PAX East: Day Two

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And now the thrilling conclusion of our tale...

Saturday morning we took the rare opportunity to sleep in, without child and in a city far from our own the Z's came easily. "Sleep in" is a bit of a misnomer I'm afraid, when you have been waking up for a year at 6 or 7 anything beyond that is gravy. We were up, showered and in a Dunkin Donuts by 9am. A Boston cream in Boston tasted the same as one Richmond, but the pleasure centers of my mind were all hands on deck just at the thought.

No repeats of our day one e-celebrity sitings at the repository of confectionery toruses, sadly. Upon entering the convention center at 10am though we saw the Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins). I was giddy and Crystal was more amused with my amusement than anything else. For the better part of the rest of the morning we toured the expo hall. The first place we went was to the Geek Chic booth to get a brief demonstration and pitch on the Emissary. An object I thought ownership of would be pure fantasy for the entirity of my mortal life, but was left in open mouthed amazement when Crystal expressed interest in it as our new dinning room table. I won't believe it till we are eating a meal at it, but there now exist hope.

There were tons of games to see in the expo hall as well. Split Second (pic) was a fun mix of Mario Kart and Burnout that will probably end up on my shopping list. Joe Danger (pic) caught Crystal's interest as a mix of Excite Bike and Trials HD with a cartoon aesthetic. Shank is a beat'em up that looks flipping incredible and will be mine on XBLA this year hopefully. Seeing Puzzle Quest 2 inspired Crystal to start playing the first game for the rest of the weekend. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (pic) was a game I had read about a number of times, but never played, I remedied that on Saturday. Finally, I played in (pic) a mini MW2 tourney and did horrible with default controls and free for all.

After a quick lunch in the mall it was back to the convention center to see even more. The board game rooms were packed (pic) with folks playing all kinds of games. Before we could checkout a game though I was drawn to the siren song of Surfacescapes. Simply put it is D&D 4th edition played on the interactive screen of a Microsoft Surface. Impressive stuff for sure, but better expressed through their videos. Drooling complete we played a quick demo of Zombie Dice (pic) and then checked out Ninja vs Ninja. Being two folks of limited time, NvN was a great game for us to cut our teeth on. Next we played Zombie Fluxx and were sold pretty quick on it. We ended up playing for more than an hour and then hunting for a set to buy. They were sold out, but I have since ordered it online.

Dinner was more of the same, a trip to the food court and then right back to PAX to get in line for the live Joystiq Podcast. We ended up waiting in line for an hour and a half (pic). Thankfully the time was spent sitting and playing our DSes. We were rewarded for our wait though, as the first 10 or so rows of seats (pics) had video games waiting for their recipients. Crystal got a copy of Tropico 3 and I the Force Unleashed: Sith Edition. The live cast (pic) was great, my face hurt from smiling and laughing through the whole hour.

We wrapped up our night with another line, for an hour this time, to see the Scott Kurtz's panel. A semi drunk Scott showed up on time and just started telling stories. He is an amazingly funny story teller, we laughed, things got emotional and we laughed some more. His panel ended up going an hour over and we did not get back to our hotel till 1am. A bit discouraging given our 5am wake up call for our flight, but well worth the lack of sleep.

Sunday was an early morning flight and reflection on a whirlwind weekend in Boston. We had a ton of fun in the city and even more at PAX. We are already planning to go at the very least to two days of PAX next year. Hopefully we can shoot for all three.