The Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX for short, is one of the biggest gaming conventions open to the public. It’s been around for a good while, but at first it was only limited to being in Seattle (I’ve been to quite a few of the Seattle ones).  Over the past few years, that’s changed as there have been PAX conventions in Boston and even Australia!  And now, for the second year in a row, they had a PAX South convention located in San Antonio, TX last weekend!  I live near Dallas, TX, so I attended this one as well as last year’s.

This year’s PAX South didn’t seem as eventful as last year’s. Or at least I didn’t have as many meetings.  PAX has a lot of panels with speakers, and I usually don’t go to them since I’m busy attending meetings with game companies.  But since I didn’t have as many this year, I tried to attend more panels instead.

The first panel I attended was called “You Have Died of Dysentery: Meaningful Gaming in Education.” For some reason, I have always been interested in educational games and I have always loved to review them.  So I was hoping this panel would introduce me to some new ones or insight on ones I already knew about.  But this panel was actually a little different than that.  The speaker was a teacher and she talked about how kids today are very motivated by video games, and she proposed how to make lessons and elements in the classroom mirror those found in video games.  She showed ways on how she motivated kids in her classroom with gaming elements like Achievements (they were separate from grades of course), for instance.  The only problem I had with her lecture was that she cited game study examples that were a bit outdated, like Zelda: Ocarina of Time and A Bug’s Life on the N64.  While it wasn’t quite the topic I was hoping to hear about, it was still pretty interesting and I know a lot of teachers who would’ve loved to listen in on this panel.  The speaker’s name was Ashley Brandin, so if you are interested in learning more about her panel, maybe she has it online somewhere if you look her up?  Her presentation had an Oregon Trail motif, as you can see from this slide here:

There were a couple of panels I missed for various reasons. Those of your who have read my articles in the past know that I am an avid Amiibo figure collector.  There was actually a panel this year about Amiibo collecting, so I wanted to go see that.  I waited in the line for the panel and it ended up being late by at least 20 minutes.  With no indication of them starting the panel anytime soon, I left my place in line to do other things.  Who knows when it started?  I also figured that since I own all Amiibo figures released in the US so far (except for Mega Yarn Yoshi), I probably wouldn’t learn much from the panel anyway.  There was also a panel about the PTA and gaming, but I missed that one as well because of my bad luck with the last two panels not being what I wanted or not happening at all!

But I did attend a panel run by Galaxy Trail. They made a cult classic game called Freedom Planet, which plays like a cross between a Sonic the Hedgehog game and Treasure titles like Gunstar Heroes.   I reviewed it last year for Wii U, which you can read about here.  Anyway, they used their panel to announce their new title, which is of course, Freedom Planet 2.  The hosts of the panel were makers of the game as well as some of the voice cast.  I thought it was pretty cool that they were using some local talent as well.  I was hoping for some gameplay footage, but all they showed was an animated intro that looked more like Mega Man X than anything.  They did show some slides of some of the new and old characters, though.  I took pictures of almost all of them, but didn’t show them here.  However, if you are interested in seeing those slides, let me know in the comment section and I might write an article about them later and show the pictures.

One of the few meetings I had was with a game company called Fishing Cactus. They are making a computer game called Epistory: Typing Chronicles.  According to the developers, this is an adventure game with exploration and gameplay elements similar to Zelda.  But the graphics and visuals unfold on the screen like paper Origami art.  And when you encounter enemies, you defeat them by typing out words, so it’s kind of educational as well.  Normally I’m not interested in PC games, but I thought this one sounded kind of unique so I wanted to learn more about it anyway.

Another meeting I had was with LootCrate. Similar to subscription services like the “Pudding of the Month Club,” you can subscribe to LootCrate and they’ll send you out a box every month with products and swag based on comic books, games, movies, and other entertainment.  You never know what you’ll get and there is a different theme every month.  It sounds pretty cool, and I think one of my brothers even subscribed to it for a while.  But I don’t subscribe to it as I have enough junk as it is, plus I don’t need to be spending too much money on that sort of thing anyway.  But at PAX South, they announced a new kind of LootCrate that you can subscribe to that has only gaming themed swag in it, and will feature products based on games like Halo, Skyrim, and Street Fighter.  Supposedly, the products in the boxes will be of higher quality, too, and will be exclusive to LootCrate, so the subscription may cost a tiny bit more, too. Maybe if they made LootCrates based on Pac-Man, Mega Man, Kirby, Animal Crossing, etc., I might be more interested in subscribing to LootCrate Gaming.

