It’s day one of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) up here in Seattle. PAX was started in 2004 by the guys behind Penny Arcade, a webcomic about gaming, and has since grown to a twice-a-year convention in Boston and Seattle—last year, PAX attracted over 60,000 people.
Other than being full of a bunch of freaking nerds (and disease—last year saw a significant H1N1 outbreak), PAX is where many games get announced and the tone of nerd culture is set. On to the coverage!
Big titles this year: Portal 2! Duke Nukem Forever (IT LIVES!)! Guild Wars 2! I could go on….
There’s just nothing else to say: Portal 2 looks amazing. In Portal 2‘s new two-player co-op mode, you play a robot, completing the same type of puzzles that you did as a human in the first Portal. You and your partner each have a portal gun, making possibilities for portal-ing about twice as awesome. You can also direct new things through your portals: lasers, an energy bridge, and a flubber-like substance that flows like liquid but lets you can bounce on it like it’s a trampoline.
- Pictured above: robot sex.
The co-op mode robots—one short, one tall—appear to take equal part in the game mechanics (though as GLaDOS’s friendly voice reminds you: “Like Albert Einstein and his cousin Terry, history will remember only one of you”). However, the game is designed to be played by gamers at different levels (you and your mom or girlfriend, for example)—a new feature called “pinging” allows one player to show another where to shoot his/her portal. You can also make your robots wave to one another or “hug” (adorably).
Valve says Portal 2‘s single-player storyline is twice as long as the original’s; the co-op mode, additional and separate to the continuing storyline, is also twice as long as Portal‘s.
More from PAX day one—including Deus Ex creator Warren Spector’s keynote and the craziest kind of nerd—after the jump!
Farmville Sucks!
My comrades and I rose at 6:30 today in order to wait four hours for the keynote address (fortunately, we met some kids in line who had the Back to the Future card came). In 2007, PAX’s keynote was the origin of Wil Wheaton’s famous (in certain circles) “Don’t be a dick” motto—a motto that has penetrated so deep (in certain circles) that nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot wrote a song about it. Warren Spector (known for titles Deus Ex and System Shock, and otherwise gamer celebricon), delivered the PAX keynote this year, telling gamers to embrace the spread of social and casual gaming (Farmville received a hearty round of “boos” from the audience) instead of holding onto videogames as a sacred bastion for gamers only.
- Nate Anderson
- Warren Spector: “The geeks have inherited the earth, now we need to figure out what we’re going to do with it.”
“We yearn to be accepted be accepted by the mainstream,” Spector said, “but we get upset when developers try to appeal to a broader audience—as if that diminishes our experience somehow.”
The mainstreaming of games is essential now, as a case approaches the Supreme Court that will make video games “the first entertainment media ever to be denied first amendment protection.”
The Craziest Nerds Here
Boyfriend and I stayed in the auditorium after the keynote, thinking we would sit through some more interesting presentations—and interesting they were. We learned, for example, that die-hard fans of Rooster Teeth Productions are completely insane.
Rooster Teeth Productions makes Red vs. Blue, an internet video series that uses footage from the Halo games to tell the story of both sides of the war. Red vs. Blue got pretty popular in its early years (starting in 2002), and there are now apparently eight seasons of the thing.
During a panel discussion and the showing of the final two episodes of RvB‘s eighth season, Rooster Teeth fans were squealing, “I love you”—yelling, shrieking, gasping, and all kinds of emoting all over the place.
There are a lot of nerds here. Some are dressed like the living dead, some are dressed like characters from TV shows that have been off the air for decades. But the craziness of these fans really excelled. Some people spend months making a Star Wars stormtrooper outfit, but at least they are pretty quiet about it. Two women sitting next to us stomped all over boyfriend and I on her way to ask her heroes a question about their series. (I just asked boyfriend what their questions were and he said, “I don’t remember, I just remember being kind of annoyed.”)
- Angela Webber
- Nerds!
Check back tomorrow for updates on a CRAZY NERD-THEMED CONCERT and DUKE NUKEM FOREVER! (IT LIVES!!!)
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