So, I just got back from PAX, and now I'm going to talk about it or something. First of all, the general. PAX is AMAZING. People who weren't at PAX missed the fuck out. Or at least, gamers who weren't at PAX missed the fuck out.

I rolled into Boston in the middle of a Thursday night, which is inadvisable to begin with, and promptly lost my luggage. I found it, then I lost myself. I barely made the last train to Newton. Boston trains don't run late, which can't be great for the nightlife.

Friday I wake up early and go to PAX. PAX is awesome. It's basically an airplane hangar, except climate-controlled and instead of having airplanes in it it has forty thousand nerds. This is either a larger or a smaller number than you're imagining. I don't know which. Suffice it to say it's many, but doesn't exactly blot out the sun. Just fills up a hangar to firecode capacity, and when everybody leaves effectively saturates the city of Boston with PAXies. The first day, I mostly just wandered around the con floor. I played demos and things. I saw the new Portal II stuff, and talked to someone who had played it. The new video basically just confirmed that Portal's sense of humor is still going strong, it had no new gameplay, although I think there were a few levels we hadn't seen, there're no new mechanics. The guy who had played it said that when he was setting up the Valve crew were just like "Hey, you wanna play this?" and he was playing Portal II. He says the Paint mechanics are extremely tricky but very fun. I got a free t-shirt. That's a PAX tip for ya'll. If you don't want to bring shirts, you don't need to, because PAX will just throw shirts at you. I've got a Portal II shirt, a RAGE shirt, a Brink shirt, a Fancy Pants Adventures shirt, and that's just what I remember. Were I committed to getting all my free shirts, I missed at least ten. Sorta wish I'd gotten Mortal Kombat and Red Faction, but no matter. Anyway, Portal II stuff was excellent, and wandering around the con floor was extremely cool.

The best stuff in my opinion was the weird hardware that was everywhere. There was one team selling this shell that fit on an xbox controller and remapped three of the surface buttons to outward flicks, so you don't need to take your thumbs off the joysticks ever. Well, except to hit A or the dpad. But that's still a hell of an improvement. Really cool thing, and it's a good 'what's great about PAX' demonstration as well. There's no way you could sell something that esoteric to any other crowd. PAX loved it. There was another controller enhancement team, selling big blocks of nerf to stick controllers into. Which sounds ridiculous, right? It is. But you know how Super Meat Boy hurts your palms? Totally fixes that problem. Geek Chic had a pretty nice setup, too. You know how it's impossible to find a really good gaming table? Like, it feels like you could do better than just a table, right? But you can't? You can. It'll cost you, but you know, quality. They've got a super classy act together, making really nice hardwood tables with cupholders and lowered play surfaces, and it looks like they've thought of all the little things. The amount of testing and thought that must have gone into these game tables is frankly spectacular, and if I were to find myself in possession of seven grand and in want of a dinner table I think I know what I'd do. (They also work as dinner tables.)

I also played a handful of Magic tournaments. And did terribly. But whatcha gonna do. Forcing Mill in Besieged-Scars-Scars is really hard, and I got left with a crappy pool and then got eliminated round one by some guy with a scarily consistent mono-red metalcraft with a pheonix, a masticore, and a battlesphere. Fuck that.  I'm also, well, not necessarily joining the school of "EDH shouldn't have sanctioned tournaments" but I got stomped, using a deck that beats mine consistently, and the metagame wasn't nearly as horrible as it could have been. So, yeah. Not doing that for a while.

I also figured something out day 1. You don't ever eat con food. It costs an arm and a leg, and they'll rip you any chance they get. Like, three bucks for a coke, and three bucks for chips, and they put a broken coke machine that won't take most dollars next to a chip machine that advertises giving coins as change in big letters and then won't give you your money back without a purchase, which I think might be illegal. Anyway, you can get a soda three times the size of theirs for half the price at a 7-11 that's a ten minute walk away. You can get food to make a con's worth of semi-edible sandwiches for two skinny people for 12 bucks there. I also figured out that I don't need food to survive. I've barely eaten all weekend, and I feel fine. Odd. I guess it's the adrenaline and the drinking-two-liters-of-soda-a-day.

I got home fine day 1, and woke up day 2 to go to the con. I wandered around the floor for another few hours, then went to the RAGE panel. RAGE (I think it's supposed to be all caps) is coming from Id later this year. It's a game about walking through a wasteland shooting mutants. It's an RPGFPS. It looks like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and like Borderlands and like Fallout, but that's okay. The formula's solid, the implementation looks good, the game's really pretty... I'll enjoy shooting some more mutants, I think. I left the panel, wandered for a while, and talked to the guy who designed Hex Hex for a while. It's got a new edition out, looks much better. More chaotic, and if you get hexed twice in a row the game makes you operate under stupid rules or lose yet more voice as a variant, which I imagine makes the game yet more vindictive. Incidentally, we should try playing that game more aggressively, I think it would be more fun. Then I demoed an indie tabletop game called Inevitable. It's sort of like mean-spirited dystopian monopoly with some RPG elements. It's fun. Ben, you should play it, it's how you make a fun roll and move game. And it involves my choice of destinations mechanic, so there. It's also a good demonstration of the right way to give different players different powers. Each player's unique ability is borderline-gamebreakingly powerful, and the game is a ton of fun. After that game (I lost, but I managed to take everybody else down with me, there was no winner) I went to go see the concert. In this case, VGO, Paul and Storm, and JoCo.

