So the plan for Sunday was to get there early and hit the booths that had eluded me so far (mostly because I wasn’t willing to wait several hours in line).
Booths that I wanted to see were Duke Nukem Forever, Portal 2 and perhaps Dragon Age 2. Duke Nukem had proven to be the worst of the bunch on previous days.
I was able to get to the convention center early enough to line up indoors. On the first day I had to line up outside as the indoor waiting area was already full.
On a giant screen they were showing text messages from people waiting in line. Some of them were pretty funny. One of them claimed that the Duke Nukem booth was out of t-shirts. Other booths had run out over the weekend, so this wasn’t all that surprising. Honestly, though, one of the main reasons for wanting to see the booth was to get a t-shirt, so this was something to consider.
Regardless, I decided to go there anyway and see what all of the fuss was about.
Photo from Wikipedia
I can remember playing the original Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 3D back in the 90’s and it’s been a long running gag that Duke Nukem Forever is the king of vaporware.
I walked directly to the booth after being let in and guess what I saw? A F****** 3 hour lineup! Seriously, I got to the booth by 10:05 and people were already lined up around the booth and down the wall; easily a 3 hour wait. Like WTF!!! As an added bonus, I saw that they had plenty of t-shirts to give out. 👿
I tried not to let that get me down and I continued on my way. Luckily, the Portal 2 booth was not very busy and I was able to get in with only a 20 minute wait. Since returning from PAX I’ve learned that they were giving out Portal 2 t-shirts at some point. They must have been out already because there were no t-shirts to be had while I was there.
The game looked awesome though, with many new features.
The above photo shows two of those features. The repulsion gel (foreground) and the excursion funnel (background).
The repulsion gel, when sprayed upon a surface, gives that surface a trampoline like effect.
The excursion funnel creates a churning tunnel of liquid asbestos. It basically allows you and other objects to be carried along the path of the funnel.
Other cool new features are propulsion gel, aerial faith plate, thermal discouragement beam, pneumatic diversity vent and Wheatley (a new character).
The demo mostly consisted of showing the new Co-op mode.
Valve has created two new robot characters for the Co-op mode. The Co-op mode is independent from the single player game, but will be just as long.
Both the single player game and co-op mode are each supposedly twice as long as the original Portal. Many complained that the original Portal was too short, so I guess Valve decided to overcompensate and give us 4 times the game time.
I’m looking forward to picking this up, although I probably would have bought it anyway, I really enjoyed the first one.
I decided not to get in line for Dragon Age 2. I still haven’t played Dragon Age 1 yet, so I’m not in a hurry to learn about Dragon Age 2.
I was able to score a coupon for a Guild Wars 2 t-shirt by jumping in the line of people who had just tried it.
I had to take the coupon down to the T-shirt Factory and exchange it for an actual t-shirt.
I didn’t sit in on any panels (again), but I tried to participate in every raffle that I could and kept my eye out for any more t-shirts.
I did end up getting runner up in the Patriot Memory raffle. They gave me a copy of Fallen Earth and a Fallen Earth t-shirt. I didn’t really have any interest in the game, so I went over to the Fallen Earth booth to see if someone checking out the booth would be interested in trading. When I got there, there was no one checking out the booth and then I saw that they were giving out free copies of the game.
I gave them the copy that I won and told them it would get more use if they gave it to someone else.
Around 4 PM I went over to the Intel booth and asked if there was any place in particular that I should be if I wanted to get spotted by their button patrol. I had my button on all weekend, but no Intel love. The guy told me to come back at 6 if I didn’t have any luck.
I caught raffles at 5 and 5;30, but didn’t win anything else.
At 6 I headed back to the Intel booth to plead my case. They took pity, gave me an Intel t-shirt and told me to keep my button for next year and they will hook me up.
After that, the show was over. I made out pretty good, 23 t-shirts, 1 hoodie, one ring to rule them all, a bunch of buttons and some beta keys. Ya OK, I made out like a bandit. 😀
ComputerAbuser
