PAX East is over, and it’s time to settle back down and deal with reality again. I had a really great time and met a lot of awesome people, regular joes and janes, and people in the industry. This week I want to share some of the experiences, findings, and thoughts from my weekend at PAX East.
So many people, so many booths. Where to start?
I was surprised at the number of retro games I’d seen for sale on the convention floor. I caught a glimpse of an Odyssey 2, a few Intellivision games, lots of Atari 2600 and NES games. Someone walked out of there with a Turbo Duo, I hadn’t seen one of them for sale in years unless it was on eBay or something. There were some more obscure things for sale as well, such as a few WonderSwan handhelds, custom modified Game Boys, newer indie DreamCast games and even some Genesis and Super NES reproduction games. If you ever wanted a boxed repro of Mega Man: The Wily Wars or Star Fox 2, it was a good chance to pick them up and not wait a month for them to be made for you. I also spotted a cart-only English Monster World IV and Pulseman.
So many treasures. I wanted to buy it all.
A PAX tradition is the Retro Gaming Room, which is a bunch of TVs lined up with a console hooked up to it. They have a library of Commodore 64, Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Genesis/Sega CD/32X, Master System, PlayStation, Saturn, Turbo Grafx-16, Apple II, and Dreamcast games. I probably missed something in there. They didn’t have an MSX which bummed me out but, God willing, I might seek to fix that. The way the room works is you check out a game and they give you about half an hour to just sit down and play it. Hanh, our faithful Editor-in-Chief, and rocked out some Gunstar Heroes and later some Street Fighter III: Third Strike with some other people. I could have spent all three days.
When was the last time you could just walk up and play Colecovision?
They also had some neat treasures on display. One case was full of prototype carts, collectable pins, buttons, and patches. Another case had a GameBoy Light Famitsu Edition, a PC-Engine LT, a Gizmodo, the Satellaview for the Super Famicom, and a Color TV-Game 15 which was one of Nintendo’s early consoles from the late 70’s. They had some old magazines too, some of which I still own. Remember SEGA Vision, SWAT, and GamePlayers? How about Diehard Gamefan?
I think I had a subscription to every one of these.
Another sight that blew my mind was the Steel Battalion room. Ever heard of the game? It was an obscure Xbox mech-simulator by Capcom that came with a humongous controller, complete with an eject button and foot pedals. There was a recent sequel on the Xbox 360, but I don’t think anyone really played that either. They had a room set up with I believe 8 Xbox systems networked together and a few set up solo. I didn’t know that many of them still existed, let alone expect to see that many in one room. It was quite amazing.
I got to meet John Delia from Retroware TV, and Joey DeSena from Clan of the Gray Wolf. They were a blast to talk to, and I hope I will get the chance to do so again. They did a panel with Bob Mackey from Retronauts, and Marty Silva called “Retro Games We Want to Love”, which was about games that are popular that they just didn’t care for or think were so great. John Delia mentioned Final Fantasy VII, which I completely agreed with. Also, if you’re unfamiliar with everything that went down with Ziff Davis’s aquisition of IGN, 1UP.com, UGO.com, and Gamespy.com are being shut down. This means that the guys from Retronauts were laid off. However, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of Retronauts, as you can support their Kickstarter here. They’ve got some awesome stretch goals, as well as some great bonuses for pledging. I love their work, and if you want to see them keep doing their podcast, toss them a few bucks to help out if you can.
An example of some of the rare loot that was being shown off.
I also attended a panel with the guys from the American Classic Arcade Museum, who talked about restoring and preserving arcade machines from the 70’s and early 80’s and the problems going along with that. As time goes on, many of these machines are lost and that’s a big problem. They had brought a few dozen machines with them to PAX East, and had them set up on free play. Some of them I hadn’t seen in years, like Super Mario Bros. They also had a Pong machine and a couple pinball machines as well. The darkened lights, lasers, and music really set the mood making you feel like you might have actually walked back in time to 1985.
There were some newer retro styled games that caught my eye. I got to check out a GCW Zero, which is an open source handheld. They had Unnamed Monkey Game, not a working title, which was a cool platformer made to look like an old school Game Boy game. So, the game looks green-ish and light green-ish, but the handheld itself is full colored. The GCW Zero is Linux based and they mentioned trying to get some old DOS games on it.
It’s got monkeys? Sold!
Another fantastic game by Yacht Club games, who is comprised of some former WayForward employees, was Shovel Knight for PC, Wii U and 3DS. It mixes elements from Mega Man, Castlevania, and even some Dark Souls. The gameplay mechanics to the game are very clever. You’re a Knight, you wield a shovel. You can do a move similar to the downward thrust in Zelda II. There’s also piles of sand and/or dirt laying around that you can dig in to get additional treasure and items, or dig through to move on in the levels. Everything played very smooth. The graphics are all 8-bit style, to the point where they’re using the NES’s color palette. They have a Kickstarter going on, you definitely want to check it out if you’re into 8-bit platformers.
I guess you could say I really dug this one.
Dive Kick for PS3, PS Vita, and PC also stood out for me. You can think of it as a parody of fighting games. There’s two buttons: Dive and Kick. One dive kick knocks the other player out. If you do a headshot, which is hitting someone in the head, it leaves that player dizzy at the start of the next round. It sounds simplistic, but it was a lot of fun. It would make a great party game.
It’s not exactly retro but Transistor, by Supergiant Games, caught my attention. It certainly had some style to it and the music was incredible. It’s an Action RPG featuring redheaded girl with a giant sword in a cyberpunk world. How can you go wrong? You could say it’s sort of a successor to Bastion with more tactical gameplay. Supergiant Games hasn’t stated what platforms the game will appear on, but PC is probably a given. They’re saying an early 2014 release is most likely.
Transistor just oozed style. I wish I didn’t have to wait until 2014 to play it.
Capcom announced Duck Tales: Remastered for Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii U. It’s being developed by WayForward, and It will even feature the same voice actors from the show and remixed music from the original NES game. They also announced Dungeon and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara for PC, Wii U, Xbox 360, and PS3. It includes both original Dungeons and Dragons arcade games. At one time I said this probably would never see the light of day again. I’m glad Capcom decided to prove me wrong. Bravo. Supposedly they’re also working on a new Mega Man game, but didn’t mention any details.
Admit it, you still know the song by heart.
There’s countless other things I saw at PAX, too. Remember Me looked spectacular, as did The Last of Us. I checked out Diablo III briefly on PS3 which seemed to work very well on the controller. The Rise of the Triad revival reminded me a lot of the original, that’s one to keep an eye on as well. Did I miss anything? Probably. There were so many things going on at PAX East, I couldn’t possibly write about them all.
Were you there? Anything I didn’t mention you want to make sure I saw? I want to know! Comment below or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
