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"E For All" Game Expo Withers, PAX Thrives

Posted by Soulskill on Tue Aug 26, 2008 04:12 PM
from the supply-and-demand dept.
Entertainment Games
After the continued struggles of E3 this year, it looks like another IDG-based games conference will have its own troubles. BigDownload reports that most major game manufacturers are skipping E For All, in part due to their focus on the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and BlizzCon (which will be televised). E for All will have major presentations by Microsoft and EA, but you'll have to go to PAX to see events and exhibits from other big publishers; for example, the playable Jumpgate Evolution demo, the Guild Wars tournament, or the Omegathon. The Seattle Times ran a story about Penny Arcade's creators and how PAX came into existence. Further competition for E For All is coming from the Tokyo Game Show, which runs in the beginning of October.
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  • Being a Penny-Arcade fan.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobBebop (947356) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @04:20PM (#24756651) Homepage Journal

    I can say that it is good that a convention where the focus on gaming is valued more than the focus on the "market for gaming".

    Hell... Penny Arcade was pushing the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragons table game not too long ago. I would guess that this is a fairly small market, but they don't care because they enjoy the game.

    • Re:Being a Penny-Arcade fan.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Silicon Jedi (878120) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @04:21PM (#24756671)
      James Darkmagic the Third approves this message.

    • Re:Being a Penny-Arcade fan.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sethus (609631) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @04:36PM (#24756827)
      There is so much truth to this. I went to PAX for the first time last year (and I'm going again this year, driving down to Houston from Dallas, and flying up) and the thing that struck me was how they don't sell games there. They showcase all these awesome games and you really get your consumer head going; but the total lack of stores there makes you realize; hey this is a Con for people who just love gaming.

      Will Wheaton gave an excellent Keynote last year (and hopefully he's there again this year and I can have a chance to play some Smash or something with him) but really brought together my floating thoughts what it means to be a social gamer. In some ways it's simply parallel play, but PAX is about getting together with your best friends, going to have a blast and enjoy everything about gaming.

      I'm no wordsmith, but this article comes as no huge surprise to me; PAX is awesome (and hopefully it continues to be).

        • Tim Buckley does his own game/con type thing called Digital Overload - so I don't know how he would approach pax - not to mention I really doubt Gabe and Tycho would ask him - based on things they've said about him.

          You are right that he is 'infamous' in some circles. This mystifies me a bit. I've looked at all the stuff he gets criticized for and wonder why it is such a big deal. Then, the people who are the most vocal about it go and do the exact same things and the silence is deafening. He see

          • What stuff is he criticized for that you've heard, out of curiosity? The one I've heard is that his comic is supposedly a rip-off of Penny Arcade, which I consider complete BS. It had similarities at the beginning, but the style is totally different now, not to mention his style of humor was always different. I've never really heard anything else said against him, though, so I have no idea what else people might fling.

            • I've seen him slammed for the way he does his art. All I know in that regard is I couldn't draw all that stuff.

              He's been ripped on for imitating Penny Arcade. I've looked at the strips in question. They are similar. I've also seen P.A. put out artwork that involved elements directly copied from others (They apologized about it, said it was a mistake.) and most recent Scott Kurtz had to redraw a strip because he used a character that was an almost exact copy of one created by someone else. He ap

          • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

            by drsquare (530038)

            You are right that he is 'infamous' in some circles. This mystifies me a bit. I've looked at all the stuff he gets criticized for and wonder why it is such a big deal.

            He gets criticised because his comic is complete and utter shit. It's just unfunny 'jokes', told badly. Hell, most strips don't even have any joke at all. The characters are all drawn with exactly the same expression, and none of them are interesting or funny.

            They're not well made at all, most of them have four panels when two or three would s

          • While I don't have anything against Buckley personally, I think his comic was best summed up in this snide and nasty review [blogspot.com].

            Unfunny, copy/pasted, bad art, Mary Sueism, derivative, etc.

            I often find comics I like in Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad's hit list, but his review of Buckley seemed spot on.

        • Well, there's always MagFest. Its nowhere near as big (yet), but bring your D&D group or whatever - make of it what you will.

          http://www.magfest.org/ [magfest.org]

          • PAX East Coast will open in Boston in 2010. I'm hoping it'll live up to its west coast brethren, as I probably drove half way to Boston to catch a flight to go out west.

            • Re:Being a East Coast Resident.... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by ElectricTurtle (1171201) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @10:21PM (#24760145)
              Have you even been to PAX? Ever met Jerry and Mike (Tycho and Gabe)? There's going to be an East Coast PAX because metric ftons of people begged on their knees for it. It will have all the same features for what I would wager will be the same cost. How is that profiteering? Sources on the inside of PA Inc. have said that at their current, dirt-cheap ticket price they only about break even. I don't see how doing the same thing in another place that other people have requested is somehow magically sleazy. There's no sound ethical rationale for that.

              • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

                by Anonymous Coward

                There's going to be an East Coast PAX because metric ftons of people begged on their knees for it.

                And there you have it. They're doing PAX currently because its fun. They'd be doing PAX east because there is demand for it.

