PAX Day 4 2/9/13
We got up fairly early as we needed to get packed and check out ready to fly to New Zealand later in the day. After sorting the room out and packing our bags we checked out then left our bags with the hotel and headed off to sample the dreggs of PAX. First up was an panel by Nvidia which also had a raffle where we didn’t win anything (I think Byrnie’s ticket was a digit out at one point) they talked about there desktop cards showed off the nice extra effects in games like Batman Arkam Origins and Assasins Creed 4 Black Flag. In the new batman there were some impressive atmospheric effects with swirling smoke and snow that reacted to the characters as well as some impressive dynamic tessellation tech that allowed footprints in the snow and the like. With AC4 some really nice looking water effects with some approximation of caustics and some lovely translucent shading. After that they looked at the Shield which we tried out earlier in the week showing a port of Oddworld Strangers Wrath which while a nice looking and fun game is somewhat old. They also demoed the desktop streaming function using Dying Light the latest from Techland which is another Zombie game like their last couple dead island and dead island riptide. Probably time they tried something different I think. The game looked pretty nice and the streaming seemed to work pretty well. It’s a nice feature but it feels like it costs a lot to be a fairly run of the mill android tablet + controller and terminal for your PC for some games (they showed a list of supported titles and it’s something like 30 games).
After that the nvidia show ran down and a lot of people left the room allowing us to get a lot closer. We were something like 4th row which was good as up next was an interview of Mike and Jerry by Robert Khoo who is their business manager and the guy who took the fledgling penny arcade and turned it into a powerhouse business empire. The interview was really interesting and Robert asked some really interesting questions of Mike and Jerry. The whole process made Mike and Jerry look decidedly uncomfortable at times. Mike himself said that since it was Robert asking the questions he could ask things that if they got from Journalist they would just refuse to answer. One of the things that came out of it was Jerry’s fear that he wasn’t doing as much of the work as Mike because of the amount of time it takes to draw and ink a strip vs writing. I think this must be a common anxiety for writer artist partnerships and maybe source of a lot of tension between artists and their writers and it did come up in one of the Q&A’s earlier in PAX. They also discussed a potential lookouts book and if Jerry might write it something that Jerry apparently hadn’t been aware that Mike was keen for him to do. They ended up with all of them telling funny stories about each other. It was a really fun panel and had a lot of interesting stuff and a great way to round off PAX.
After that we decided to see if there were any swag bags left, which there weren’t, and headed back to the hotel to collect our bags. Then we began the journey to Auckland which I think I will cover in a different post. It’s been a great PAX some wonderful panels and good games. I liked the D&D next the doublefine panel and the various Mike and Jerry content. It was great fun and I hope I can manage to get in again next year.
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