Post PAX......Post

Alliteration ftw I guess? Anyway, PAX has ended (a while ago, sorry about the delay) and it is time to regale you with stories of how great it was. I'll be posting pictures after this, so keep a lookout for those. I leave in a couple hours for the beach, so I'll try to have them all up by the time I head out. For this past week, I'll include it in my next big post which will be right before school starts (so look out for it on either the 21st or 22nd. Around that time, I'll also put up my summer album on facebook, which will have more pictures than you've seen on the blog. I do it that way because I trust facebook's minimal privacy settings more than I trust blogger's. I want anyone to read the blog, so I don't restrict it. On facebook, I can post more pictures of my family and not feel bad. Here, I try to keep pictures just to myself and friends. Enough of my rambling though, you came here to read about PAX! Or maybe you did not, in which case I don't care what you do though you are invited by all means to read this post. I decided to "do" PAX differently this year because of experiences and wisdom gained from going to PAX 3 times before. The following are the changes I made:

Don't take those huge-ass bags: They're really big and they stab people as well as you. When they get home, the bag will generally sit in my room for several months until I get sick of seeing it in February and I purge it along with most of the contents in it. Besides, I have a perfectly good Piper-Jaffray bag that can usually hold all that I need. Which brings me to my next thing.

Bring my own bag to hold stuff all three days: I always seem to forget to bring that bag on the first day which forces me to get one of those bags because I need something to hold all the stuff I get on Friday.

Don't take huge posters: Same reason as the bags, they just take up space and are inconvenient to transport though you can usually combine them into one super roll. Anyway, I have gotten many posters from PAX and I have hung up 0 of them. The only thing I have ever hung up on my wall that I got at PAX is a cool little Guild Wars picture. Since I always throw the posters out, I decided that I would avoid taking any this year. I broke that rule twice, but only because the posters were kind of cool looking and they were relatively small compared to the huge ones I got in years past.

Be selective: Of all the freebies I get at PAX, I throw away about 75%. I decided this year to take mostly just stuff I though would survive my purge later in the year. I think I did a really good job of that actually.

Keep headache medicine around me: Last year, I got one of my migraines at PAX and at the worst possible time (during Metroid Metal). From there, we had to bus back and it was not a fun 3 hours living with that migraine. I made sure I had excedrin on me at all times just in case one came on. It didn't thankfully, but it's good to be prepared.

Don't hesitate to take pictures: I didn't do very good here, but I am never really good about it. I wish I had gotten pictures of/seen more cosplayers. I'll try harder next year.

Friday:
We (Davis, Steven, and myself) met Eric (now joining "we") at Northgate. We went to the convention center and got there at about 10, right as the queue room was being emptied into the expo hall. The expo hall had grown from the year before. It's grown all four years actually. The first, it was just most of that main hall. The second year, the main hall opened up to its full amount and got filled out. Last year, it spread across the skybridge to that other area. This year, they added on last year's queue room to the expo hall. The queue room was in the concert hall from the previous year. The concert hall was in Benaroya (60,000 people for the weekend plus seeing how they expanded like that, a sure sign that PAX is getting way too big). In addition to all that, there was a small "hidden level" below the main room of the expo hall. It was pretty huge this year.

Back to us though, we first stopped by the Sega booth where they immediately recognized our Typing of the Dead cosplay and had to take a lot of pictures of us. We got some cool lanyards and then said goodbye before going off to explore the rest of the hall. There wasn't a ton of great stuff there (Blizzard wasn't even there :[ ). After seeing all that was there, we went back to the top floor near the escalators where the Omegathon stuff usually takes place. There, we met up with Chris (now joining "we"). From there, the five of us headed up to PC freeplay to try some Left 4 Dead 2 (Left 8 Dead?). The game was surprisingly hard, but we got about 2.5 hours of freeplay because it was early on Friday and everyone was busy in the expo hall, leaving PC freeplay very empty. After doing that, we decided to go get lunch because it was 3 in the afternoon. We ate at Taco Del Mar, then went back upstairs for some classic console freeplay. Chris watched Steven and Davis play Golden Axe while Eric and I played Contra on another console. We were able to beat it in that one sitting, so that was pretty cool. I had not yet beaten the original Contra and now I can say I have. I think Super C is a lot harder though, I might have to try it again.

