Reports from the road: PAX Australia Day 2

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Day 2 of PAX Australia. Lots more people, lots more costumes and lots more to see.

At the start of the day we thought we’d stay away from the expo hall and instead focus on the tabletop and panels. That didn’t exactly pan out.

A few of the sessions were completely mobbed. For example, we wanted to see Bajo and Hex from Good Game, but they were not in the main hall (instead in a smaller hall) & therefore the queue was full, so people were being turned away more than an hour and a half before their panel. Ditto with the “Why So Serious?” panel which we wanted to see. A bit disappointing that on a day where we specifically wanted to go see panels we were turned away twice from queues after arriving over an hour early.

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This cute little guy had about a thousand adoring fans. Hint for next year exhibitors; less booth babes, more booth babies.

We also saw Half Brick’s new game, Colossatron: Massive World Threat on iPad which was pretty cool; kinda a destructive version of snake?

We also played Story War, the Kickstarted card game made by Cantrip Games. It was excellent fun; a combo of improvisation, storytelling, debate and really simple to learn.

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Some Wii Fit cosplay, a great costume.

We also got some more time with the Occulus Rift. I played team fortress 2 and I have to say I came away really impressed. It definitely needs a game pad though, I kept losing my fingers off the keyboard.

Anyone who’s here can’t help but notice the two biggest booths are League of Legends and World of Tanks. Both are free-to-play MMORPGs. Those two booths are just packed to the brim at all times of the day too; competitions, team play and commentators revving up the crowds. It’s quite insane and really speaks to the power of how big your audience can be with that kind of model.

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We ended the day with a talk from the staff of Firemonkeys, now the biggest Aussie gamedev studio. It was excellent, and reflected their approach to quality in their games. They didn’t shy away from addressing their relationship with EA either, which I thought was refreshing.

Last day tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get into the final Penny Arcade Q&A. See you there!