Pax South

Pax Deconstructed

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Not Prepared

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It turns out Illidan was right…. I was not prepared.  This morning I thought I would break down some things I learned this weekend while at PAX South.  Overall I had a fun time, but there were just some things that didn’t quite work out as planned.  The first year it felt like I had a lot of my time planned as I had numerous media appointments to attend to.  This year I was going for what ended up being the polar opposite, and that didn’t quite work out either.  Over the course of the weekend I walked roughly 25 miles, and either I have the beginning of the PAX Pox… or my allergies are just going haywire now that I am back in Oklahoma.  I am so insanely sore, and in truth I lacked the stamina for this conference.  Before the first year I had been walking every single day, and for the most part I took it all in stride.  This time around I am thirty pounds heavier and have not been walking at all…  and it took its toll.  Both Friday and Saturday I was up by 5:30-6 am and out at the convention by 8.  Then after wandering around largely aimlessly trying to sort out what to do for several hours…. I ended up leaving around 4pm each day and going back to the hotel room and crashing.  The first day this was largely due to a general lack of parking downtown, and having several of the major garages booked out by another corporate event.  On Saturday however it was absolutely due to the fact that I was simply “PAXed Out” and too tired to keep going.

The other thing that did not phase me during year one, but absolutely did during year two were the crowds.  There was this strange thing going on, where there were fewer big games at the convention…. but the crowds were so much bigger.  A prime example of this is the fact that on Saturday we were trying to find a table in the gaming area to play board games.  This area was over twice the size of it was during year two… but every single table was full with zero signs of anything opening up.  Similarly every other room in the convention seemed packed… the Jam room… the Arcade room… the Intel PC Gaming room…  all were just packed with people.  While the first year did not bother me at all when it came to crowds…. this year definitely did.  It makes me pretty certain that there is zero way I could handle the type of crowds that a PAX prime has.  By the time I left at 4 pm, on top of the exhaustion…. I just needed some peace and quiet and a place to sit down and chill.  I realize I could have probably gotten this in the AFK room…. but given that every other area was packed…. even the first aid station, I figured that would also be completely packed.  I don’t want to give the impression that I did not enjoy myself, because I absolutely did… it was just a much harder convention for me than the first year.  Year one was this super chill event, and it has just gotten considerably bigger.

The People

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For me at least this con was absolutely about the people.  The folks that were in attendance were…  Ashgar, Thalen, Paragon, Rae, John her brother, Tick, Dallian, Damai, Rowan, Sctrz, Genda and his wife, Exale and Maovis.  This at least was the number of people that I actually managed to meet up with at least for a period of time.  The problem is that it is really damned hard to have a meaningful amount of time with fourteen different people, that may or may not be in the same place.  I felt like I was constantly trying to meet up with different groups of people and failed miserably at spending much time with any of them.  Then there were other folks that I meant to meet up with, but never actually saw.  Early on I had every intent to try and meet Fynralyl and Psynister on the way down, or Beau and Leala…  but I simply ran out of mental bandwidth to try and juggle everything.  In theory I could have come up with ways to make it happen, but in trying to keep my schedule super flexible…. I spent a good deal of time simply doing nothing.  So the truth is next year… a bunch of things need to change.  While I hate having every moment of the day scheduled out, I feel like I am going to have to make some hard and fast appointments so that I can feel like I actually made the most of the weekend.  I also plan on making some more media appointments because they did a great job in the first year of breaking up the day… and also giving me a quiet place away from the crowd to sit down and talk about games with the developers.  To facilitate that however I am going to have to really get my shit in gear and get that Media pass.

Now that I am home… I just feel overloaded.  On top of the sore throat and sore everything else…. I am just feeling like I need to hide out from the world for awhile.  It is situations like this that make me realize that I am in fact introverted, regardless of how hard I try and be extroverted.    The happiest moments of the weekend for me, were introducing people to Ultimate Chicken Horse, sitting in the board game area and playing Codenames, or just chilling out and collecting street passes with Dallian early in the morning.  Had I been able to do more of that I probably would have been fine staying considerably longer, but there was one period where I walked non-stop for two and a half hours trying to sort out what the hell we were doing…. and after that, I was pretty much beat.  Essentially I think the key for me to be able to function at this bigger PAX Prime is to have better planning, which is not exactly a strong suit of mine.  I tend to do best when I roll with the punches, but there are far too many punches in this case to be able to roll with them.  I will say it was amazing to get to hang with all of these people in person, but I just feel guilty that I didn’t get to spend all that much time with any one of them.

