What I saw at PAX 2006 – Day 2
So I came early the next day to PAX to get an opportunity to check out the exhibit hall early and saw some games and talk to some people who worked at the booths about things before the general public was able to get in. I was able to see the Penny Arcade booth before it got a huge crowd coming in to see what wares they would be selling to the people.
Here’s the Xbox Team getting prepared for the people who were coming. I got to meet up with one of the PMS girls squad and with Trixie. I was impressed with Xbox’s and Nintendo’s booths. I wanted to play America’s Army but also didn’t want to sign a stupid thing saying I was interested in some army junk mail.
I went over to see the Creative people and got a sneak peak at some things and saw this really small MP3 player with a color screen. It’s the Zen V and it’s really cool. I can’t wait for the Creative Zen: W to come out. I heard it’s awesome.
So one of the funny things I saw in the Exhibit Hall is the Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG blue screening an XP system. You can also see the America’s Army booth too.
You should deffinetly play this game comming out from The Behemoth company called Castle Crashers. It is a really cool game and was very interesting. It’s a Golden Axe like game with 4 player fighting. I can see this game making bank when it’s released early next year.
Well, now we are at the comic creation panel where we see a full Penny Arcade strip is created for the audience while even more questions are asked about their “SOE doughnut” incident and thier feelings on Jack Thompson. The funniest thing I saw at the event was when Mike Krahulik (Gabe) called Jack and let the audience tell him how they really feel about him on his voice mail. He called the next day on Mike’s voicemail and only said “I have your number and your name” and that was it. Here’s the video.
So here is Jerry Holkins writing out the script for the comic strip that will be released later next week. He starts to use Notepad but everyone says it’s too small so he switches to Wordpad so he can change the font to be larger. He adds the text to the pleasure of the audience and then trades seats with Mike Krahulik so he can draw the comic and let Jerry take over the questions.
Now, Mike had just done some really rough sketching early in the day and had scanned it into the computer and it’s now all ready to be inked. This part takes over a good part of the time and was very interesting to see his inkstyle with a wacom tablet.
The first picture that is shown is a human heart which according to the crowd is that Mike draws a lot of hands that look like they are holding a heart so a heart was drawn. I think that was an interesting outlook from the crowd. The second picture is that of the color log that cartoonists use to keep all the colors correct and in the right way.
Here’s a video that I did and here are two other links to people who had better cameras and longer recording times than I. They filmed what happened after the comic was complete and now they were just playing around. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
And here is the final product for the cartoon. It’s pretty grainy so go here for the nice version on Penny Arcade’s site.
That’s it for PAX I didn’t get a chance to come to the Sunday event but had a great time and Enjoyed the time I had there. Hope you enjoyed these Pictures and Videos showing off PAX.
