PAX! Day One.

This weekend has been an absolute blast.

Yesterday morning I woke up incredibly early (like 6:45 eww), donned my sneakers and ZAXY tshirt, and headed out the door for my first day of PAX.

Now, I don't really know what I was expecting. I've been to more Harry Potter and YouTube conferences than I can count, so I thought I would be prepared for a gaming conference.

I was not prepared for this gaming conference.

We walked in and immediately there were so, so many people everywhere (I think they were projecting 70,000 people to attend over the course of the entire weekend). Tara and I took a picture with a real delorean and then headed to the queue room. Which was literally a whole room just for queuing to get inside. We got our free bags of goodies (including a whole bunch of fliers I haven't read yet, and Magic the Gathering starter decks!) and then proceeded to be entertained for about a a half hour by a giant screen with "wait-in-line" games playing. In the duration of that time we danced to the Numa song, were Rickroll'd, enjoyed the ending song to Portal, texted in our answers for a Would You Rather, and played a game where we, collectively as an audience, had to lean left and right to make a jumping man make it up the screen by going in the right direction.

Once inside, I was on complete sensory overload. There were multiple floors, with so many rooms, and each room was just FULL of awesome booths, all trying to outdo one another with how flashy and impressive they were.

Tara had all these press demos lined up so we alternated between running to appointments and meandering aimlessly through the convention center. We got to meet with the Alienware people and learn about their gaming systems (which I thought were pretty sweet looking). Our next demo was for this new MMO called Vindictus, which none of us really knew anything about, but we wanted the free Wolf hood they give out as swag. But when we got to this particular demo appointment, they had a fancy little buffet set up for us and were super excited to tell us about their game. So we stuffed our faces and actually played through the entire demo and it was really fun! The characters are incredibly customizable and I was really impressed with the detail and options for the girl characters. You can pick up anything in the game and throw it at your enemy, so Tara and Brittney and I (I think I neglected to mention I was running around PAX with the other Zaxy girls) were cracking up at each other when we'd see our characters walking super slow off in the distance since they're lugging a giant clay pot bigger than their whole body. We had a blast and got beta codes to try the game before it comes out.

Then we got to demo this awesome new game called "The Ball", which had a really cool concept; you have this giant magic ball and you go through this ancient Mexican tomb thing, solving a series of puzzles and guiding the ball along with you the whole time.

As for other things we did at the first day... we got to play Epic Mickey (which looks really, really cool), we tried Deca Sports for Kinect (I can see some games being fun but it's pretty limited in what you can do without a controller. We tested figure skating and it was lame). We saw tons of people in hilarious cosplay, I met 2 different people who recognized me from YouTube, and actually ran into a lot of people I knew, some from the Internet and some from high school. And I got a lot of free tshirts!

That evening we were throwing an afterparty at Neumos, which started a bit slow but ended up being a whole lot of fun as well. Major Nelson was there, and we had a few bands play, but the best part of the night was the nerdy trivia competition. We had 3 rounds and then a championship round, and the whole thing was hosted by Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy fame [I love him]). Tara, Britt and I acted as Vanna White for the trivia, walking across the front of the stage to award and deduct points, and Ken was a terrific host, keeping the game upbeat, exciting and running smoothly. The audience got really into it as well, which was fun for us, since the ZAXY girls wrote the questions.

I am so, so tired now, and already planning to go into PAX a bit later than I told Tara I would be meeting her there. But we have more demos today (including Kung Fu live, which should be hilariously fun) so I can't stay in bed too long.

Last google search: "pax tri-wizard drinking tournament"
Chipotle burritos: 18