Next Year

All of this said… I am absolutely going next year.  This is the only PAX that is really viable for me to attend.  Also we have made it into and event that my wife actually looks forward to for completely different reasons.  The big thing for me is going to be sorting out the parking thing.  That first day… was a huge damper on the weekend, and it made me super paranoid about finding parking on Saturday.  I think I am going to try out the bus system next year, that way I can get downtown without having to drive… which also makes me less paranoid about partaking of adult beverages.  Next year I also need to take more photos… because in the entirety of the weekend I only took five or six.  I think the biggest thing however is going to be scheduling actual lunch and dinner times with different groups of people so that I feel less like I abandoned folks.  I got to spend the least amount of time with Rowan and Sctr and Genda and his wife, but in both cases I get to the Dallas area more often than I do San Antonio, so hopefully I will be able to meet up with them on another occasion soon.  The biggest goal however is to be a much smaller person by the time PAX 2017 rolls around, because that thirty pounds and lack of regular walking made the biggest impact on my enjoyment.  Once I made it back to the hotel each night, I was just dead to the world.  I am so thankful that I ended up taking today off from work, because if I had to roll back in after travelling yesterday, and just the sheer exhaustion of the convention…. I am not entirely certain I would be able to function.

 

 

 

 

Parking Debacle

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Pax Day One

The first day of pax was interesting, mostly because it started off on a bad foot.  I wrote about yesterday how I failed to charge my cell phone over the course of the previous night.  The positive of that however is that I learned my power bank does a phenomenal job of charging phones, and by the time it took me to drive from the hotel to the convention center it was sitting around 63% from the previous 15%.  Last year there was a plethora of parking options up and down Commerce and Market streets, but unfortunately yesterday every single lot had a full sign.  I finally ended up parking in a surface lot, having to pay $20 for 8 hours.  On the way to the convention I stopped and chatted with one of the attendants at the garage I parked in last year, just to find out what time of the day it actually filled up.  Turns out that some other corporate event is going on downtown, and that a company had booked pretty much all of the city run garages, greatly reducing the amount of available parking space.  She said that today they would be open again, so here is hoping that I can get into the garage I am used to.

As far as the day itself, it took a little while to connect with everyone.  I met up with Dallian in this coffee shop area near a giant Pax South sign, where we milled around until we joined up with Paragon and Damai… and eventually Ashgar.  Since we had not heard anything from Thalen yet, we wandered into the con and around the floor.  All the while I was on lookout for trying to sort out where exactly my first appointment was.  Turns out it was downstairs at the river level…. which is not something I even knew existed.  The rooms down there were super nice however, and in truth I liked them better than the area the Motiga suite was last year.  When I went to scope the place out I got nabbed by Deanna from Perfect World, and ushered into their room to hang out while waiting on time for my appointment.  They had this really great spread of brownies and other pastries, but unfortunately… I had just eaten a large breakfast at the hotel thinking it might be awhile before I found food on the con floor.

Livelock

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I will of course be writing a proper piece for MMOGames.com once I have more stable internet, but I still wanted to talk a little bit about it this morning.  I have to admit I was not really sure what to expect from all of the press announcements leading up to me actually getting to test it.  I had a basic idea that it would be a top down shooter, but I was not really certain past that.  I turns out that the game as a whole is a love letter to the twin stick shooters of the past, updated and infused with modern gameplay mechanics.  So in my head it feels like Ikari Warriors meets Diablo meets some almost MMO mechanics.  When the game is finished it will include three mechs that have specific niches, and in the discussion they mentioned tank/healer/dps holy trinity.  It seems as you level up your character to 30 you unlock ways to swap up your abilities and make them more defensive or more damaging.  I asked the ever important question about how big of a detriment a new player will be to seasoned players… and apparently the game is more skill based.  Level 1 characters and Level 30 characters have the same health, and the upgrades to abilities don’t really crank up the damage value, but instead change the way they work.  So in theory this might be a great game for impromptu co-op with friends.  That has always been the challenge in our own little circle, that if someone was not there on the first night… it is often difficult to play catch up and be viable until everyone simply hits the level cap.  The other nice thing about this game is that it is a straight up $19.99 game, and I grilled them a bit about future monetization plans.  It seems like right now they have no plans to offer a whole bunch of DLC characters or anything like that… they are just trying to design a really tight three player co-op experience and that is in many ways refreshing.

