So far the Microsoft Kinect demos were technologically impressive – the sports, dancing and workout games looked fun. Nintendo didn’t impress me much – the 3DS looks nifty, but I haven’t touched my NDS or PSP since I got the iPhone. I doubt I’ll get it – unless they release another Advance Wars or Fire Emblem. Sony hyped the PS Move, but after seeing Kinect it kinda felt flat. It’s basically a glorified Wiimote. Their presentation was much better though, while MS and Nintendo’s presenters kept using marketingspeak – “franchise”, “mass market”, “consumer trends” – Sony’s Kevin Butler went with a funny speech crafted for their target demographic. Too bad Jack Tretton went back to BS right after. I also thought PSN Plus is crap since you basically rent the content – it’s yours as long as you pay the subscription.

Wish I was there though – Microsoft gave free Xboxes to all keynote attendees and Nintendo had pretty girls demoing the 3DSes. Games-wise, I’m excited about the next Mortal Kombat, that should be fun. The Medal of Honor, Bulletstorm and Crysis 2 trailers looked really good. Should be a fun holiday season.

We were five guys – me, Ethan, Cary, Sean and their friend Jo – the latter three even scored media badges since they have a blog where they review video games. Since they needed to pick up those badges earlier, they took Thursday off and jumped on a bus to Boston during the afternoon. Me and Ethan drove there at night, after work.

The Gang

Friday morning we got hit with the crappiest weather imaginable – a mixture of rain and snow – which fortunately didn’t last much. The expo doors were opening at 2PM so in the morning we went to check out a related event, an Xbox360 press conference held at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center at MIT.

Microsoft NERD

The main spokesman for the Xbox – Major Nelson – was there to talk about 360 news and took some pictures with us. He had a Q&A session and gave the audience a bunch of prizes. Cary walked out with a copy of  Forza Motorsport 3.

In the afternoon we went to the main convention center, got our badges and swag bags. There were a huge number of people in there – the total headcount was at 60.000 – which means there were lines pretty much everywhere, especially to play the new games. We also missed most of the panels for the same reasons; the only big event we got into was the Nvidia GTX 480 launch, for which we lined up an hour before.

PAX East

My biggest achievement was sneaking in to see a private demo of Civilization V (which was completely booked as well). It looks absolutely fantastic, I can’t wait for it to come out. Ethan spent his time mostly playing Left 4 Dead 2 (which is the same thing he does every night at home) and the others went around interviewing game developers. At the end of the day we had dinner at a Cheesecake Factory near the convention center with some of Sean’s friends for Boston.

On Saturday morning I took another dose of gaming, this time with an old favorite – Magic: the Gathering. Played a couple of games on the floor which netted me some free cards in the end. I spent all my other time taking pictures of cosplayers.

Cosplayers

In the afternoon we were joined by one of Ethan’s friends from Boston. Since I wanted to check out the city anyway, I left him at the convention with my badge and took a walk in downtown Boston.

Around Boston

I walked about half the city – from the convention to the Civic Center, Theater District, Chinatown (with a stop for bubble tea ), City Hall and Cambridge Bridge. I met up with the others around 7, when we went for dinner to a famous Boston burger place. While driving back – it was already night – I realized that from Harvard bridge I could take some very nice pictures of the city at night, so after we got to the hotel I went back out to brave the freezing cold (and believe me, it was cold) and took some pictures.

Boston at Night

Sunday we took one last stroll around the expo and after lunch me and Ethan headed back to NYC. The others had interviews until late and they returned with a bus at night. Overall it was a great trip, can’t wait for next year!

A few minutes later I was gazing upon the new interface. Which looks like crap. I was never a fan of oversized text-only tab headers, but hey, to each his own. The game list window has a couple of improvements, mainly you can view details about the games or see them as huge, easy-to-click buttons. The downloads section is much better now, with bandwidth graph and everything.

And there’s where I started noticing the problems. For some unknown reason, Steam decided that some of my games (Modern Warfare 2 and Company of Heroes) need to be redownloaded… At first I thought it was a patch (Steam downloads and installs patches automatically) but then I noticed the size of the downloads: 6 and 8GB! A quick search on the forums for the beta UI found a lot of people that were complaining about the same thing: games being erased from the hard drive and redownloaded. What the hell, Steam?

Oh, and one more thing: I have a Steam account, which I use to purchase and play games. Then I have a Steam Community account, where I can manage my friends, see achievements, etc. And yesterday I realized, in order to post on the forums (Steam forums that is, not some third party) I need another account??? Are you serious? Haven’t you people heard of single sign-on? Or shared user database? Argh…

On the literary front, I’m currently reading Makers, Cory Doctorow’s latest book. It’s about… real-life hackers – in the most literal sense, as people changing the world around them by creating gizmos and tools out of anything is available. It’s a very fun book, it really rubs the nerdy insides. On Monday he was in NYC so I went to the signing. The guy is really smart and funny, a great geek. No wonder there are so many XKCD comics about him

On the professional level (at work, that is), I finished my first ever iPhone app. Which means that now I have the basic know-how to create applications for both Android and iPhone. I want get into this in my own time as well, so I’m planning buying a Mac in the near future (you can only do iPhone development on a Mac, grrrr). It will be my next gadgety purchase so I’m already giddy about it. It’s gonna be great

This weekend I started to catch up with some of the shows I recorded on my DVR the past days, most notably History Channel’s World War II in HD. Which is absolutely great, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in WW2 history out there. Think Band of Brothers, minus Holywood, plus realism. An extraordinary documentary. Speaking of Band of Brothers, looks like HBO is preparing another WW2 miniseries, The Pacific. Can’t wait.

I can’t say much about it’s singleplayer – probably plays a bit like Fallout 3, but more boring – but the co-op multiplayer is definitely a lot of fun. It has the adrenaline-filled action of a FPS combined with the obsessive-compulsiveness of Diablo loot (or WoW, for that matter). The weapons are procedurally generated, meaning that you can get really exotic combinations (like a shotgun that fires rockets that deal lightning damage on impact) and the world is pretty interesting, with a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max theme.

But the most important aspect is that it’s just… fun. It’s been a while since my last LAN party (or multiplayer StarCraft, after work ) so this brings back all the good memories. Nothing builds teamwork like yelling expletives while running for your life, shooting at some huge monster poised on turning you into rice pudding. Then the blasted sniper rifle reloads, you aim, score a headshot and the whole screen lights up: LEVEL UP. Good game.

We ended up going a large group – 12 people. I enjoyed the concert – the crowd, not so much – but I wish they’d played some favorites of mine (that I missed last year) like Civilization or God of War. Still, I have to say I discovered new beautiful music like the theme from Chrono Cross (here’s live in the second half of this video) or the Halo suite.

Other highlights were a pianist who could play blindfolded most of the themes form classic videogames (Mario, Zelda, and the like) and a Guitar Hero performance (on Expert), played on the big screen. Also, during the play of One Winged Angel (the boss fight theme from Final Fantasy VII) they had a nice montage of cosplay.

You can find my pictures in this SmugMug gallery. There’s a ton of videos on YouTube of the event (i.e. this one: part1, part2). For more info, here’s the NY Times coverage of the event.

Now I go back to replay for the hundredth time the Chrono Cross theme, acoustic version.