Before the concert, though, was the Omegathon. It's a PAX tradition, they take two dozen random attendees and stick them in an elaborate well-publicized competition. This particular round was Giant Jenga. It was far more tense and fun to watch than you would expect it to be. I would watch professional Jenga were it televised, I think.

The concert was amazing. I wasn't all that excited about VGO, but they were great. Played bitching metal versions of video game songs. Very good musicians, and bloody good looking to boot. After they went off, Paul and Storm put on one of the funniest acts I have ever seen. Seriously, worth seeing them. They played a recorded message from Wil Wheaton apologizing for not being there. Wil Wheaton's a really funny guy now.

PAX concerts are a pretty cool scene. You know how waving phones has largely replaced waving lighters? PAX waves DSs and at least one full-size laptop. Paul and Storm took a big panorama of 3000 people all giving them the finger for the first note in Opening Band that everybody fucks up in Rock Band. JoCo also put on a great act, he's fun to see live, and I love his music, and it was just an awesome night all around. There was a guy who was right in front of the stage camera and every song he'd pull up a new appropriate picture for it and wave it in front of the camera, which was always good for a few laughs. JoCo played stuff of his next album, some of it was really, really good. He also played Mr Fancy Pants as a live remix, which was spectacular to see. The guy has a lot more tricks than we assume.

It is, however, when my plans started to go awry. The trains stop running well before the concert ends, so I'm out a 20 dollar cab right. Fuck Boston cabs. And  DST is fucking any shot I have at sleep. Also, my ride situation goes to hell. Deckard, who I thought I was riding back with, canceled my ride at just about the last possible second. Ben, who was my contingency ride, decided he couldn't got to PAX after all. I am suddenly stuck in Boston. I manage to secure a ride with Ian Mason, but he's gonna charge me 20 bucks for it. Which isn't, you know, a great friend thing to do, but gas is expensive and whatnot, so sure. I set up a whole thing with him where he's gonna call at 7:30, come by the place I'm staying in the morning, grab my stuff, and take me and some others to PAX.

I get home at (altered) 4:30 AM. Begin Day 3. Ian Mason forgets about me. Like a douche. Doesn't even bother to call, just forgets I goddam exist. Then at the con the next day, after telling me where to meet him for my ride home, he informs me (by text, having not shown up for this meeting) that he doesn't have room in his car after all. And in fairness, he initially said it was only a maybe depending how full it was. But still, he should have canceled it WAY sooner than he did. What a fucking douchebag.

So I get to enjoy the last few hours of the con, at least. Day 3 has some cool stuff. I got to play Duke Nukem Forever. I don't have much to say about it, though. It's a shooter. Not a bad one. I'm really bad at it because it's not at all easy and I can't aim for shit on an Xbox controller. So I didn't get far. It seems pretty good. There were also a few other hardware geekery highlights. Someone working with Geek Chic had an early prototype of a multitouch RPG table that was pretty much the coolest thing ever. It's like the FTIR table I wanted to build, but his is good and mine wouldn't have been. And Geek Chic's involvement means that it's not a hack, either. It's a really classy act. There was also a fellow there with a homebuilt game in early development that had really good motion feedback, it would tilt your chair as you rotated around the tunnel. Great, and made out of angle irons, which is even better. There's also a company writing 600 page choose-your-own-adventure Fantasy novels for iPhone (and soon Android) and a tiny little RPG about temp workers sent back to fix a damaged timeline, and I picked up a bargain copy of Monday Night Combat, which I look forward to playing extensively rather than doing actual work.

On the other hand, I basically got abandoned in Boston. I was down three rides now, and I didn't know it until 4:30 in the afternoon. It was too late to catch a train, or a plane, or a greyhound earlier than 11:35 for less than 60 bucks. Plus, all my luggage was an hour away, because I left it with the people I was staying with because Ian Mason was going to go right past there on his way out anyway. So I ride a train an hour to Newton, and then I ride it an hour back with a huge-ass bag, and then I got on a sixty dollar bus to get to my dorm at 4:30 AM and be locked out because Debby's got my key at the moment, because I packed in a hurry and forgot it. I think I also only have one pair of clean underpants, so I'm gonna have to resolve this damn quickly.

But now I'm on my bus. It has free wifi. I just got ice cream at the White River Junction station. I'm pretty sure the girl across the aisle is either on blue-skin 4chan or Reddit. I'm on the bus from PAX to Montreal, apparently. So it's all cool. But this is fair warning to Ben, Deckard, and Ian. Next time I see you I'm probably stamping hard on your toes, or punching you or something.