The Rhyz Report PAX South Recap

do do doooo dododododo doooo do do

Breaking Rhyz Report News!

We come to you live from a computer desk in Houston with a recap of the PAX South event.

It’s been quite the long weekend here in the lone star state. Large numbers of people started to arrive in San Antonio, for one of the largest nerd gatherings the city has ever seen, last Friday. As I wasn't lucky enough to get a 3 day pass, and I had already bought just the Saturday and Sunday ones, I set up other activities to entertain myself on Friday.

We’ll start with the Persistent Universe Town Hall. Unlike a lot of other game companies, CIG had set up a town hall style forum for backers to ask questions and suggest ideas for the persistent universe. Some of the questions were a little out there, some of them were really good, but all of it was at least entertaining for me.

The event also consisted of a Meet and Greet with the devs, and then a hour long presentation of some of the upcoming features to the Arena Commander module, as well as the eagerly anticipated FPS Module (scheduled for release in late March - early April).

All of the Town Hall and the closing event will be available on the Star Citizen Youtube later today hopefully, but until then I leave you with a gif of Jumppoint Travel and the Arena Commander 1.0 trailer.

GlamorousIdolizedBluetickcoonhound.0.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrrvPBrm03w

Saturday:

With Friday being quite the awesome day, I didn't know how much more fun Saturday could have in store for me. It turns out, quite a bit more.

Let me preface this by sayingthis is my first con ever. The only thing I've been to before that would be remotely close to this is the car show that comes around once a year. This was much larger than that though. I think we heard mention of 40-50k con goers of the weekend.

So, we start off by entering the main hall, and lining up in huge queues to be let in to the expo hall as soon as it opens.There are massive numbers of people in here standing around in full costume, or street clothes. Most holding a 3DS and playing with the Street Pass Plaza, others just talking about what they plan to do today. Every so often you hear shout of "COOKIES FOR CHILD’S PLAY!" as people run up and down the lines gathering donations and handing out snicker-doodles.

I turned to my friends and said, "This is truly the nerd Mecca. And here I stand unclean and unworthy. Someone wash my feet, quick!"

From my right, a large cheer goes up from the crowd, and you can see the lines have started to move. Like cattle being led to the slaughter we march across the hall towards the archway into the expo area.

The first thing your sense are accosted by is the sound. You can hear it like a train approaching from the distance. A low roar that grows louder as you walk past the merch booth. Then once you’re under the archway, its a full on riot. The mixture of voices, and hundreds of games being played simultaneously is enough to give most people a headache (this actually did happen to my friends wife). The first 1:1 comparison I could pull would be a Vegas casino, but with more game lingo and less drunken debauchery. Surprisingly though, there wasn't a cloud of BO hanging over the convention. Maybe it was the cold outside, but I only smelt bad BO when I was right up next to the person.

So, booths booths and more booths. That is the expo hall in a nut shell. The place to be to see some of the games being advertised throughout the weekend. First two booths seen are the Twitch booth, and the Greybox booth. Greybox took the cake most of the con with their demo of Dreadnought. I've been watching this game a bit when they put things out for it, but this was the first chance the public got to play it. The main problem was that the line to play was usually a two hour wait. As much as I love the look, I couldn't justify that wait time.

Further in the booths became a bit more spread out, but no less grandiose. Intel was running copies of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and had an Oculus set up to play with Eve: Valkyrie. Frontier had an Oculus as well, but they only let you fly Sidewinders through a ring belt. Nintendo had a good chunk of stuff to play with MH4 demo, Smash, Luigi’s Mansion (don’t know why but it was there), New Super Mario Bros, all on the NN3DS XL. I asked the people there if any of them were reps, but unfortunately they were all just models for the event. Wanted to tell them to pass along that NA wants the smaller version too.

Further towards the back is where they moved away from video games, and more into the traditional tabletop. Magic had a big showing with multiple tournaments throughout PAX. They also demoed the Duels of the Planeswalkers game on iPad or something.

Next to them were a lot of amazing board games being sold and played. I got to test out some indie games in the works like Twirk, Millionaire Banshee, and my favorite of the con Bring Your Own Book. Seriously guys, it seems like a great idea for anyone who loves to read. My friend’s wife is actually a librarian and she was able to snag a free demo copy to promote at her library. We’re gonna try it later this week.

All this seems fun and good, but I know the reason you guys are really here. You want them cosplay photos. Well, I snagged a good bit, but not everything that was out there. Saturday was a big day for cosplay with multiple photo booths set up on the second floor for some Bioware IPs. I’ll just show the few that I have instead. Ignore the motion blur, I was using a phone not a decent SLR camera like I should have.

http://imgur.com/a/VYOK3#0

http://youtu.be/NL6AYJ7yM8o

Lots of cool going on for my first con. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I plan to come back next year as well. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to meet up with the other Polynauts that went. Schedules for my group were pretty tight trying to get in a lot of panels. When Lucky tweeted me on Saturday it was like 12 am and we had already gone to bed in prep for the next day.