As gamers from all across Australia and from various parts of the world made their way to Melbourne yesterday, it was time to check out what was in store for us on the first day of PAX Australia 2014.
You could tell that people were long anticipating this convention as we saw from our hotel room a small cluster of people waiting to get into the convention centre at 6:30am. As we arrived at the convention centre at a more realistic time, all media got to check out the expo hall an hour earlier than the general attendees. We made our plans as to where we should stop first, and that was none other than the Cards Against Humanity booth. The team are here in Melbourne to launch the Australian Edition base deck and Fifth Expansion (you bet I bought one of each). The humour in their game is embodied throughout their booth, decorated in a very US patriotic manner with banners saying “Get Your Shit Signed Here” if you wanted to meet the team.
Almost an hour later and the queue room outside the expo hall was packed full of attendees. An interesting addition to this year was banners hanging from the ceiling with holes that allowed attendees to throw beach balls through them, effectively to pass the time. Each banner was set to different heights, with the easy ones saying “20XP” and harder ones “30XP”. I found it really awesome that this was added as attendees in last year’s queue room were trying to throw beach balls over the banners hanging in the room, much to the disdain of the enforcers.
10am struck; attendees swarmed into the expo hall and effectively kicked off the liveliness to the convention. We made our way to the indie section to check out all the standout titles the Australia/New Zealand indie games scene had to offer. One title worth mentioning was Swordy, a 2D top-down fighter game with up to eight players.
Our first bit of work on our schedule was interviewing Alienware’s Director of Product Planning, Joe Olmstead on the launch of the company’s new products, the Alienware 13 and it’s Graphics Amplifier, Alienware Alpha and the Area 51 desktop.
So far, PAX is amazing. The size of the venue this year is incredible compared to last year and the layout of the convention is well thought out. There’s two more days of this for us, so stick around!