PAX Day 3 1/9/13
We started the day with the Q&A 2 which was pretty empty we were almost at the front of the queue and the Paramount theater was maybe ¼ full. We got quite near the front and even with the small audience there were plenty of questions and Mike and Jerry were entertaining as always.
We spent some time cruising the show floor and Byrnie took the opportunity to buy a tshirt. We wandered around visited the doublefine booth and took a look at some of the merchandise on sale.
For lunch we grabbed some bento boxes from a sushi place in the westlake food court and washed it down with a smoothy. Later we had a difficult choice the Doublefine panel or the Strip Search reunion mega panel. They overlapped so we could only really see one, in the end we decided to go for the Doublefine option.
While queueing we were next to a guy who had us try his android game called Clobbr which was a fairly competent looking puzzle game. It was fairly nicely put together and simple but it was a cutesy but disjointed with cats and cheeses and some sort of mole thing it lacked a cohesion. He told us about his rejected Kickstarter which was some confusing scheme to get Tim Schafer to acknowledge their game their reward were various levels fo bothering Tim Schafer, which seemed really odd move and I’m not surprised that Kickstarter shut it down. He also plied Byrnie with drugs some sort of caffeine pill. We chatted a bit and then moved into the panel. It was pretty interesting Tim Schafer, Chris Remo, Brad Muir and Greg Rice were there and they talked about the process of making Doublefine more open with Broken Age and Massive Chalice.
They also went over the changes that they made between the two kickstarter campaigns it was pretty interesting the move from saying nothing and trying to prevent the flow of information to being almost all open and the way backer interaction shaped the game and added to the flow of development like with massive chalice with the same sex heroes making the game more inclusive. The also announced some of the voice cast for Broken age with Jennifer Hale of Fem Shep fame and Jack Black as well as some other people from their previous titles.
They also had a short Q&A and the guy we met in the queue raced up, he then basically tried to get Tim Schafer to acknowledge his game and sign some bit of paper which didn’t go down too well Tim shot him down pretty hard. It was really the wrong forum and the audience didn’t really take well to the guy trying to essentially hijack the panel Q&A to market his game.
After that we headed back for a rest we grabbed a drink and then some things that looked like pepperami but turned out to be horrible they were called Smok a roni and they were really awful. We took a picture for future reference to prevent us making that mistake again.
When we’d recovered from the meat sticks we headed out again. we intended to go to a voice acting panel but it filled up too quickly so instead we headed over to the Annex and played a game of D&D next. We timed it pretty well and were quickly in a game. I played a Gnome Druid who I made a drug dealer. I could turn into a dog and do various illusion things. Byrnie played an Elf Ranger who could do a sort of dual wield saber move. We had 4 other guys in the party a young kid who played a warrior and then a couple of other guys who played a Cleric a Barbarian and a Paladin. We had a fun adventure on our little table but the scenario was sort of linked with the other tables to have a collaborative fight going on with all the groups attacking a boss monster which was a Dragon that flew round our various groups.
I managed to get knocked out once and had variable luck with my attacks. My character looked like it would be quite fun to play in various scenarios with lots of illusion skills and sneaky things (including the ability to make thing smell like a skunk) but it lacked a bit in combat effectiveness still I had a good time turning into a dog and bitting things then getting fried by the dragon. Byrnie was the only one in our party who could attack the dragon when it was on other towers without a penalty but he had some truly terrible rolls and kept missing time after time.
It was a lot of fun and a good test of the system that was pretty easy and quite a lot like my experience of 4th edition with some tweaks. As we finished I noticed that a friend of mine Cassie was there queuing for the next session I went over and said hello.
After that we grabbed a sandwich at subway and then headed to Late Night Dub Fight where they ran some cartoons or commercials or game videos and then overdubbed them live. It was quite fun and a nice end to the evening we headed back to the hotel.
Tomorrow we have the final day of PAX and we also Fly to NZ which is going to be a hell of a day
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