As you’ve doubtlessly gathered from my last few posts, I attended PAX East in Boston earlier this month. It was an incredible experience—I interviewed several movers and shakers in the gaming industry, as well as chatted with several others in the gaming press. My time spent at the event was unimpeachable, and I learned a great deal from my travels on the east coast.
Now that said, the only way to learn is by doing, and sometimes I did things, well, incorrectly. Fortunately, I was able to push past my flubs, and I would like to pass my newly-gained knowledge onto my devoted readers.
Ten Things I Learned At PAX East
- Test the equipment. Then test it again.
- Regularly maintenance your equipment
- Stay in a hotel
- Public transit is not some magical fast-travel system
- Remember to eat and drink
- Your icons are people, too
- Wheel-less suitcases suck
- Take only what you want to carry for the entire day
- Life will go on even if your footage is less than optimal
- You’re at a gaming convention. Have fun with it!
Hell, test it after that, too. Several times during the weekend, I found to my utter horror that my interview equipment was not meeting the standards of quality I was hoping for. My colleague and I dealt with everything from poor lighting to bad audio and we had to soldier on with the footage we collected, much to my chagrin sometimes.
It’s not just making sure the equipment doesn’t look crappy, though; it’s also about making sure the “good” quality material can be turned into “great” quality. Things like testing out different microphone positions for interviewing, or fiddling with camera functions until the lighting is just right. Running experiments beforehand can produce better results when time absolutely matters, which will produce better product and make everyone look really damn competent overall.
Okay, this one was a total scrub mistake, and one I didn’t think would actually bite me in the ass until its teeth were firmly sunk in. Things like charging the camera overnight, regardless of how full the battery “looks,” or emptying out the memory card regardless of how much free space you think might be on there. Every piece of equipment should be fresh and rearing to go for every day of shooting.
During my time in Boston, I was staying with a few friends from college who moved to the area recently. I adored seeing them after so many years, and I appreciated them taking the trouble to house me under their roof for the five days I was on the East Coast.
However.
I soon came to realize that paying for a hotel doesn’t just grant you a place to sleep—it also grants you a temporary work space, as well as convenient access to the area you’re covering. I wanted to be far more productive on my trip than I was, but couldn’t be because my friends live in a studio apartment, and burning the midnight oil would have meant keeping everyone up. Not only that, my friends live about seven miles away from the convention center, and made the use of public transportation paramount to surviving the weekend. This wouldn’t have been such a hassle except…
Forgive me. I come from Montana, a land where regular buses and trains are about as common as gold-plated unicorns to operate them, and the prospect of traveling to a city with an actual transit system filled me with thoughts of regular, easy transportation to wherever I needed to be. Sometimes, I was right. Others, I was waiting twenty minutes or more for a train. The worst part came on Friday night, when I was trying to catch a bus home from a bar that was closing. Little did I know that Boston all but shuts down after midnight, and that no buses or trains would come to my aid. I felt like Moses in The Ten Commandments, with Edward G. Robinson chastising me, “Where’s your public transportation now?”
I ended up catching a cab back to my friends’ place, to the tune of thirty dollars. Public transit is fine for tourists, but when on assignment for work, I need reliability.
Like, literally remember. I was so caught up in gathering footage and darting around from appointment to appointment that I would have skipped on food if my colleague constantly didn’t remind me to eat lunch. This is particularly handicapping for me, as my performance in strenuous situations decreases when my blood sugar is low. In the future, I’ll remember to respect my lunch time, and by “respect” I mean “acknowledge.”
I’m a video game blogger from Montana who works in a small office booking movies. I don’t interact with famous people on a regular basis. Heck, I don’t interact with so much as a KFC Famous Bowl on a regular basis. So when it came to finally meeting writers and game-makers that I idolize, I was unprepared for the fanboyish rush that I would get from being in the proximity of dudes and dudettes whose work I admire greatly. I looked like a right prat when I introduced myself to Jason Schreier and Stephen Tolito of Kotaku in a manner that sounded like Rhino from Bolt, and I repeated this performance several times during the weekend.
The best piece of advice I received actually came from Kim Swift, creative director of Portal and the upcoming Quantum Conundrum. While I was meeting with her up in the Square Enix suite, I mumbled something about getting to meet some of my favorite game designers and how I felt overwhelmed about it. “Don’t,” she simply said. It helped impart the idea that the people I’m talking to aren’t “different” from me in any sort of superior sense of the word; they’re just regular guys who happen to do really cool things. It helped me keep my head a bit, but I’ll be even better on this next trip.
During one of my last bouts of travel, one of the wheels on my suitcases snapped off. It was sad, but didn’t deter me from bringing it along on my PAX trip anyway. Oh, what a fun mistake that was. You see, it wasn’t as though I went straight from the airport to some hotel via taxi or family member-driven mini-van, like it usually happens. No, like I discussed further up in the essay, I stayed with a few friends seven or so miles out of town, requiring me to lug my bloody filled-to-the-brim suitcase on two trains, four buses, and hundreds of meters in walking-distance until I got where I needed to be.
It got old. Quick.
At any rate, I can safely re-invest in new luggage now, and the prospect of finally getting a new suitcase sits reasonably well with me. Still, lacking wheels showed me how much of a pain in the ass travel used to be without them.
This is like the above list item, except much more annoying in a niggling sort of way. Basically, I wanted to be all Boy Scout and bring a crap ton of extra things with us—extra mics and their cables, change of clothes (I’m serious), my satchel full of extra goodies, etc. I basically became a pack mule on the floor, lugging about 20 lbs. of miscellaneous junk around from interview to interview (to interview) as we sprinted between appointments.
Now, this isn’t to say I shouldn’t bring additional just-in-case equipment. Far from it—extra batteries and those sorts of things are great for storing in the press room. Hauling around large, cumbersome headphones for sound check purposes, though, probably wasn’t such a hot idea, especially since I ended up taking them off in clutter-based frustration and then forgetting them.
Like most things in life, it’s a bit of a balancing act to figure out my “needs” from my “it would be nice”s, and one I’ll nail in the future. I just need to be cognizant of it going forward.
Friday and Saturday were spent largely learning how to use our equipment, and by the end of the second day, I was in a right state at not having G4-quality footage for the site back home. I got myself nice and worked up, too, until a fellow journalist attending a panel with me helped talk me down from the mental ledge I was climbing out onto. This is more of a general life lesson, but the best thing to do when faced with work you’re dissatisfied with is to make it better next time, full stop. No use in dwelling on how you Could have made things better or Should have done it a different way—it’s over and done with, so move on and kill it next time.
For the record, I’m of the opinion that we did, indeed, kill it on Sunday.
Anyway, thank you again to Morgan of Translabyrinth for helping me through a rough patch. Next time will be awesome, and I won’t let myself get down next time I’m at an event because, in the end…
With all of the stress of collecting footage and meeting appointments, it was easy to lose sight of what was all around me—literally. I was surrounded by video games! Video games and people who love video games like I do! I was playing games that won’t come out for months! Fortunately, I snapped out of my reverie reasonably quickly, and I was able to bathe in the glory of everything PAX had to offer while still doing my best to create content for Gamer’s Guide to Life.
Events like PAX are why I want to get into gaming journalism; they’re why I’m sitting here writing in my walk-in closet with pie-in-the-sky dreams of someday seeing my name in print. They’re not the whole reason, mind, but PAX sure as hell went a long way to getting me excited for the future, and if I can’t appreciate what a lucky dog I am to be attending events like PAX and writing about them, I’m doing myself a disservice.
Ten mistakes, ten lessons learned. Thanks again for tuning in to my PAX content, and I look forward to further events, early impressions, and learning experiences in the near future.
The game title that coined the best, most-nonsensical gaming term since “Metroidvania,” Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (it’s so bad, and I love it) is a sidestep for the series, focusing on wimpy-kid-turned-ninja-badass Raiden. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, mostly because I’m absolutely awful at stealth games, so Revengence‘s new emphasis on hack-y, slash-y, stylish action is a welcome departure for me. Plus, it’s being developed by Platinum Games. Platinum Games! The goodwill I have for Bayonetta alone is enough to convince me to rush out and buy this one, no questions asked.
