PAX East Day Two Review

SWAG

Surprise, more buttons from FanGamer! Non-sarcastic surprise, one of those buttons was a special Triforce button, which got me a free t-shirt from their booth! The power to make wishes come true, indeed.

I raided the queue room a few times for swag bags, in an attempt to get all three sets of the PAX exclusive Cards Against Humanity booster cards. Unfortunately, half the extra bags I took had already been looted for their bounty and returned to the pile. Karma sucks.

GAMES

You know what doesn’t suck? Legends of the Cipher. It is a deck building card game that takes you through the life of a budding MC, struggling to climb up the ladder from local rapper to hip hop legend. And it’s a lot of fun. I sat down with the lead game designer and rapper Seth Brown, also known as Ham-STAR, and played a quick round. Simple, easy to set up and get into, and a lot of fun. Especially the free-styling part, which you can actually have fun with and make up on the spot, or recite a favorite rhyme from memory, or just use the ones printed on the cards.

I also sat down to watch a demo of Saints Row IV. I was worried that this wondrously ridiculous game would die now that THQ was finished, but Deep Silver picked up the ball and kept running. Somehow this manages to be even more ludicrous than the last installment. The demo showcased a few weapons, such as the Inflato-Ray and the Dubstep Gun. Both are exactly what you think they are. Also, mech suits, aliens, and super powers are involved. Oh, and I forgot to mention that your character is now inexplicably the President of the United States. Hail to the Chief!

COSPLAY

And hail to the cosplayers on Saturday. It seems people saved their A-Game for Day Two. There was a great family cosplay of Glados, some random Aperture Science employee, and the portrait of Cave Johnson. I also ran into a steampunk Sailor Moon and a GIANT Pikachu with working ears. It’d be terrifying if it weren’t so adorable.

I also spotted an old favorite of mine, Mr. T with his giant box of Mr. T cereal. He rocks!

ALCOHOL

“Double Johnny Walker Black on the rocks, please.” After a long day of wandering the convention hall, I decided to kill time before the concert by getting wrecked at the bar. The bartenders there take forever to get to you, but at a event that might as well be called “Queue-topia” what’s one more line.

Two drinks later, it was time for the show.

CONCERT

It was impossible to tell that this was Sam Hart’s first time performing at PAX East. His set was fantastic and he had the crowd eating out of his hand with his Mario Kart song. The Adele sample he threw in was a great touch.

MC Frontalot had an good set. No new songs and no surprise feature from Mega Ran this year (he was busy doing his own show elsewhere), but his remix of the Penny Arcade Theme with the Game of Thrones theme sample was mind blowing.

No new songs from Coulton either, but his set was hilarious. He seemed to have learned from his previous two PAX East performances that the crowd goes wild whenever he drinks water, so he trolled us by drinking refreshing applesauce instead.

Paul and Storm Storm and Paul headlined PAX this year! Zealous Arrr! They started with an ad for their web series, Learning Town. Looks hilarious. Then they opened with a completely original song, Baby Got Back. They followed that with a list of favorites, closing of course with the crowd rousing The Pirate’s Wife’s Lament. Also, Storm put on a Utilikilt that was thrown on stage during the show. Also, they had the crowd of something thousand geeks tweet an ASCII penis to Wil Whedon.

A good day and a great night. PAX East can really drain the life out of you and at this point I was definitely feeling it. Sunday is going to be a very lazy day.

Final Grade: 9.5 out of 10.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *