PAX SUMMARY

In the two days of PAX that we attended, I did 4 of the 10 things I had sworn I was going to do at PAX this year.

1) Play Sentinels Of The Multiverse with aurora77 and Russell
2) Purchase Sentinels Of The Multiverse
3) Play a demo of some new board game
4) Play in a Magic: The Gathering tournament
5) Buy a bunch of Reaper Miniatures
6) Get all the Disney Fantasia free stuff (Pin, Hat, Sunglasses)
6) Meet up with xerhino to hear him play Johnathan Coulton tunes on his Ukulele
7) Meet up with my old chum, Jeremy Ballenger, who now works for Wargaming.net and would be in town for PAX
8) Go see the screening of "Gamers 3"
9) Go to the "Pitch Your Idea" panel and pitch an awesome video game idea
10) Bring home tons of Swag

BONUS ITEM, though, was that I ran in to Greg Weiss and Matt Anderson in the Taco Del Mar. Greg, Matt and the aforementioned Jeremy Ballenger were over half of my High School Gaming Group! If Vern and dotgirl had shown up, it could have been a full-on EXTREMELY AWKWARD reunion (let's just say that things got weird near the demise of that Gaming Group and leave it at that).

It was the group that I discovered SO MUCH with! All my life had been about Monopoly, Sorry, Parcheesi... standard, traditional board games where "The Game Of Life" was considered to be the weird and complicated game in our collection. Through THIS GROUP, however, I was introduced to CRAZY GAMES! Stuff like "Cosmic Encounters", "Solar Quest", "Illuminati" and a large variety of games I can't even fully remember! The world of gaming became a wide-open playing field that expanded SO MUCH FURTHER than the toy aisle at Target!

It was with this gaming group that we discovered MAGIC: THE GATHERING. Matt came back from his Freshman year at college with "This weird little card game one of the teachers at his school had made up", and we were all instantly HOOKED.

My Video Game Pitch: GRAVEYARD SHIFT

45-second pitch: In this game, you play a convenience store clerk who is working the dreaded 11pm to 7am "Graveyard Shift" during a minor Zombie outbreak, and you have to be able to tell the difference between the Zombies and plain old drunk people who keep wandering in to the store. Your boss insists that you keep the store open or lose your job. You can kill as many zombies as you like in creative and hilarious ways with stuff you find around the store as long as you keep the place clean and open for business! Can you make it through a full 8-hour shift without getting bitten by a zombie or murdering an innocent drunk?

Expanding on the idea: The game would play out in real-time, taking a full continuous 8 hours of game play to complete (plus the unskippable pre-game cinematic and the post-game credits). Your only companion through the night (other than the drunks and zombies shuffling in to buy stuff and/or eat your brains) is your radio, which will have a half-dozen recorded "Channels" that will provide music and randomized news updates about the zombie outbreak that will increase or decrease the amount of zombie activity for the coming hour - each hourly "Newscast" will have three different versions recorded that could play interchangeably. There will be several different endings to the game, depending on the performance of the gamer AND the severity of the zombie outbreak - the most common ending would be that you go to jail for murdering a drunk (it'll be pretty darned hard to tell the difference between drunks and zombies), but other endings could be "Getting a raise for having handled things so well" or "Super Cool Army Of Darkness-like Ending Where You Keep Killing Zombies Like A Boss During A Zombie Apocalypse".

A big part of the game would be having to clean up your kills. Lots of mopping, lots of stacking bodies in the walk-in cooler...