                The best you can hope for it PAX east to be a shadow of the real PAX and the real PAX will be completely unaffected.

                That's highly unlikely, what's much more likely is that the real PAX will suffer while PAX east will simply have none of the things that make PAX what it is: no concerts, no developers, no point.

                There are already plenty of conventions on the east coast, but there's a reas

                • Re:Being a East Coast Resident.... (Score:4, Insightful)

                  by NevermindPhreak (568683) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @11:08PM (#24760641)

                  Why don't we just try it out once, and see if it's something that would be good to do again.

                  You know, kinda like they did with the first PAX?

                  • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

                    by Anonymous Coward

                    Because there already are east coast conventions?

                    There are two other east coast game conventions mentioned in this thread. There's no need to stretch the PAX organizers (and I don't just mean Gabe and Tycho) thin just to get Penny Arcade in the name.

                    • I think you're afraid that PAX East will kick the ass of everything over there right now. Might your name be Ed Fleming?

                      No concerts and no developers? What are you smoking? What sound, rational basis do you have for believing that PA Inc. would abandon all the things that have made the PAX model a success in the first place? Robert Khoo has already said the developers are not only on board, they were a force in bringing this about. Perhaps you forget about the East Coast game companies like Firaxis?
                    • Proves the point that you're just trolling, perhaps. Firaxis [firaxisgames.com] is home to Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization series. If you have no idea what that series is (even if you don't necessarily like it)...yeah, PAX is not for you anyway...
                    • What it proves is that you're not qualified to judge any part of this situation. Firaxis was valued at $26 million when it was sold to Take Two, and as a company has sold over 8 million games in its Civilization series alone. Some others you're forgetting are Bethesda of Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3, Big Huge of Rise of Nations, Epic of the Unreal series, Take Two/2K Boston of Bioshock, etc.

                      I really don't know what kind of crazy you are to be this antagonistic about something this awesome. I really think I

                • Yeah, good thing GenCon is on the west coast!

                • While not as large as ComicCon, it is one of the largest multi-genre conventions in the US. Last years attendance was 40,000+ and it keeps growing.

                  Plus, unlike a lot of conventions, DragonCon counts their multi-day passes as ONE person and not 2 or 3 or more (for example, if I buy a 4 day pass for DragonCon that counts as 1 person at the convention but some conventions would count that as 4 people and thus inflate their overall numbers).

                  There are many other conventions on the East Coast that do very well. W

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nerdfest (867930)
      I don't think they advertise it this way, but it's really by gamers, for gamers. They seems like talented guys too, so it's pretty cool to see them do so well at something they love to do.

      I'd love to go to PAX one of these years. They're talking about a PAX East at some point as well. I hope it doesn't spoil it.

  • OMG JUMPGATE!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CubeRootOf (849787) <michael_labrecque@student.uml.edu> on Tuesday August 26 2008, @04:37PM (#24756835)

    Wow!

    I miss that game!

    Man o man -- I'll be buying that on release day. I just hope it is half as good as the original jumpgate was when the servers had good traffic.

    It wasn't nearly as much fun to turn the universe red when there weren't enough folks on to notice :(

    Did they ever fix the 'nix hitbox? will be my very first question when I get my hands on this, the next will be 'Where am I going to find a decent joystick in 2009?!?!?! do they still make them?' followed by 'can we still replace the in game music with our own? and rewrite the HUDs?'

    The original was awesome - its too bad 3DO screwed it up. Glad to see it back for with a sequel

    Wow!

    • Did anyone else notice that many of the sound effects in Jumpgate appear to have been ripped from the first season of Babylon 5.

      I wonder if they ever got in trouble for that.

      I certainly hope not.

      • Did anyone else notice that many of the sound effects in Jumpgate appear to have been ripped from the first season of Babylon 5.

        And a lot of games use the "pneumatic door open/close" sound effects from id Software's Doom.

        I wonder if they ever got in trouble for that.

        Probably not. I'd start by assuming good faith and guess that Jumpgate and B5 just happened to license the same stock sound effects library.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by geminidomino (614729) *

          And a lot of games use the "pneumatic door open/close" sound effects from id Software's Doom.

          ...

          Probably not. I'd start by assuming good faith and guess that Jumpgate and B5 just happened to license the same stock sound effects library.

          Probably. Those same door effects from doom were used in Xcom: UFO Defense/Enemy Unknown (depending on where you lived) which came out the same year as Doom.)

          Hell, those doors are pretty much the game equivalent of the "Wilhelm scream"

        • Hell, there were stock explosions in the 8 bit age, you could see the same damn sprite in almost any game, be it Descent, C&C or whatever else that I forgot.

        • Re:Stock sound effects (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Dutch Gun (899105) on Wednesday August 27 2008, @02:54AM (#24761955)

          And a lot of games use the "pneumatic door open/close" sound effects from id Software's Doom.

          ...I'd start by assuming good faith and guess that Jumpgate and B5 just happened to license the same stock sound effects library.