I’ve already discussed how much I love 
Tony Hawk suffered probably the most painful, easily-followed journey from riches to rags in gaming history, going from universally acclaimed (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2) to universally reviled (Tony Hawk Ride) in the span of eight short years. After taking a year off, the Birdman is back, and returning to his roots. THPS HD is a download-only XBLA and PSN game, and an attempt to recapture what fans loved about the series (fun, tight skating mechanics) while getting rid of what they didn’t (content-bloat; skateboard peripheral; Bam Margera; etc.). I spent entirely too much of my youth perfecting virtual kickflips and finding hidden tapes, and the prospect of doing it again in HD greatly excites me. 
Yet another reveal at the Spike VGAs, The Last of Us is the newest original game from Naughty Dog, who, after three stellar Uncharted entries, could convince me to buy an up-resed version ET for the Atari 2600 if they claimed they developed it. Little is known about The Last of Us, but the trailer’s choice to focus on character interaction rather than straight-up zombie shootin’ is a telling one; besides, Naughty Dog knows a thing or three about how to create compelling characters, and I see no reason for them to stop now. With luck, The Last of Us will do for post-apocalyptic zombie games what Uncharted did for action-adventure games.
When SSX first premiered last year under the subtitle Deadly Descents, I was worried; gone were the whimsical, Uber-tricking antics that made SSX Tricky and SSX 3 so gargantuan and fun, and in their stead was a new, grim tone, more befitting of Call of Duty: Black Ops than Cool Boarders. Since then, EA has released a bevy of new screenshots, trailers, and gameplay showing that, yeah, SSX will be just fine. Demonstrating the same over-the-top flair as previous entries while adding new elements like wing suits and the brand new Survive It mode, SSX is back to show the Shawn Whites and Stokeds of this generation how snowboarding games are supposed to play. February 28 cannot come soon enough.
Back in 1991, Sega released their first 16-bit console, the Sega Genesis, and introduced the world to Sonic the Hedgehog, a speedy, edgy blue blur of gaming ‘tude whose popularity would soon grow to rival that of his direct competitor, Nintendo’s Mario. Time has not been kind to Sega’s spiky mascot, though, and Sonic has been wandering in the gaming wilderness since, well, the end of the Sega Genesis, with each new attempt to rejuvenate the character falling on increasingly more disappointed and cynical ears. After over a decade of tries, though, Sonic finally has a quality game to brag about with Sonic Generations. While not the best game in the series, Sonic Generations does what no other console Sonic game since the 90’s has done: remembered that Sonic is fun because of his solid platforming, and not just because he runs fast. Sonic Generations has a fair few flaws about it (atrocious voice acting; inconsistent 3D levels; stupid, stupid boss battles), but its side-scrolling stages are pure, old-school delight, and worthy of the Sonic the Hedgehog name. It’s about damn time.
Batman: Arkham City is one of the favorite games of the year, lifting the best parts of Arkham Asylum and melding them with an open-world structure that actually enhances the game, rather than simply makes it bigger. Though not as expansive as Liberty City or Renaissance Italy, Arkham City is rather large, and positively daunting to tackle on foot. Enter Grapnel, the Caped Crusader’s newest gizmo for fighting crime. Grapnel allows Batman to use his grappling hook as a slingshot, gliding into range of a contact point, then using the gadget to propel him over rooftops and hardened thugs alike, allowing Batman to cross entire sections of Arkham City without so much as touching the ground. The mechanic feels more akin to something from a Spider-Man game, but its execution feels true to the character, and makes Arkham City an absolute treat to navigate.
Rayman Origins is a game that nearly everyone had more fun playing than me, but I still largely enjoyed my time with it, despite its overemphasis on Lum-collecting and pretty-good-but-not-standout platforming mechanics. What does set Rayman Origins apart from other recent 2D platforming games is its Treasure Chest levels, stages focused on chasing a sentient wooden box through a series of collapsing, obstacle course-like mazes, making split-second jumps and narrowly avoiding deathtraps. Each level is perhaps 45 seconds to a minute long, but is brutally challenging, often needing more restarts than finding that “perfect run” in a Tony Hawk game. It’s these sequences when Rayman Origins feels the most alive, and I wish the rest of the game felt as distinct as the ten brief sections that puts even Dark Souls’ difficulty to shame.
