All Hail Ball!

If any of you had the chance to see our... very stupid, but awesome drunken video you will notice we promised you video's of PAX. But due to Fronzibald being lazy and not wanting to carry around his Video Camera along with his normal Camera, he did not take any video's of PAX, nor many photo's for that matter...

But thankfully I did, but unfortunately on my way to PAX I lost my Camera somewhere, so all the photo's and the one video I took is of pretty bad quality, but they are photo's of this grand occasion still.

Let me first start off by explaining what PAX is, for those of you who live in a box.

PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a expo, or convention if you choose to use that term that the creators of Penny Arcade hold in Seattle, WA every year August 29 to August 31. Three days of complete, nerdy awesomeness. Everything from how to work in the Video Game industry to Game Demo to Table Top Games.

This was the first year I went to (and heard of) PAX, Fronzibald went to PAX 2007 and said that it was awesome, so I decided to go along. Since we live in Alberta, Canada, the flight down there was not that expensive, and the hotel we stayed at was at discount because of PAX. The whole trip probably cost me about $1000 CAN. Mostly because I did not book my flight early enough. But it was worth it.

This is the view from the Hotel we were staying at. We were paying around $170 USD a night, normally around $250 USD. So it is a pretty high class place.

So, Fronzibald and I got to the Hotel around 10:30AM the first day of PAX. We unloaded our stuff and preceded to head down to the Convention Center, which was across the street of our hotel. We got in and got our 3-day passes and headed into the "Line Room", a room specifically placed there for the amazing amount of people going to PAX, or which ever convention they hold there. This will give you a idea on how many people were there.

This is after everyone got up because the line started moving. I think they said that around 100,000 people came to PAX this year. That is almost double how many came last year. If you can see many people have there heads down due to the fact that they are playing a DS or PSP. Which is awesome in my opinion. Fronzibald and I were going to bring our DS's, but we ended up not bringing them. According to this guy I was talking too, Pictochat was full of people, and most of them were posting penis's. I would of got in on that action if I could, lol. Fronzibald and I waiting in the line for two hours I think. Completely worth it though.

After we got in we headed to the Exhibition Hall. That held at least 35 stands, like Blizzard, Capcom, etc. All showing off there new games. I got a picture of the beginning area, but since it was a Cell Phone picture like the others it is not that good. But here it is!

There was so much too do and see. We ended up just walking around for a bit and headed back out. On the way out I got to meet MC Frontalot. He is THE best Nerdcore Hip-Hop artist out there. You can download a few of his tracks here on the PAX website. Just scroll down and you can see the different artists that attended PAX. I got a T-Shirt, a SIGNED poster (Drawn by Gabe from Penny Arcade) and two of his CD's, again signed.

After talking to MC Frontalot, and going to a bunch of the Panels that was offered. We headed to the free concert that was offered on the first two of the three nights. All the Bands were pretty awesome, some more then others, but that is a given.

This is a picture of when the One Up's were playing. A awesome band that plays video game music!

If memory serves me correctly, Freezepop was next. I think the genre they play is called Synth Pop. probably most well known for the song Less Talk More Rock in Guitar Hero 2. At one point Freezepop played this one slow song that I don't remember, but everyone started holding up there Cell Phones, DS's and I even saw a few Laptops, lol.

When Freezepop finished they played The Final Countdown, originally played my Europe. Everyone went crazy! Everyone was singing along with the chorus and it was awesome!

After that Jonathan Coulton went on stage, the crowd went wild. At one point he did his song RE: Eat your Brains. He asked the crowd to act like zombies and throw up there hands and moan like a zombie.
He also played a song he made called Mr. Fancypants, but he said that the song was only like a minuet long, so he bought a Zen Drum to mix up the song a bit to make it longer.

It was awesome, he was called back twice for a encore. Personally I liked Freezepop and MC Frontalot... and The One Up's better then him, but I'm not into the style of music too much. But regardless it was awesome. That was basically the first night for the concerts. The next night included MC Frontalot, Minibosses, The Hills are Thickets... or something (Crappy in my opinion). MC Frontalot was by far the best I think. His performance was amazing. You can probably search him up on YouTube for his performance at PAX 2007, or 2008. He runs around the stage and raps and his arms are always moving and flaying. It was awesome. I didn't take any pictures though because my Cell had died of batteries.

Another band that played was Anamanaguchi, they play music over 8-bit sounds. It sounded pretty sweet at the time, but it was hard to hear the whole song because the 8-Bit sounds were not loud enough. Once I got home I listened to them on the PAX website, and they are awesome. I'm going to get there CD when it comes out. I think they said there first CD is going to be free to download.

Fronzibald and I also visited the table top section of PAX and Watched some apocalypse 40K battles, not for long though. We also played D&D for a while, it was pretty damn sweet. We plan to play it more often if we get a group going.

Other than that, it was a awesome time in Seattle. In conclusion, I can't wait for the next PAX! And... All Hail Ball! (With a horrible Cell Phone video!)




-CarlEldar