Ultimate Chicken Horse

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The other game I really want to talk about from yesterday is Ultimate Chicken Horse.  Now this is a title we have talked about before on AggroChat on our PAX Prime Show.  While Tam, Kodra, and Ashgar tried to explain the game to me… I didn’t really “grok” it until I was sitting there yesterday with a controller in hand playing it myself.   The idea is pretty simple…  you have a platformer that you compete with up to four other players.  The level designs are pretty classic and relatively simple to complete.  What makes the game amazing is that each round, each player gets a block that they can place somewhere in the level.  Some of these blocks help the players out like springboards or platforms…. and others will kill the player like crossbows that fire arrows, or spiked floors.  The goal of the game is the make the level difficult enough for at least one of the people you are playing with to die…. but not so hard that you cannot beat it yourself.  If everyone beats the level… no points are awarded.  If no one beats the level…  no points are awarded.  Things start to get really insane about five rounds in when the map becomes a field of death and destruction.  I can already tell this is going to be one of those must own “go to” games for hanging out with friends.  The best part about it is the fact that it does couch co-op and does it amazingly well.  The only problem I am going to have is that I am not sure if it supports network co-op, and I simply don’t have a group of people to play it with on a regular basis in local mode.  I am absolutely going to buy the game regardless because I want to support this flavor of insanity.  If you get a  chance, you should totally check it out when it ends up on steam shortly.

Ending the Day

The big problem with the day yesterday, was the fact that I was super paranoid the entire time about the crappy parking option I had.  Previously the $10 lots were for as long as you cared to stay, meaning I could be there late at night without much issue.  I talked to the parking attendant about the lot I happened to be in, and she mentioned that it was a privately owned lot and they were super quick to boot cars.  So the entire time while roaming around Pax I kept looking at my phone to check when it was time to walk out and get the car and try and move it to someplace better.  I finally headed out around 3:30 in the afternoon to do that, and in the time it took me to exit that surface lot… someone had already taken my space.  I drove around Commerce and Market streets and all of those lots still showed the “Full” sign, so I circled back around to the lot I had parked in… which now had a barricade across its entrance as well.  So everyone went off to Dave and Busters, and I instead went to the Hotel and played 3DS until my wife and friend got in a few minutes later.  Once the traffic had died down we went out roaming for a bit, because we needed some pop to throw in the hotel fridge.  The day took a lot more out of me than I realized, and I ended up crashing really hard about 9 pm.  Over the course of the day I walked a little over 15,000 steps, which is something I am just not used to right now.  It was fine and well while I was in motion, but once I got back to the hotel room… it took its toll.  Overall was a really good first day, other than the parking bullshit.  Next year I am going to sort out the bus system and just use it, because in theory there is a bus that picks up right outside this hotel and drops off near the convention center.

 

Journey to Pax

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Travel Day

Yesterday was a very long day, and by the time I reached the hotel room last night I was pretty out of it and ready to crash.  In theory I should have blogged then, because now I feel like I am running late by stopping to do it this morning.  The travel itself went really smoothly.  The most interesting part about it was just how the world gradually warmed as we went south.  It was in the mid to high 30s when we left Oklahoma, and by the time we hit Austin it was a balmy 60 degrees out in the evening.  The other big revelation is that how much faster it seemed when not driving in the pouring rain like we were last year.  Our trip to Pax 2015 was honestly pretty miserable, and we got caught up in a quagmire of construction between Waco and Temple that put a massive crimp in the entire trip.  This time around we were bracing ourselves for the same thing to happen, but honestly the only really bad traffic we encountered was when we finished eating dinner in Austin and were attempting to leave town at around 7:30 in the evening.  As we went through the downtown area it was this irrational bumper to bumper traffic where everyone alternated between riding the gas and brake.

As far as the trip itself we meandered our way down taking in a bunch of random stuff along the way.  We however made significantly better time than we did in 2015, and as a result we had quite a lot of time to kill when we finally got to Austin.  I think more than anything that is the point at which I started to slow down.  Up until that point I had been constantly in motion with a clear destination in mind, and without that driving me I lost steam quickly.  By the time we actually met some friends for dinner I was pretty out of it, and while I attempted to keep a robust conversation going…  inside the world had turned into the “wah wah, wah wah wah wah” of the adult characters on the peanuts cartoons.  So when we finally hit the hotel room, we shuffled everything up from the car and attempted to “set up base”.  I would not have even set up my laptop last night probably, but my wife needed to use it to remote into something in her school.  The problem is… in my rush to make that happen…  I kinda did a half assed job of getting everything hooked up.

The Mishap

In the process of hooking things up, I connected my USB hub up to the laptop, and into that I connected my phone and the powerbank.  When I got up this morning, raised the lid of the laptop… and expected to be able to wiggle the mouse and have the screen come to life.  The problem is… nothing happened.  I thought maybe there had been a critical update or something that came through…  so I attempted to power on the laptop…  nothing happened.  Then it dawned on me…. that I had hooked everything up… except the laptop power supply.  So that means as a result my phone is also now sitting at 15%.  So in theory…  I get to test my powerbank early in this process because there is no way I can handle existing with only 15% battery.  At the moment I have it hooked to a high powered ipad style wall charger, and a usb3 cable… so here is hoping that while I eat breakfast it will continue to charge and maybe be up to 50% or so.  However for most of the day I have this feeling that I will be leaving it hooked to the power bank.