One of my favorite parts of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the Death From Above level, where I got to take the gunner’s chair of an AC-130 and blow the crap out of everything that didn’t blink the correct color. It was the perfect breather moment, letting me unwind from the tension brought on by so much frontline action. Iron Lady acts as a spiritual sequel to good ol’ DFB, adding a twist: the mission forces the player to be both the AC-130 gunner and the on-the-ground foot soldier, leapfrogging back and forth between roles and creating a wonderful contrast between long-distance targeting and intense, close-range firefights. Modern Warfare 3 doesn’t want for killer setpieces (both the sandstorm and the entire last mission nearly took this one’s place), but Iron Lady is perhaps the game’s finest.
Speaking of killer setpieces, Uncharted 3 has enough awesome moments to populate a whole new trilogy of Indiana Jones films, with several competing for a spot here (wandering the desert, fighting in a burning building, the entire last mission, etc.). In the end, the place that thrilled me the most was the Ship Graveyard, which Nathan Drake must explore after being captured by pirates. Initially, the section feels cheap, surrounding you with a hundred enemies all gunning for your hide, but after this first rough patch, the section opens up into something magnificent. Most of the action in the Uncharted series can be neatly divided into two sections: platforming and shooting, with the two rarely overlapping. The Ship Graveyard, on the other hand, forces Drake to climb the rusty exterior of countless ships, making dangerous leaps and finding creative handholds, all while fending off gun-toting baddies. Making tricky jumps feels much more intense under a hail of gunfire, giving the platforming sections an urgency lacking in most of the game. At one point, while I was climbing, the camera pulled back to reveal the entire disabled hull of a ship I was climbing, reducing Drake to mere pixels in size and dwarfing me with its sense of scale. Like the rest of the game, the Ship Graveyard is flawed, but no other game this year put my jaw on the floor the way it managed to.
The Gears series has always been known for its cooperative, split-screen action, but Gears of War 3 escalates the scope even further by allowing up to four players to tackle the single player campaign together. True, local co-op is limited to the usual two, but Gears’ usual loud, brash, spectacle-driven gameplay still makes for a great show, even for people who might not be playing at all. Grab an extra controller, and give the Locust a New Year’s Resolution they’ll never forget.
Man, Nintendo loves their co-operative platformers. 2009 had New Super Mario Bros. Wii, last year brought us Donkey Kong Country Returns, and this October’s Kirby: Return to Dream Land makes three in so many years. Unlike other recent ventures for Kirby (Epic Yarn and Mass Attack), Return to Dream Land is a traditional Kirby game, complete with the eat-and-copy mechanics we all know, love, and find slightly disturbing. The game adds four-player drop-in/drop-out co-op, allowing you to share health items and tackle tricky jumps as a team. 
Traveler’s Tales’ LEGO games have been some of the best local co-op games on the market, and LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 is more of the same. Literally, it’s a continuation of last year’s LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4, with the titular 5-7 books being represented in playable form. Of course, the first LEGO Harry Potter was one of the series’ strongest entries, so the opportunity to continue the tale of Harry, Ron, and Hermione vis-à-vis plastic blocks should be no problem for LEGO fans, and the previous game’s two-player split-screen co-op is as fun as ever. 
Thought the first game made you feel smart? Wait till you try it with a buddy. Portal 2‘s co-op is a separate entity from the main story, and tasks two players with using teamwork to plow through another round of brain-bending puzzles. Elements like timing are taken into account, though the game does a good job of giving you tools to coordinate your efforts. Perhaps it’s not as drop-in/drop-out as others on the list, but it’s a grand time for anyone looking for a co-op experience different from the usual platforming or shooting fare. 
Though the game has been built from the ground up as a four-player co-op experience, Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One is basically a traditional Ratchet and Clank game. The series’ staple elements of huge weapons, imaginative worlds, and whip-smart humor are still intact in All 4 One, and the extra chaos from three other players only adds to the enjoyment.
The king is back, or so Activision would have you believe. Inflationary marketing remarks aside, there’s a lot to like about Eurocom’s updated take on 1997′s Nintendo 64 classic, including a throwback to the original’s four-player split-screen action that wasted so many hours of my youth. Goldeneye 007: Reloaded adheres more to modern shooter conventions than its forbearer (ironsight aiming, rebounding health, etc.), but includes just enough Bond references to feel distinct (movie villains like Jaws and Oddjob, weapons like the Moonraker Laser and Golden Gun, paintball mode, etc.). 
