PAX East: Tales from the Show Floor

On the weekend of the 11th of March, I was at Penny Arcade Expo: East in Boston, MA. It’s a huge video game convention attended by over 69K people. I’m going to split up my PAX East posts into two sections: impressions of some of the games I saw on the show floor and some of the panels and events I went to.

And so here is part 1: Tales from the Show Floor. A lot more patient people than I have covered the popular games, so I’d like to tell you about some of the smaller booths that I got to visit.

Fangamer’s Booth

Before I got to any of the games, the first thing I did when I went to the show floor was head right on over to Fangamer’s booth. It was tucked away in the corner of the show floor, a more subdued booth than some of the large video game companies that were on hand showing off highly anticipated games like Duke Nukem Forever and Portal 2. Their booth was made of whiteboard material, so people passing by drew all over it. Everything from characters, to cryptic messages, to math was put on their booth at one point. I was really happy to meet the staff at Fangamer, since I had only known them through online communication. They are really wonderful, friendly people and hanging out with them was one of the highlights of the convention.

Snapshot

I arrived late at the convention on Friday due to some travel difficulties, but I got a chance to try out Retro Affect’s Snapshot. Snapshot is a puzzle platformer with the key gameplay mechanic being the ability to take a picture of the environment and past parts of it around. For instance, there was a pit of spikes, but across the level was a box that I could paste on top of the spikes as a stepping stone. For the short time I got to play it, I really enjoyed the deceptively simple mechanic and can see how they could make it a really fun puzzler game. This is a game that I wish I had spent more time with, because I think the first couple levels were basically tutorial levels.

Fallen Frontier

Fallen Frontier is a 2D platform, shooter by Moonshot Games. The first thing I noticed was the art style: cartoony, yet crisp and smooth. It made me think that I was playing a comic book. There were a handful of weapons available in the demo, but my favorite tool they gave me to use was a grappling hook that you can use to both get around the environment and yank the enemies nearer to you. Pulling an enemy close and then opening fire with your weapon was an oddly satisfying mechanic. I got to play co-op with one of the developers who guided me through the game. I remember one fight where he was fighting some of the enemies from both below them and in front of them. If I had to say something that I disliked about it, it would be that the enemies weren’t really varied. I don’t think I fought anything other than a soldier and one of the flying drones. Otherwise, this game has a lot of promise for an early demo especially since they say they’re not going to be releasing until next year.

Skulls of the Shogun

The third and last game that I got to demo in depth was Skulls of the Shogun, a fast-paced, turn-based strategy game starring undead samurai and mystics. As a fan of strategy and strategy RPGs, I jumped at the opportunity to play this game. I got to play a three way battle between two other fellow attendees, so we were both learning the ropes. Like a lot of strategy games, some important elements of the gameplay of territory control, unit positioning, and powering up your units. The game is gridless, which gives you a lot more freedom of movement. I liked that the mechanics were simple enough to grasp even in the short time that we had to get acquainted with them. Rather than a complete game lasting several hours, our match ended in about 30 minutes. The game gives you a few units to work with: soldiers, cavalry, archers, and sorcerers. Every time a unit is killed, it drops a skull that can be captured by the opposing teams to power up their units. I think my one major complaint was that the resources to call more units depleted too quickly, so a fight between myself and another player ended up with our “boss” characters just slugging it out. I am definitely looking forward to playing the completed version of this when it comes out.

Other Remarks and photos.

• I got to play Resident Evil for the 3DS. The 3D effect to me was not that impressive. I barely noticed it even after playing for only a few minutes. I’m going to wait on the second generation 3DS.
• Lines for anything major involved hours of waiting, so I didn’t get to check any of those out.
• A lot of hardware manufacturers were there. There was even a liquid nitrogen cooled computer.
• I didn’t get to play it, but Fez looked really cute.
• I’m going to conclude with this. I’m still not quite sure what this is.