I asked him, "How did you choose the font that you used?" For reference, this is what the font looks like (screenshot from the game):
The answer I got was actually quite cool! The font is an old typewriter typeface developed by IBM in Kentucky back in the day. I just found it so cool how fitting it was to the atmosphere and location of the game! I talked with him for a while about the game, and I asked about how easy the development process for Switch was. He actually showed me the game open in Unity and said that the development process was super simple because Unity can export to Switch. He also told me that he really liked the Switch's HD Rumble feature and that he was currently trying to figure out how and where to implement it in the game by release (early 2018). He was kinda shy and reserved, but a really chill person to chat with! Had a bushy beard and was the classic adult hipster nerd xD
I also got to talk with one of the four guys behind the Bit.Trip series, who was there showing off the newest title, Runner 3. I also asked him how developing a game on Switch was, and he also answered that it was far simpler than any other Nintendo console. I asked him why that was, and he explained that the Wii U and prior Nintendo systems used proprietary software that was hard to use and required a lot of learning time on top of actually porting things. Meanwhile, the Switch works very easily with Unity, Unreal Engine, and more, and is apparently super simple to work with. He couldn't get into any specifics because they were confidential, but it was a sweet glimpse into how much better the development pipeline for game developers is on the Switch!
And now, the other memorable interaction I had was with the lead artist on a game called "Floor Kids." This is a very interesting game, in that you tap the controller buttons in rhythm with the music, and you can tap it in whatever pattern you please, allowing for this very unique style of free dancing. I was intrigued when I first saw the trailer, and having gotten to play it, it was quite nice! So I got to talking with the artist on the game. We talked about pricing at one point, and he explained something interesting: Lower-priced games have lower review scores, so they're currently trying to balance what the game is worth with the negative perception of a low-cost game. I never knew that poor perception was an issue when pricing games to be super cheap. It gave me some really cool insight into why games are priced how they are. You know how people complain about expensive games? Well, the data apparently shows that a higher-priced game is viewed as higher-quality, even though consumers love cheap things. Enlightening! Eventually, we drifted into talking about multiplayer. He mentioned that multiplayer was a thing they were working on, so I asked him what kind of design challenges they ran into transitioning their normal, robust controls onto a much simpler single-joycon button layout. He explained to me their plans for multiplayer (which I won't mention here out of respect for information leaking, since the public doesn't know about this). Then, he walked behind a cloth screen with a Nintendo Switch logo emblazoned on it and pulled a Switch out of a bag. Apparently this was one of their company's Switch dev kits! It booted into the dev kit menu I posted a pic of earlier, and as I said, "Hey, is this a developer menu?" he motioned with his pointer finger and lips, "Shhhhhhhh!" Amazing xD From there, my brother and I got to check out their current prototype of multiplayer, something no one else has seen so far! And I have to say, the concept sounds really cool! I already really like the game, and the multiplayer is looking to be a very nice addition. Again, wait for them to reveal details on it, since what he showed me was just prototypes and I don't want to speak on their behalf. This guy was just awesome! I think I'm going to buy his game just from how great he was. Shameless promotion, you should check out Floor Kids!
Before you enter the Nindies Arcade, you get a little sheet of paper with all the game logos on it. When you play a game, you get a stamp. Get four stamps, and you get a Nindies pin and this cool T-shirt:
Yup, by far the best exhibition on the showfloor. It's not crowded, you get as much time as you want, you get to meet developers, and you get a cool shirt! Definitely an awesome time. We spent almost 3 hours in there!
The rest of the day went by with us trying various games. Of note, we tried this one VR game on the Oculus Rift:
It used the Oculus Touch controllers to control a space suit. You fly around a space station doing various things. The left controller controls thrust, the right one controls your direction. The game was honestly quite nice for the first 15 minutes, until the motion sickness kicked in. See, the game has you flipping around and doing maneuvers, and that causes you to get horribly motion sick. Obviously this problem of movement is present in all VR games, and so many decide to have a teleport system instead of player locomotion. Something the VR community will have to figure out and solve eventually.
Anyways, now to the BEST EVENT AT PAX.
The showfloor closed at 6pm, and at 8:30pm was....... the Telltale Annual Crowd Play! Basically, one episode of a Telltale-series game is played in front of a live audience and the audience gets to choose the choices. Newer Telltale games have a feature called Crowd Play where players can use their phones to vote for answer choices, similar to Kahoot. I attended this event last year, and we ended up crashing the hotel Wi-Fi lol, so instead of using the app, we shouted out our answers. To be honest, this was MUCH better than voting silently.
We left the showfloor when it closed and half two and a half hours to kill, so we ate some Subway and waited. I had brought my Switch with me, so while we were waiting, I was playing the Splatfest that was going on in Splatoon 2 around this time. I was not alone, as there were probably dozens of others doing the same thing, haha.
Show time! This year, the event was being hosted by Greg Miller (some of you might know who he is), and boy does he know how to hype up a crowd! This year was MUCH better than last year, as a result of him and also because, right off the bat, he said, "Everyone know what the Crowd Play feature is? That's the normal way to do this, but that's not the Greg Miller way! You're all going to shout out your answers, and I mean the entire line, not the buttons!" And OH MAN did this make it so much better! PICS:
(that's Greg looking intently at that laptop screen)
The game we played was Batman: The Enemy Within Episode 1, the second season of Batman: The Telltale Series. Honestly, this is probably one of the best episodes Telltale has made. The tension was great and the arc was just fantastic -- and that made for an even better Crowd Play! Imagine: hundreds of people packed into a room screaming choices at the screens, cheering at every epic moment, and shouting out all the quick-time prompts in unison! It's freaking electric, and something you HAVE to experience! As a side note, Greg said that he hosted another one of these events at ComicCon and that we were three times the crowd they were, so WOO, GO PAX!
At the end of the show, they gave out Steam keys for the Season Pass of Batman: The Enemy Within to everyone who attended! They did the same thing last year. And you know what? I now STILL own every single recent Batman game for free (except the LEGO ones). Story time: When I bought my current GPU, I got a code for Batman: Arkham Knight. Now, I'm sure you know how the PC port for that game was horrible, right? Well, as an apology, they gave everyone who "bought" the game all the other Batman: Arkham games for free. So just like that, I got all the Arkham games for free! Then last year, I got Batman: The Telltale Series at the previous Crowd Play event, and now I got the next season this year. So boom! Every single Batman game, for free. Feels good ^-^
Anyways, that wraps up Day 2! And seeing how it's so late now, I'm gonna end up writing Day 3 and 4's summary tomorrow as well. It's been an exhausting weekend, but great fun! Really enjoying my time at PAX. Aight, you'll hear from me again soon! Thanks for reading if you got this far!
I'll add this here, because it just came to mind. While I was walking to another showfloor, I saw that guy from the Sonic livestreams:
Sorry for the blurry picture, but I was taking it as I was walking. He was playing some trivia with the audience while showing off Sonic Forces. Not really a Sonic fan myself, but I thought someone might get a kick outta this
This day at the showfloor was all about the indies! But first, I paid a visit to the Bethesda booth to see how long the wait would be to try their VR demos.
Three hours ._.
It was three hours. I think I should've considered that lucky, because when I checked back later, the lines were completely capped for the day. To be honest, I'd totally wait 3 hours to try Fallout 4 in VR, but there are other things to see and not a lot of time, so off I went! All said, Bethesda had a pretty awesome booth (it was actually four booths combined into one megabooth). They had all their games in full force -- Wolfenstein: The New Order, the new Evil Within game, Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, and Dishonored.
Here's their cool Wolfenstein booth:
From here we went straight to the Indie Megabooth. The very first thing I saw when I arrived was Super Meat Boy Forever running on a few Nintendo Switches. I found out that if you pressed the Home button, the console would return to the Dev Kit menu, so while no one was looking, I snapped this pic:
There you go! The Switch Dev Kit UI in all its glory xD
I didn't make too many stops in the Indie Megabooth. I mostly just ogled the various games and kept walking. In the back of the booth, I found this!
There was this cool little shop that had Nintendo plushies for sale. They even had some colorful Squids from Splatoon! Really cute <3
Moving on, I stumbled across a Cartoon Network booth where they had an OK KO! game. That's a show on Cartoon Network if you weren't aware. So I gave it a try...
Aaaaaand I was utterly lost .-. That's my brother in the picture, playing for me because I couldn't figure out what to do. I still don't know what kinda gameplay this game has because I had no idea where to go, haha. It honestly seemed like some Flash game you'd expect a one or two man team to put for free on Miniclip or something. The pretty colors looked appealing from a distance, but the game is just ehhhhh.