While we’re discussing throwbacks, here’s an HD remake of one of the most seminal games of the past ten years. Combat Evolved Anniversary still sports two-player co-op through the main campaign (which blew my 14-year-old mind back in 2001), but the real draw is its four-player split-screen deathmatchin’ fun. Included are seven maps from past Halo titles, available in both original and content-added forms, and Halo‘s classic arsenal of weapons (including the almighty Pistol in all of its broken glory). Multi-kill! 
It’s only fitting that two years after Street Fighter came back to reign supreme over the fighting game scene, Mortal Kombat would dust itself off and enter the ring once again. Rid of much of the fluff and extra modes it had accumulated over the years, Mortal Kombat celebrates the tight, frantic fighting that made the series great, and adds even more gory and over-the-top Fatalities that fans have come to expect. The perfect fighting game for spectating–it doesn’t matter who wins, as long as the ending is bloody. 
While technically a co-operative platformer a la New Super Mario Bros Wii, Rayman Origins stands out by offering more ways to grief your partners than any other game I can think of. Whether it’s slapping players around to prevent them from choosing a certain character, or taking advantage of the infinite-lives respawn system for cheap deaths, Rayman Origins is as much a game about screwing your teammates as much as it is about helping them. 
Back in the 90′s, when Chandler-levels of snark permeated just about everything, there was a series of trivia games for the PC and PlayStation that perfectly combined being smart and being a smartass. Jack is back and irreverent as ever, with wise cracking questions across a multitude of categories, ranging from history to a more pop culture bent. If board game trivia laced with wise cracks doesn’t sound like a great way to down a couple brews with friends, then you don’t know… 
Runic Games’ little dungeon crawler that could broke out in popularity when it launched on Steam in 2009, and now Xbox Live has received a port. It’s a loving port, though, letting players loot through randomly-generated dungeons while slaying fell beasts and collection sweet drops. It’s basically a cartoonier, less-epic Diablo, but Diablo ain’t on Xbox Live, and my magpie-like predilection for finding and hording treasure would surely be taken care of with Torchlight.
One of my favorite new genres of the past ten years is the stylish action game, a blend of traditional hack ‘n’ slash brawling and aesthetic show-boating made popular by games like Devil May Cry and God of War. Vampire Smile cribs several combat elements from its stylish action betters (juggles, points-based combos, complete and total overkill moves), and sets it in the vein of a 2D beat ‘em up. The strange, Johnny-The-Homicidal-Maniac-meets-Kill-Bill art direction and hyper-violence gels with the play mechanics to give the package a dark, gritty feel unique from anything I’ve ever played on Xbox Live Arcade.
After hearing somewhere close to THE ENTIRE GAMING CRITICAL WORLD sing the praises of Beyond Good and Evil, Michel Ancel’s adventure cult classic that sold roughly two-and-a-half copies, now I can experience BG&E‘s open-world exploration, Zelda-esque dungeon crawling, and startlingly sci-fi fiction in HD. Protagonist Jade is still regarded as one of the better-written female characters in all of gaming, and Ancel’s vivid, imaginative world still stands as compelling to this day.
Perhaps developer Housemarque hoped for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup effect when they created Outland, because the game plays like a glorious combination of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Ikaruga. In Outland, players scrounge about the environments, discovering new powers and unlocking new sections of the game in true Metroidvania fashion. Outland‘s visuals look informed by African tribal art, and the game is positively stunning. One of my favorite downloadable games is 2009′s Metroidvania platformer Shadow Complex, and I’m hankering to dive into another open, side-scrolling world.
Oh, lordy, does this game look inviting. Nearly everything about it, from the gorgeous, hand-drawn aesthetic, to the wonderful bluesy soundtrack, to the twitchy action-RPG gameplay, calls out my name, like a whispered Siren song consisting largely of Beatles lyrics. Bastion’s fiction is rich and involved, and the game’s use of sound (the narrator, the aforementioned bluesy soundtrack, etc.) piques my interest in ways I haven’t felt for a game before. If I can carve a niche out in my holiday break, and especially if the game goes on sale, Bastion will be my holiday must-play.
