PAX Your Bags

April 20, 2014

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending PAX East in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Aside from the free stuff (which included a packet of Pwnmeal, the “official porridge of e-sports”), the convention was filled with some bad-ass-looking new games. Among them was “Evolve,” a title which requires no more explanation than this:

Petrifying!

There were booths for popular titles like League of Legends and World of Warcraft, the nerdy operations of NewEgg and Twitch.tv, plus tons of cute cosplayers! The opportunity to mess with one of Valve’s upcoming Steam Machines was had with pleasure. Sweet merchandise for every title from Minecraft to Zelda to Pokemon was on sale. Every conceivable type of gaming interest was covered: tabletop, handheld, console, PC, board games, all with tailored exhibits or activities. The icing on the cake was the classic original Xbox title “Steal Battalion,” with its rare-and-expensive cockpit controller contraption available for multiplayer battles.

If you’ve never attended PAX East before, you should. Seriously. And not just because of the conference itself. The people of Boston possess a lucid candor I adore. The city itself is astonishing: everything from the parks to the public transportation to the restaurants will leave a good taste in your mouth. Perhaps the following pictures will convince you. They are a rough pictorial chronicle of the trip.

A flurry of life without the annoying overcrowding of certain other nearby cities.

If only this were a permanent fixture of the BCEC.

Mew-Genics: A game where you play as a cat that physically assaults other cats, for play on a coveted Steam Machine.

You’re not obligated to purchase merch, but you’ll probably want to.

No mech game or flight simulator could ever be as good as this without a similar controller.

This #accidental selfie is the result of a ridiculously reflective computer case. I’m sure the hardware inside is equally shiny.