Dear PAX,

Yep. That's me up there lounging in a Riot Games bean bag chair watching a few League of Legends tournaments. PAX, you are big. You have attracted every kind of geek imaginable. You are the first video game convention ive attended and you are intense.

We met up with a few friends of @chowda and that was fun to meet some new people. They had attended PAX a few times previously and gave us a few tips. One such tip was that you would stand in many lines. I am not sure I have had feet as sore as this and ive back-packed around Italy. I just might be getting too old or something..... :D

http://i.imgur.com/b6U7I.jpg (the morning line up)

One of the highlights of the day was a talk on the uncertain future of game story telling. It featured Notch and the designers of Baston, DayZ, X-Com and The Walking Dead. Interesting talk as they all seemed to have different takes on games and story telling. After the talk I wanted to say hi to Notch but he was mobbed by about 100 fan boys and I decided to eat lunch instead.

http://i.imgur.com/zEcdR.jpg (the uncertain future of storytelling on the PC panel)

This evening I went to the EPIC games Fortnight game reveal. In line I met a few cool people. Someone that worked for Microsofts Azure team and a woman who is a indie artist. We sat with them during the Fortnight panel. With Fortnight EPIC is building a stylized co-op game that looks like Team Fortress 2 meets Minecraft meets a Pixar movie. From what they showed, you can collect resources to build a fort and that fort is used to survive zombie attacks. You operate on teams and you can focus on building, attacking and other stuff they didn't showcase. The graphics are really pretty and for an EPIC game its not what we have come to expect. Cliff Bleszinski and the other designers talked about creating a game without a huge advertising push that they release on PC first. They want to quickly get a beta out, listen to fans and build it up for the Fortnight community. They said they had a lot of success with Gears on the XBox but that model wasn't something they were going for with Fortnight. After the reveal @chowda and I are really interested in playing Fortnight. One person got a "golden ticket" under their chair for beta access to the game. She was excited about winning.

PAX is an amazing spectacle filled with art and cos-play and I snapped a few pics of some stuff. I plan on taking many more pictures tomorrow.

http://i.imgur.com/NvieF.jpg

Tomorrow we plan on hitting up the expo hall more to try a few games out. I watched a few people play Borderlands 2 and I was really impressed. I think the new menu system seems to work better on widescreen TVs and the game seems really smooth and polished. 2K had an impressive amount of show room floor space and easily 45+ stations setup for people to play. That said the line was around 3-4 hours to get your hands on the game so I opted out of standing in the line to check it out for now.

A few more pics for good measure. I would upload more but the internet in our Hotel is slow.

http://i.imgur.com/sqvBu.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZAoAk.jpg

Taking a few minutes to post a bit about PAX as I wait in line for a panel on PC gaming. Nothing could have prepared me for the scale of this convention. The amount of video game fans present and eager to tear through the endless halls of video game culture is incredible.

I heard there were 60,000 tickets sold and that doesnt surprise me. Had to take a few breaks away from the crowds due to the scale and intensity of things.

I'll post more tonight, with pictures and more awesomery! Having a good time with the army of nerds.

Cool new Borderlands 2 trailer narrated by a new character, Sir Hammetlock. In this 7 minute video he gives an awesome run down of the new classes and some characters skills. A few new enemies are shown as well as some gun and grenade abilities.

This game looks epic!

Happy PAX day!

A really fun documentary about the Starcraft craze. The video covers the history of Startcraft to Starcraft 2 and eSports.

A fun watch on the eve of PAX.

Leaving for PAX Prime in Seattle tomorrow. Reading over the presentations and noting which ones I want to attend:

"Story Time with Ted Price"
"Chiptunes"
"The Double Fine Adventure Adventure"
"Assassin's Creed III PAX Prime Panel"
"Epic Games Presents: Fortnight Reveal"
"Behind the music of blockbuster video games"
"After notch the new minecraft team"
"Which Interactive Lie Did I Tell: A conversation on game writing with Chet & Erik of Valve Software"

I plan on hitting up others but these were the ones that stood out to me.

According to Bethesda Doom 3 BFG Edition will be playable as well as Departed. Gearbox will be showing Borderlands 2 as well so I will have much to write about in the next few days.

Stay rad.