TinyBuild publishes a lot of mobile and PC games, and I’ve reviewed quite a few of them. TinyBuild has always been very supportive of me, so I try to meet up with them at every PAX I go to.  They were showing a lot of games that are already out, even some that I’ll have reviews up soon.  So be on the lookout for reviews of their games like Punch Club (a boxing simulator), and Dungelot: Shattered Lands (a cross between a dungeon crawler and…Minesweeper?).  One of their upcoming games they showed at PAX South was ClusterTruck on PC.  In this game, you have to jump on a convoy of truck trailers without touching the ground.  It’s as crazy as it sounds.  They also had a sequel to Lovely Planet, a first person shooter with graphics that look like Katamari Damacy.  Hopefully I’ll be able to review the first one when it comes out on Wii U later.

And finally, my last ‘official’ meeting was with Hebi Studios. They are a local San Antonio company making a Wii U game called RageBall.  It plays and looks mostly like Pong, but with added elements like bumpers and more balls on the playfield.  The neat thing was that after I played, some little preschool kids came up to play the game as well, so I thought that was cool.  RageBall certainly is accessible for all ages, and hopefully we’ll be able to check it out on the Wii U later this year.

I played some other games here and there while walking around. I saw a booth from the Dallas Society of Play, a group of local indie game developers.  My brother Jeff played one of the games at their booth called Neightborhorde.  It’s a four player twin stick shooter that plays like Robotron.  You shoot monsters like dragons in a suburban setting, and the game was really colorful.  You had to stay close to your teammates to heal your characters, too.  Jeff thought it was really fun, and the other PC games at their booth looked colorful and interesting, too.  I also played a mobile game at another booth called Happy Chess, which is a user-friendly chess game for beginners that had cute and colorful characters in it.

And that’s really about it as far as games I remember at PAX South. Most everything else was computer games that may or may not be greenlighted on Steam, which doesn’t guarantee they’ll come out, or they were on a kickstarter.  Other titles were just free-to-play mobile games or the exact same games I saw at last year’s PAX South.  I was disappointed that hardly any big-name console companies were there this year.  Last year, at least Nintendo was at PAX South.  This year there was only Capcom, and they showed off and let people play Street Fighter V, some Resident Evil game, and Mega Man Legacy Collection.  And they also had a store.  Here is what their booth looked like:

And speaking of stores, of course there were lots of stores that sold all kinds of gaming merchandise, but nothing really jumped out at me that I wanted to get. One place had a Portal board game, but it was fifty bucks and I’m not paying that much for a board game! Another place was selling Amiibos, and they even had the only Amiibo I don’t own, the Mega Yarn Yoshi!  I wasn’t even sure if this one even existed, so I made sure to take a picture of it out in the wild!  But I certainly wasn’t going to pay 70 bucks for it!  Everything was just so overpriced there.

All in all, I really felt this year’s PAX South was more disappointing than last year’s. People said it was bigger, but I really think it was only bigger because everything was more spread out.  Which is good in a way, but I still think there was less stuff to do there than last year.  Even the tabletop games section felt less prominent.  Here are a couple of shots of the show floor from the second story balcony so you can see what it kind of looked like.

That was the right side; here is the left side closer to the entrance.

So yeah there really wasn’t much at this year’s PAX South that really interested me. They weren’t even giving out that many freebies this year.  Heck, I only got one free T-shirt!  Chances are, I may not be coming back to PAX South again next year, as it really wasn’t worth the trip.  If I do go, I probably won’t stay near as long.  Maybe I’d go if they held it Dallas next year, yeah that would be cool.  But at least I got to spend time with my brother Jeff and other family members, so it wasn’t a total wash.  Tomorrow I’ll post some pictures of people who dressed up in costume at this year’s PAX South.  Later!  –Cary

Tags: Misc