PAX 2010

You might be wondering what PAX is. For the un-informed, or rather the non-nerd crowd, PAX stands for Penny Arcade Expo. The expo was created in 2004 and is held in Boston and Seattle. It's basically a big giant nerd-fest where gamers of all types (video, PC, and tabletop) come together and check out the latest and greatest their chosen outlet has to offer. This year, since we are conveniently living in Seattle, Glenn bought us tickets for one day.

I have to say, it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera with me, so I have no pictures to document the experience. Glenn probably has some on his phone. The first place we stopped at was the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit booth. There were ten or so stations set up so you could try your hand at the new and improved, and very good looking, NFS:HP. The last time I played this game was back when I still had a PSOne, so that was a really long time ago. I loved the new version of the game, and it's graphics are really nice. I might even say it rivals the hotly anticipated Gran Turismo 5. I even got 1st place.

After that we checked out the NBA Jam on the Wii. I wish I could say I liked it more, but basketball is just not my thing, and the two other guys we were playing with were playing dirty so it stopped being fun pretty quickly. Glenn really liked it though, so I guess we'll have to add that to the ever growing list of video games we want.

We wandered around some more and got to see all the cool things that Sony and Microsoft are working on and the main battle between the two is who is going to have the cooler "Wii-Like" gaming experience. Microsoft has the Kinect and Sony has the Move. Kinect seems to be the winner though, especially because it doesn't require controllers. Glenn played a demo of the Kinect and really seemed to enjoy himself. Honestly, anyone playing Kinect seemed to be having a great time, whereas people using Move mostly seemed confused.

I also got to play Gran Turismo 5. I absolutely cannot wait to hold my very own copy of GT5 in my hands. I can do that on my bday :o) The graphics are stunning, the cars are awesome, and the courses are complex. It is definitely a racer gamer's heaven.

We also checked out the tabletop gaming portion of the expo, but I really wasn't impressed with it. This is very much a PC/video game heavy expo. It terms of board games, there weren't any new exhibits, just stores with booths selling you their stuff. We did however see a giant version of Ticket to Ride, and that was pretty cool, but again, nothing else new.

I definitely had fun at PAX, but I'm not entirely sure I would go again. It was a cool experience, but the majority of the booths were just not my thing and most everything else I had already seen or demoed myself before. Now we just need to find a board game expo to get our nerd on in some other way :o)