Spartans never die, Jorge.

As promised, a review of late August/early September’s nerdy events.

Halo Reach event in Vancouver

Overall, absolutely terrible. Nobody really knew what was going to happen, but most Halo fans don’t care, as long as there is promise of Halo-related things. So we went and arrived 15 minutes early…to wait in line for 4 hours. By the time we got up to the front, they ran out of t-shirts and there’s no excuse for that. Everyone knows how much people love their Halo. Anyways, the event consisted of giving your demographic information inside an army tent and then in a different tent being “briefed” about the mission with a video that was already released. After a few “HOORAH”s, we got suited up and killed the “Covenant” (they were people wearing purple shirts) with complicated and sometimes broken “machine guns” (laser tag guns with more buttons). The best part about that was if you look down the scope, you get a red dot sight. To make this event even worse, there was a third tent set up with screens and 360s, but no Reach. Seriously? A Reach event without Reach? The Toronto version got Reach, but not us. Anyways, the end product of the whole event was a 5 minute game of laser tag, a lanyard, and a dog tag, which is not worth standing in line for 4 hours.

Penny Arcade Expo

Surprisingly, many people don’t actually know about PAX. It’s a convention in Seattle on the last weekend of August every year (this year they changed it to be labor day weekend) for people who play games. Console games, PC games, board games, card games, handheld games, etc. This year, the event sold out before the first day to over 60,000 people. As my birthday present this year, I went to the first two days of the convention (if you’re a real hardcore nerd, you’ll find stuff do to for all three days and still run out of time, but I get tired an hour or two before the second day is over) with Sir Myles.

There’s really 4 main things to do at this (and probably many other) conventions. You either stand in line for hours to play the hottest games only previously seen at E3 or never, go around collecting all of the free stuff you can, go to all of the panels, or participate in the tournaments or freeplays. Of course there’s other stuff like playing the indie games scattered around the edges of the expo hall, talking with developers of pretty much anything game related, and stalking Gabe and Tycho.

I did some of all of those – I saw a bunch of my Xbox Live and Red vs Blue friends, went to a few panels, played a few hot games, collected free stuff, and saw Tycho crossing the street. I could go on for pages about PAX, but I’ll keep this short, so if you want to know anything more about anything, let me know. But some of the best parts were…

• The Rock Band 3 panel with the hilarious picture of one of the employees doing things outside of Activision (only old music game fans will understand this)
• The 343 Industries panel where we got a Halo Reach poster that’s on thick paper, embossed, holographic, and signed by Bungie (see picture at the bottom)
• Finding a poster tube for the poster
• The Red vs Blue panel
• Playing FFXIV
• Playing Rare’s Kinect Sports – Boxing (only because I pwned Kiryu very hard on it) and Harmonix’s Dance Central on Natal, I mean, Kinect
• Visiting every single booth in the expo hall

Good times were had by all, except those who missed out on free stuff, and I’m definitely going back next year.