The Video Game Revue

PAX 08

Sunny and I just got back from PAX 08, which was our second PAX. I don't have much of a basis for comparison since I can only really compare PAX 08 with PAX 07, but this year's PAX felt a lot like more of the same to me, except for being more crowded.

One of the high points this year was watching The Gamers: Dorkness Rising on a whim (we haven't seen the first one). For the first five minutes or so I thought that Sunny and I might end up having to discreetly leave, but the show turned out to be very entertaining and even made me nostalgic for table-top role playing. It's nice to get blind-sided by something that I assumed wouldn't be for me and end up having some stuff to think about afterward.

On the exhibition floor, Sunny got her first exposure to Little Big Planet (I'm already bored with all of the hype surrounding it and just want the damned thing to be released already, but Sunny hadn't seen a demo before), and I got to see a bit of Left 4 Dead. Both of us were wide-eyed and giddy at our respective eye candy of choice. There was other cool stuff happening too, but I didn't get my picture taken with anybody, whereas last year I had my pic taken beside a Big Daddy statue for BioShock, and with a Parappa the Rapper mascot. I also didn't score much free stuff, but Sunny and I did get a couple of free MtG booster packs--which is to say that we lost in a pair of demo matches to other people, who got free tournament packs instead of mere boosters. At one point I was tempted at a $45 copy of Seiken Densetsu 3 (cart only) and at another I saw a $50 copy of Guardian Heroes (box, no manual), but in the end I couldn't shake the feeling that if I really wanted that stuff I'd just order it on the internet.

I can't emphasize enough just how much the increased population of PAX changed the event. Last year when we lined up for Console Freeplay, there were only four people ahead of us. This year we had to take a number, go do something else for an hour, and come back before our number was called. (We ended up playing Lego Indiana Jones. It was alright, but not any better than Lego Star Wars--maybe not even as good.) I suggested that we go watch a screening of The Guild, and when we got to the Raven theater room, the lineup was so massive that we decided to go find something else to do.

And yet even with the drastically increased population, it didn't seem like people had discovered Juice It, which is seriously the best place to grab a snack or even a light meal anywhere in downtown Seattle. The guy who runs that place is the closest person to a living saint that I know of, and it was the only place open in the convention center where one didn't have to wait in line for half an hour to get something.

I should explain that one of the mandates that Sunny and I had for this year was to spend less time at PAX and more time trying to see Seattle. This was a good year for it too, because PAX was busier and it already felt like we'd seen a lot of it from last year. On top of that, we hadn't been to Seattle before (except the year before, when we barely ever strayed from PAX) so this year we ventured out a little.

Sunny and I aren't huge on "touristy" things when we travel. Generally what we want is to find some good restaurants, check out the local shopping, and try to get a sense of the urban culture where we're at. It's a little hard to describe what we do, honestly, because we're mostly home-bodies, but for the few things that we tend to get out for at home (eating out being chief among them), we generally try to do the same things when we travel. There are often exceptions to this rule.

The reason I explain this is because we ate out at three different restaurants and the best of the three was merely good, not great. The first of the three was by far the most expensive: Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. We had a fairly pricey steak dinner ($60 per plate), and they drenched everything in butter. I'm not exaggerating for effect: we were truly assaulted by a barrage of butter, sour cream, and hollandaise sauce. It was as if they measure the economy of their food in calories.

We were still recovering from the massive dinner the night before when we decided to hit up a "French" restaurant near the Pike marketplace for lunch. We ordered some croque monsieur sandwiches and they were absolutely caked with cheese (if they'd only been able to layer on the ham to match, I might not have minded). Our salads were also drenched in oily dressing, to the point where the lettuce collapsed under its own weight. Again, it was a case of the food being much heavier than we were prepared for, and I started to feel a little ill. My body was clearly telling me that it was fed up.

As we started to look around at various other lunch places, I started to get the sense that it was the same story all over the place. There were potential exceptions that we didn't get to explore, like a promising looking chowder spot. Still, I had the sense that there were more places we'd want to avoid than places we'd want to eat, and that surprised me given that we weren't far from home. Juice It became our lifeline with their remarkably un-heavy food.

The third big dinner we had was at a place that will be familiar to many PAX attendees: the Dragonfish Asian Cafe. The food there was pretty good, and I would gladly eat there again. One of the things we ordered was the seared Ahi tuna, which was great (be prepared for raw fish, of course). We also ordered the Singapore Noodles, which in my opinion didn't have enough curry and should have some kind of spicy sausage in them. The whole experience was a welcome change of pace from the steak dinners from the night before.

One thing that surprised me was the lack of sushi restaurants in the area. Where I live, sushi joints are as numerous as coffee shops (and the coffee shops are almost as numerous as they are in Seattle). I thought that the Dragonfish Cafe would qualify as a sushi restaurant, but while they do serve sushi, they were much more generically Asian-American than west coast imitation Japanese. Where downtown Seattle dwellers go for udon noodles and raw salmon remains elusive to me.

We concluded PAX by watching the Omegathon final. I was impressed by the choice of Vs. Excitebike as the final event, but it took too long to start (they ran rather late) and was over all too soon. Last year's Omegathon was definitely more exciting, even if the unveiling of Halo 3 did add a commercialized tinge to the proceedings. Sunny also got bathed in body odor from a tubby guy who appeared out of the crowd in front of us very suddenly after we'd already been standing in our spot for quite a while. I considered saying something to the guy, but in the end I felt too sorry from him--I imagine that he had probably wandered our way after being ridiculed in some other part of the crowd. Smelly geeks are, unfortunately, a common reality at these sorts of conventions, and it's better just to bear with it sometimes. Sunny and I still joke about the "dancing hobbit" who wafted an unpleasant breeze of body odor through our general vicinity during one of the concerts at PAX 07.

Overall I had a great weekend and many fun experiences, but I'm reluctant to predict that Sunny and I will go again next year. PAX is fun, but it can also be a stressful assault on the senses with its long waits in line, bombardment of advertisements, flashing lights, loud noises, and funky odors. There's a low level of culture shock involved too: as much of a gamer as I am, my experience with gaming hasn't been shaped by PAX nearly as much as many of the other attendees, and the gaming culture that I call home isn't always compatible with what a stereotypical Penny Arcade fan considers to be gaming culture. I also haven't warmed up much to Seattle, although most likely I simply haven't had enough time. Maybe we'll just take a break from PAX next year and see what it evolves into in the meanwhile. PAX continues to undergo some growing pains, and I hope that it doesn't lose any of the distinctive character that makes it such a great community.

posted by Parappa @ 11:05 PM