Pax East 2011 - Day 2 Midday check in

by: Ben Berry - posted: 3/12/2011 11:15:00 AM

Yesterday, I started with a beer. Today, I started by retrieving my car from the downtown garage that I parked it in last night. Evidently, Gamers Gone Wild has longer hours than the average parking garage. The time at the show floor today started with the 1 hour press only access to the show floor, of which I made quality usage (#winning!). I was given a 15 minute talk and tutorial with a press exclusive primer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Then I was able to spend 45 minutes playing hands on with the game. Clearly, that hour of time deserves it's own post, so I won't divulge anything yet, other than to say that this is the only game on the floor I fully intend to have a personal as opposed to professional relationship with.

I followed that up with a visit to the Red 5 booth for hands on time with FireFall, their team based action shooter due out in late 2011. I'll give more details on this later, but there are two things I'd like to share here and now:
1. The game is graphically stylish, with subtle cell-shaded animation.
2. I was better at the game than the head of development, which frankly isn't saying much for his skills.

My next stop was with the folks from Nexon who showed me the new content for Vindictus, which will be available in just a couple weeks. This was nice to see as Vindictus is one of the better free-to-play fantasy style games on the market. The big news from Nexon is their upcoming Dragaon's Nest, which feels a bit Final Fantasy-ish, but with a decidedly different combat scheme. 

As expected, the number of folks in costume roughly doubled from yesterday. I would have guessed about 5% of the show attendees were in some form of thematic dress yesterday, with easily 10% in game-related garb today. I've been having problems getting photos from my phone but the best costumes of the show so far were two 10 year olds dressed as Gabe and Tycho. I will post the pictures later, but when I told them I was going to post the picture on the site, they were afraid to give me their names as they skipped school yesterday to attend the show. 

My last appointment today is to check in with the folks from Uber Entertainment on the haps with Monday Night Combat. A lot can change in a year, and it will be interesting to see what's next for one of the better selling games on XBL. I'm in the tournament at 1, so hopefully I'll have some better teammates than last year.