The Great!

• There are rumors of this year’s PAX reaching 60,000+ nerds and nerdettes in attendance this year, which is a far cry from the 3,300 at the first PAX.
• Bethesda has a new game coming out! To anyone who showed up last year, you’ll remember the gigantic spectacle that was Fallout 3. Unfortunately, Brink is still far from release so there wasn’t anything near that grand this year (maybe next year?). Although a word for developers: if you want people to see your game and be interested in it, don’t surround the demo area in frosted glass that people are unable to look through.
• Bioshock had it’s own little stage area set up… These clues must mean something, but my PAX Pox-riddled brain can’t seem to put the pieces together. However, anyone who has followed the Bioshock 2 story thus far will truly appreciate what they’ve done here.



• The toilet paper in the ladies room (can’t speak for what they had in the mens) was printed.

The Good

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Bus! If you have ever collected anything TMNT in your life, odds are it was in this bus. They filled it with every action figure, videogame, anything you could imagine. Definitely cool.
• Plenty of great games and great people at PAX, including a couple great offerings from NEXON, the makers of Maple Story and Dungeon Fighter Online. For fans of both Mabinogi and Penny Arcade, they were offering limited edition in-game Cardboard Tubes for signing up for their mailing list.

The Bad

• Hothead Games, the team responsible for Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, has another really cool game coming out called Death Spank. What’s ‘bad’ about that? Starting Friday, for viewing different demos for the game, you would be given one of five collectable buttons that could be redeemed for a rad ‘Unicorn Poop’ Death Spank shirt on Sunday. Come Sunday afternoon, all of the shirts were gone, and button horders were being offered water bottles instead, much to the frustration of anyone who really, really wanted a shirt that said ‘Unicorn Poop’ on it. While running out of a supply of something is understandable at such a large event, Gamer Leah Hirve put it exactly right when she said, “they told gamers to collect something — what did they think was going to happen?” Even though the Unicorn Poop shirt was a disappointment… that game still looks pretty awesome.

The UGLY

• Lovingly dubbed ‘PAX Pox’, this year’s event came with a cough; there have already been countless cases of the Special Infected boarding planes to cities around the country.
• For some reason it seemed like Gabe & Tycho were not as involved this year as they have been in previous years; the program cover was simple and could’ve been done by anyone, there was no note to attendees on the inside, and the whole event just didn’t have that loving feeling that has been there before. Although I don’t want it to sound like they don’t care anymore — clearly this expo is the result of something that has grown out of the love of a common ground. Maybe it just feels like something so intimate must now be shared.