          Good guess. I can't answer specifically about Jumpgate and Babylon 5, but I know a bit about the Doom sounds. Quite a few of the sounds in Doom are pulled (often completely unaltered) from a huge general-purpose sound library called "The General 6000" from Sound Ideas. Most game companies I've worked for own a copy of this as part of the core of their sound library. Of course, if possible, modern sound designer will not use such common stock sound effects anymore unaltered, as a lot of these sounds are pretty recognizable.
          http://sound-ideas.com/6000.html [sound-ideas.com]

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It could be Babylon 5 got them from some pack of stock sound effects, rather than make their own. Not that uncommon, actually. I know there's one distinctive "holstering pistol" sound effect that's been used in a few older (98-2000) games and more TV shows than I can remember.

    • Re:OMG JUMPGATE!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kamokazi (1080091) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @05:07PM (#24757133)

      My understanding is it's a completely reworked game. Looks to be quite interesting and I am planning on checking it out myself.

      Also, I love my Saitek x52 Joystick/Throttle. Lots of features and you can find it for about $90. Kinda salty, but not crazy expensive like some options, and I think it's a good value considering all the features and the quality feel. Thrustmaster has some cheaper ones (independent joy/throt) that work pretty well, but the feal cheaper and don't have nearly as many features. (As a side note, if you try to demo them in an electronics store, the x52 stick can loose it's tension if abused to hell and back by elementary children. I worked in such a store and ours was fine until some 11 year old punk thought he was Maverick and went nuts on it)

      • The best thing about the Saitek flight sticks, at least from my perspective, is that that they're adjustable. I have small hands, and with a lot of flight sticks half the buttons are simply out of reach and the hand rest platform is inches below where my hand is so I get tired holding my arm out. So from a comfort standpoint, Saitek is the only game in town for me. Good thing they're also pretty good joysticks. :)

        • Have they learned how to implement USB specs yet? I was stung by the first Saitek product I bought - a GM2 gaming mouse. On paper it looked great - two buttons and a wheel plus a 4-directional pad under the thumb and a separate device for the left hand with two buttons under each finger, a PoV hat and a strafing control. I got it home only to discover that unlike every other USB mouse in existence it wasn't a USB Human Interface Device, it had some weird proprietary protocol which ran on top of USB and s

          • Have they learned how to implement USB specs yet?

            The last joystick I bought used the old game port interface, so damned if I know. :)

  • Colour Me Unsurprised. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bieeanda (961632) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @05:25PM (#24757293)
    E for Everyone eradicated a lot of goodwill the other year, when it had people wandering around outside PAX with televisions shoved up their shirts, handing out E4E advertising crap. Their chief organizer's smarmy attitude, an 'Oh, we didn't realize that this other little con was going on' probably damaged a lot of what was left.

    I still love how PAX's would-be competitors just don't get it, like there's some kind of Feng Shui about their display rooms that draws fans, instead of not being treated like a walking wallet with a desperate libido.

  • It's not because PAX that E for All is failing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MoFoQ (584566) on Tuesday August 26 2008, @05:26PM (#24757297)

    It's not PAX's fault that E for All is failing.
    Just think of just the name "E for All"...it sounds so.....cheesy (for lack of a better term).
    (plus there's that dreaded drug reference in the name....not so good for the public image).

    anyways...the last good "E"-anything conference (formerly "E3") was the one in 2005 before they started instituting just stupid rules for a conference; they banned booth babes [wikipedia.org].

    Then in 2006, attendance numbers were less than previous years and they announced that the 2007 E3 would be "downsized". (nail in coffin)

    They tried to salvage it by spinning off the "non-invite only" conference as "E for All" but the damage was done. By then PAX was gaining lots of steam....plus the price was right. It had a bigger attendance numbers and wider range for its attendance demographics.

    • E3 died when it became a conference instead of an Expo

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      E For all just doesn't understand some things. For example, they clearly went with the LA Convention Center because of the E3 nostalgia. Anyone who's actually gone to a show at LACC knows it's about one of the most unfriendly venues out there, though. There's no food *at all* nearby, there are very few nearby hotels, parking is often hard to find or expensive, and because it's LA there's nothing nearby to do at night after the show.

      There are so many better locations they could have gone with that would ha

    • Just think of just the name "E for All"...it sounds so.....cheesy (for lack of a better term).
      (plus there's that dreaded drug reference in the name....not so good for the public image).

      That's funny you got a drug reference. When I read "E for All" I assumed it was a reference to the "E" game rating (which I still assume is where they got the name), and thus the expo would be a focus on family oriented and kid friendly (and thus, crappy) games.

  • How is the Omegathon an "event (or) exhibit from (a) major publisher"?

    Or should that have been parsed as ((events) and (exhibits from major publishers)) rather than ((events and exhibits) from major publishers)? If so that doesn't make sense... I mean, you don't think E for All is gonna have "events"?

    Maybe there should be a bit of Javascript in Slashcode - when you hover over a sentence in the summary it'll pop up a sentence diagram...

  • But...E for All has fata1ity! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2008, @06:50PM (#24758125)

    That'll bring the kids in, right? Right?

    I did have to laugh that PAX promised that fatal1ty wouldn't be there [kotaku.com] -- I think it's clear which convention understands their market.

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