The awesome thing is that last night the whole group text thing seems to have worked, because after I sent the initial test message I crashed and crashed hard.  Over the night there were seven messages in that thread and it seems as though everyone met up at the Hard Rock.  There is a bit of a feeling of “missing out” because I am staying nowhere near the convention.  That said… after the drive there is no way I could have functioned.  I realize that Thalen made a longer drive, and he apparently joined in the reindeer games…  but yeah…  I was personally toast.  So at this point I am going to wrap this thing up, head down and grab a quick breakfast and then finish packing my bag for the day.  The goal is to be parked at the convention center around 8 am, and hopefully meet up with folks then.  There are a bunch of anxieties that I am trying to keep pushed down so that I can function normally today.  However if it goes anything like last year I am going to have a really fun time.

Pre-Travel Post

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The Night Before

I am going to warn you ahead of time…  I took some Benadryl earlier and am fading extremely quickly.  I take no credit for this post making a damned bit of sense tomorrow when you fine folks will actually read it.  Tonight did not go exactly as planned.  The goal was to get home, change the ferret cage and start packing technology.  At least on one level that worked, and I have at the very least everything laid out and ready to pack…. but will get into that more later.  The first obstacle was pulling my laptop case out of the closet….  which was inexplicably covered in a few tiny tiny spiders.  I am pretty sure a few of them bit me, either that or the paranoia just makes it seem like everything is crawling on me.  The original thought was to burn the laptop bag and call it good…  but then I remembered that I actually rather liked this laptop backpack… and also I needed it to travel.  So I did my best to de-spider the thing and get my laptop packed.  However in the process I kicked up an inordinate amount of dust…. which is where the Benadryl comes in as a desperate attempt to stave off triggering my asthma.

After that the plan was to start packing my messenger bag.  So I got together my power bank, and tested it.  It for some reason shipped 100% charged, which shocked the hell out of me.  It also seems to have a flashlight built into it…. that I managed to turn on and it took a good ten minutes of pressing buttons to get it to turn back off.  I also managed to test my digital recorder, and it seems like it is going to do a damned good job of recording any impromptu interviews that I get to do from the convention floor.  It is also going to hopefully be the basis of a “LunchCast” concept I am kicking around where I record little solo podcasts on my lunch break while sitting in the car.  So back to the bag… I was walking over to the bar where I had it laying… when Kenzie our kitten was pawing at it like she was trying to cover something up.  Turns out she had just pissed right in the middle of the bag, which leaves me pretty much zero options.  The bag itself was canvas with leather straps….  and at this point it is ruined unless I can somehow wash it.  With nothing much to lose, I threw it in the washing machine with a big fully blanket hoping to cushion the insanity that is the clasps clanging around in there.  For the most part it seems to have worked, and while it needs a little bit more time to dry…  it seems to be mostly in one piece.

The Backup Plan

In theory that should work, and if it doesn’t I guess we will find something else that will work on the drive down.  Right now the plan is to get up crazy early, pack our clothing, pick up our passenger and get on the road hopefully by 6 am.  From there we meander our way from Tulsa to Austin, where we are meeting some friends of my wife for dinner.  Right now I am just hoping that in my pre-coffee state I can remember to pack everything correctly.  Originally I had planned on bringing my chromebook, but since PAX does not actually have public internet…  it kinda makes a chromebook mostly useless.  Instead my idea is to talk to myself… and by talk to myself I mean record voice notes if there is anything I need to jot down quickly.  Last year I spent most of the first day of PAX alone, and it was not until Saturday that Rae and Ashgar actually arrived.  This year however I should have one or two people to hang out with on Friday, meaning I will have less time to sit in a quite place and bang out post ideas.

It feels like I am actually packing fairly light this year.  I did manage to get my 3DS all patched up and Final Fantasy Explorers downloaded and installed, so that at least is done.  That is pretty much going to be my go to for standing in line diversion.  Past that I will have my phone and will probably be tweeting throughout the day on twitter.  I think I am in a pretty good state as far as anxiety goes, because if tonight didn’t break my will…. I don’t figure anything can.  I am hearing reports that construction was pretty horrible between Dallas and Austin today as folks drove it, so I am definitely not looking forward to that.  The big positive however is I am driving down in a newer vehicle, that is way more comfortable to long trips.  Additionally in theory if I get tired of driving, I can probably convince either my wife or our passenger to trade off and take the wheel for awhile.   The greatest irony of going to a gaming convention is that it means until I finally get home Sunday night… I am going to be playing far fewer games than at any other point of the year.  If all goes as intended, I will get to meet a bunch of folks that I have gamed with for years and Pax South will be yet another amazing experience.