After completing a ton of quests in Whiterun I decided to pick up the main quest and make my way to the place to meet up with the Greybeards in the mountains. From Whiterun to the destination it looked pretty close but as I made the journey I realized how far things in Skyrim can be. The journey took me over grasslands, rivers a bridge and to a town at the summit of the 7,000 steps. The 7,000 steps leading to the area the Greybeards inhabit.

Ivarstead is the town at the mountain summit and I talked to a few people and rested up at the Inn. There were a few town quests, one being to check out a haunted shack at the edge of town that I haven't started yet. Hanging out in these small towns is fun, nice to see every town in Skyrim isn't "Whiterun sized." I picked up a quest from a NPC on a bridge to take a sack of food to the top of the mountain for the Greybeards. He said the only stuff he encountered on his trip up were the occasional wolf or rabbit. Yeah, that was pretty misleading as I had a few sizable foes to kill on the way. One Frost Troll killed me 5 times before I put it down. Apparently many players had problems killing that one too from a few Google Searches on the topic.

Summiting the mountain was fun. Its was cool to see the weather change and read the text of the stones on the way to the top. After I hit the steps I snapped the above image and saved. I want to enter High Hrothgar in a later session.

The Portal 2 Perpetual Testing Initiative is a really fun map editor and sharing platform. Making maps and sharing them with friends really brought me back to my early map making days with Wolfenstein, Doom, Warcraft 2 and Starcraft. Looks like Valve is taking the Perpetual Testing Initiative one step further and allowing people the ability to make co-op maps!

A snip from the Valve blog post:

"That's right: Puzzle creators can now design and publish co-op maps, which puzzle players can now greedily consume. Well, as long as they have a co-op partner. Which the 75% off coupon should help them (i.e.: you) find. We've also added a "Quick Play" feature that creates never-ending, auto-generated playlists of the top-rated maps in a variety of categories. It has literally never been easier to figuratively jump in and literally play some Portal"

http://www.thinkwithportals.com/blog.php?id=8663&p=1

Not much to share because PopCap hasn't shared much with us yet... That said, Plants VS Zombies 2 has been confirmed by PopCap for release for Spring of 2013.

http://beefjack.com/news/plants-vs-zombies-2-coming-spring-2013/

Hoping it comes with difficulty modes or something that makes it harder for multiple replays!

Hear ye, Hear ye,

Today we announce the Cheerful Ghost Borderlands 2 Haiku Contest

To celebrate the upcoming Borderlands 2 launch on September 18th, Cheerful Ghost is having a Borderlands 2 Haiku Contest. You have two chances to win a copy of Borderlands 2 on Steam and the details are as follows:

1. We are giving away one copy of Borderlands 2 on the Steam Gifts site here: http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/RaQNV/borderlands-2 One lucky winner will be selected at random to win on Steam Gifts site.


2. We are also going to be giving away a second copy of Borderlands 2 to the Cheerful Ghost user that creates the coolest Borderlands 2 Haiku. The winner will be determined by which Haiku gets the most “+1” comments from other users. To post your Haiku for consideration, add Borderlands 2 to your game list and post your Haiku with Borderlands 2 as the game category for your post.




1. Feel free to share your Haiku post over Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to allow your friends and family the ability to vote for you. Due to practical considerations, only “+1” comment votes count that are posted directly to the Cheerful Ghost site.


2. Each person may only vote once. If you vote multiple times, we will disregard each vote over the first one we count.


3. Each Cheerful Ghost user can only submit one Haiku to be considered.

Please format your Haiku appropriately, for more information on that see the always amazing Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

Deadline for Haiku Contest entries and votes are September 15th @ 4PM EST!

If you have any questions on the contest, feel free to ask in the comments below.

Gearbox recently released a stripped down retro version of Borderlands 2 you can play in your browser. You can choose from one of the 4 new Borderlands 2 characters and fight hordes of enemies in an area 2d shooter. From the handful of games I played, I chose Salvador and made it to level 16. There is a fair amount of gun types to choose from but I seemed to prefer the machine guns to the others. Shotguns seemed to be a bit underpowered as the intial blast is strong but they took too long to reload.

Its a fun game to try out in anticipation for Borderlands 2 launch this September 18thand you can play it here: http://www.wubwub.eu/demake.php

If you strip the "/demake.php" off the end of that domain, it looks like there are a few more things that will become available as time marches onward to the Borderlands 2 launch. Should be interesting. More as it develops.