We ran across the Xbox booth on our way to wherever the hell we were going next (we were just wandering at this point, haha). There was an Xbox One X on display in a glass case, and another one blown up with its various layers (motherboard, casing, etc.). Just... just look at this:
It looks fine and dandy at a glance, but when you really start to look at it... It's asymmetrical!! Do you see how the left end of the console is kinda hanging over the base? That's not a trick of the camera, that part is literally just sticking out for no apparent reason. The right side maintains the same leading as the rest of the box over the base, but the left side... I... My brain is screaming. Do not buy this console if you have OCD!!!
After this very troubling encounter with Microsoft's latest mental breakdown, we headed upstairs, where there was even more showfloor waiting for us. We ran into another area full of indie games and booths from local technical colleges with game dev programs, like Seattle Art Institute and DigiPen. As we wandered, two people got up off these blue beanbag chairs in front of two TVs playing The Escapists 2. Why not?
I've never played The Escapists, but hey, it wasn't so bad! They had the full game running here, and I accidentally loaded up an existing save on some super hard prison. I didn't even know the controls, so that went as well as you'd expect.
On the other side of these screens were another two screens with an upcoming Nintendo Switch title on them called Yoku's Island Express. And wow, was it something! I don't have a picture, but let me describe it. It's a pinball platformer. Basically, you control this little ant creature attached to a large ball and use the L and R buttons to control pinball paddles scattered across the world in order to traverse. You can also move the ant thing left and right to control the ball if its on the ground. Here's what I mean:
Very innovative and something I'll keep an eye on! Never played anything quite like it.
And now, probably the best exhibition in this whole event -- The Nindies Arcade! A small room they let a few people into where you can stay as long as you want and get to try out almost every new "Nindie" title Nintendo showed off in their Nindies reel in the last week and chat with their developers. The showfloor opens at 10am while this room opens at 11:30am, so around 11:40, we made our way here. We waited in line for about 40 mins to an hour to get in. Apparently most of the people in the room were family members of the developers and so were taking a long time, haha. Take a look at it:
Only a couple dozen people in a small room with all the Nindie titles scattered everywhere and developers showing their games off. I could write an entire article on my impressions of all the games I tried here (nearly all of them!), but I'll keep it short and tell you about a couple cool interactions!
I met the lead writer of Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic narrative-based adventure told from multiple perspectives about a highway in Kentucky known as "Route Zero." I had this one odd burning question, so I asked him, "How did you choose the font that you used?" For reference, this is what the font looks like (screenshot from the game):
The answer I got was actually quite cool! The font is an old typewriter typeface developed by IBM in Kentucky back in the day. I just found it so cool how fitting it was to the atmosphere and location of the game! I talked with him for a while about the game, and I asked about how easy the development process for Switch was. He actually showed me the game open in Unity and said that the development process was super simple because Unity can export to Switch. He also told me that he really liked the Switch's HD Rumble feature and that he was currently trying to figure out how and where to implement it in the game by release (early 2018). He was kinda shy and reserved, but a really chill person to chat with! Had a bushy beard and was the classic adult hipster nerd xD
I also got to talk with one of the four guys behind the Bit.Trip series, who was there showing off the newest title, Runner 3. I also asked him how developing a game on Switch was, and he also answered that it was far simpler than any other Nintendo console. I asked him why that was, and he explained that the Wii U and prior Nintendo systems used proprietary software that was hard to use and required a lot of learning time on top of actually porting things. Meanwhile, the Switch works very easily with Unity, Unreal Engine, and more, and is apparently super simple to work with. He couldn't get into any specifics because they were confidential, but it was a sweet glimpse into how much better the development pipeline for game developers is on the Switch!
And now, the other memorable interaction I had was with the lead artist on a game called "Floor Kids." This is a very interesting game, in that you tap the controller buttons in rhythm with the music, and you can tap it in whatever pattern you please, allowing for this very unique style of free dancing. I was intrigued when I first saw the trailer, and having gotten to play it, it was quite nice! So I got to talking with the artist on the game. We talked about pricing at one point, and he explained something interesting: Lower-priced games have lower review scores, so they're currently trying to balance what the game is worth with the negative perception of a low-cost game. I never knew that poor perception was an issue when pricing games to be super cheap. It gave me some really cool insight into why games are priced how they are. You know how people complain about expensive games? Well, the data apparently shows that a higher-priced game is viewed as higher-quality, even though consumers love cheap things. Enlightening! Eventually, we drifted into talking about multiplayer. He mentioned that multiplayer was a thing they were working on, so I asked him what kind of design challenges they ran into transitioning their normal, robust controls onto a much simpler single-joycon button layout. He explained to me their plans for multiplayer (which I won't mention here out of respect for information leaking, since the public doesn't know about this). Then, he walked behind a cloth screen with a Nintendo Switch logo emblazoned on it and pulled a Switch out of a bag. Apparently this was one of their company's Switch dev kits! It booted into the dev kit menu I posted a pic of earlier, and as I said, "Hey, is this a developer menu?" he motioned with his pointer finger and lips, "Shhhhhhhh!" Amazing xD From there, my brother and I got to check out their current prototype of multiplayer, something no one else has seen so far! And I have to say, the concept sounds really cool! I already really like the game, and the multiplayer is looking to be a very nice addition. Again, wait for them to reveal details on it, since what he showed me was just prototypes and I don't want to speak on their behalf. This guy was just awesome! I think I'm going to buy his game just from how great he was. Shameless promotion, you should check out Floor Kids!