After that, we decided to go check out Munchkin. We wound up playing that for about 4 hours while Davis played Inspectres and then another thing with Jon and company. The games of Munchkin were pretty intense and fun (at least when we weren't arguing about the sometimes vague rules). By the time we finished that, it was getting to be late. We decided to check PC freeplay, but i was about an hour wait to get in. We decided it would be best to just head home and get some sleep, so we did that.

Saturday:
For the weekend, we had the use of the garage where dad parks. It is really convenient because we don't have to worry about the buses and we can then arrive and leave whenever we want to. We got to PAX at about 10:30 because I was pretty late picking everyone up. When we got there, we met up with Eric (he had come earlier) and the five of us went and checked out the expo hall again. From there, we went to the hidden level to see what all the D&D stuff down there was about. It looked pretty cool, so we decided to sign up for some playing later in the day. There weren't a lot of spots, but Chris volunteered to head and do his own thing while we played with Jon and his brother later. The time slot was for later in the day though, so we decided to go hit up the D&D bus down the street from the main convention. We checked out the red box (kind of) while we were there and we decided to stick around while Davis attempted to win a signed one. He was successful, so that was pretty cool. It was a $20 value and it was signed by the artist, so that is a great thing to win for free.

By the time we got back, it was close to the time to go to our session, so we hung around the expo hall for a bit before doing that. Our session was not so great. The DM was really nice, but the adventure was so hard, we died half an hour into it only managing to kill half of the enemies in the first encounter. It was kind of embarrassing, but I must say, Eric did well for his first time ever playing D&D (even if he was just playing a fighter).

After that session, we went to go hang out at classic console freeplay. We tried out a four player fighting game at the recommendation of a guy working there. It turned out to be only 2 players (as Eric said "well the guy did say screw over 3 of your friends..."). After we got bored of it, I went and did the Goldeneye 64 tournament while Steven and Davis played Goldenaxe again. It had been a long while since I played Goldeneye and it showed. I lost the first round, it was embarrassing. It did distract me though from the fact that Steven and I had been screwed out of joining a spontaneous SC2 tournament (finding out about it was a good "FFFUUUUU" moment). We wound up doing some PC freeplay after that and we got some good vs mode Left 4 Dead 2 in. After that, it was getting pretty late, but we wanted to play Munchkin again, so we did that for a couple hours before leaving for the night.

Sunday:
We got to PAX closer to 10 again since I had my routine down. The last day of PAX is always kind of good and bad for me. On the one hand, I'm really tired by then and I want to get back to my regular schedule, but at the same time, I don't necessarily want PAX to go away for a year. We decided to cosplay again this last day because of the rare, but very positive feedback we received on our costumes. After doing some exploring in the expo hall, we went up and did some PC freeplay. After that, we checked out the hidden level again to see if we missed anything there before going up and giving the expo hall one last runthrough. After all that was finished, we met up with Sai and played some Munchkin until late in the day. By then, it was getting towards the end and I needed to get home to see the relatives in town, so we left.

Thoughts:
PAX was way too crowded this year, if it keeps growing, eventually it is going to be more than I want to deal with within a few years. I'll go next year though, I always like going while I can. Cosplaying is also really fun. I liked going as Typing of the Dead because the few people that got what game we were from were really excited to see it. I think we'll have to figure out something cool to do next year, we've got plenty of time for now.

Ok well I think I'll have to post the pictures on Monday. Maybe it will be Sunday night, depending on when I get back. Until later, peace out.