Pax East 2013, attending my last Pax East.

Pax East 2013 was fun, and certainly enjoyable.  There were a lot of great things to see, and some neat swag to get (Got my Moga controller!).  But despite all that, there was no single game which really stood out.  No single piece of hardware or device which really piqued my interest.  This is most likely my last Pax East as an attendee...  But Pax East 2014 is most likely Dormouse Games first Pax as an exhibitor (if a lot of things go well).  We're already planning and psyched to go!


I spent most of my time at the Indie Mega Booth!  Sorry about the bizzare movie size.  Blogger isn't playing well with the script that embeds the movie.  If you look super close at 6:22 you can see Eric in the far right side of the video.  Eric's is on polygon!  Whoo!

Gameskinny was one of the few things that caught my attention at Pax East 2013.  And it did not live up to expectations.  Yes obscurity sucks, but poorly design UI sucks worse.  Claiming to 'save a draft' and then not allowing you to recover it has driven me away from using Gameskinny to focus on this blog.

There was a Pax East 2013 post written up.  It was written on Gameskinny, and saved as a draft.  But that draft is apparently unrecoverable.  Mostly because there is no button on the site to recover from a saved draft, or view saved drafts.  So that platform is still new and needs some tweeks.

For that matter there were very few games which really caught my attention this year.  Guns of Icarus has stuck with me.  Although not usually a FPS player, Guns of Icarus addresses many of the issues with FPS gameplay.  Check it out if you are looking for some teamwork based steam-punk shooter.

One of the really interesting games from the indie RPG section of the event (a place which FAR too few computer game developers visit) was a game called Dread.  A horror tabletop game which uses a Jenga tower as the resolution mechanic.  This is brilliant.  As the game progresses the tower becomes a visual representation of the heightened tension in the game.

There were a couple games which have gotten some press in other places.  Rays the Dead is doing well for itself.  The mechanics in Zombie Tychoon 2 are excellent considering its an RTS on a console.  Definitely an inspirational game at least for mechanics.

Of course I played some more Lords of Waterdeep.  In an official WoTC game, with my DCI number and everything.  And got a demo of Ascension, a fun deck building card/board game.