Before you enter the Nindies Arcade, you get a little sheet of paper with all the game logos on it. When you play a game, you get a stamp. Get four stamps, and you get a Nindies pin and this cool T-shirt:
Yup, by far the best exhibition on the showfloor. It's not crowded, you get as much time as you want, you get to meet developers, and you get a cool shirt! Definitely an awesome time. We spent almost 3 hours in there!
The rest of the day went by with us trying various games. Of note, we tried this one VR game on the Oculus Rift:
It used the Oculus Touch controllers to control a space suit. You fly around a space station doing various things. The left controller controls thrust, the right one controls your direction. The game was honestly quite nice for the first 15 minutes, until the motion sickness kicked in. See, the game has you flipping around and doing maneuvers, and that causes you to get horribly motion sick. Obviously this problem of movement is present in all VR games, and so many decide to have a teleport system instead of player locomotion. Something the VR community will have to figure out and solve eventually.
Anyways, now to the BEST EVENT AT PAX.
The showfloor closed at 6pm, and at 8:30pm was....... the Telltale Annual Crowd Play! Basically, one episode of a Telltale-series game is played in front of a live audience and the audience gets to choose the choices. Newer Telltale games have a feature called Crowd Play where players can use their phones to vote for answer choices, similar to Kahoot. I attended this event last year, and we ended up crashing the hotel Wi-Fi lol, so instead of using the app, we shouted out our answers. To be honest, this was MUCH better than voting silently.
We left the showfloor when it closed and half two and a half hours to kill, so we ate some Subway and waited. I had brought my Switch with me, so while we were waiting, I was playing the Splatfest that was going on in Splatoon 2 around this time. I was not alone, as there were probably dozens of others doing the same thing, haha.
Show time! This year, the event was being hosted by Greg Miller (some of you might know who he is), and boy does he know how to hype up a crowd! This year was MUCH better than last year, as a result of him and also because, right off the bat, he said, "Everyone know what the Crowd Play feature is? That's the normal way to do this, but that's not the Greg Miller way! You're all going to shout out your answers, and I mean the entire line, not the buttons!" And OH MAN did this make it so much better! PICS:
(that's Greg looking intently at that laptop screen)
The game we played was Batman: The Enemy Within Episode 1, the second season of Batman: The Telltale Series. Honestly, this is probably one of the best episodes Telltale has made. The tension was great and the arc was just fantastic -- and that made for an even better Crowd Play! Imagine: hundreds of people packed into a room screaming choices at the screens, cheering at every epic moment, and shouting out all the quick-time prompts in unison! It's freaking electric, and something you HAVE to experience! As a side note, Greg said that he hosted another one of these events at ComicCon and that we were three times the crowd they were, so WOO, GO PAX!
At the end of the show, they gave out Steam keys for the Season Pass of Batman: The Enemy Within to everyone who attended! They did the same thing last year. And you know what? I now STILL own every single recent Batman game for free (except the LEGO ones). Story time: When I bought my current GPU, I got a code for Batman: Arkham Knight. Now, I'm sure you know how the PC port for that game was horrible, right? Well, as an apology, they gave everyone who "bought" the game all the other Batman: Arkham games for free. So just like that, I got all the Arkham games for free! Then last year, I got Batman: The Telltale Series at the previous Crowd Play event, and now I got the next season this year. So boom! Every single Batman game, for free. Feels good ^-^
Anyways, that wraps up Day 2! And seeing how it's so late now, I'm gonna end up writing Day 3 and 4's summary tomorrow as well. It's been an exhausting weekend, but great fun! Really enjoying my time at PAX. Aight, you'll hear from me again soon! Thanks for reading if you got this far!
