Text and photos by Sam Machkovech.
Two hours in, and my eyeballs are already fried by more than 300 HDTVs stuffed full of video games. Boy, it’s fun here. I’ll assume the folks who want to hear specific game details are among the wall-busting crowd at PAX right now, so I’ll start today’s impressions with a few photos to set the scene.
Testers show off the new Beatles-ized version of the music game Rock Band. Shown here are the new "instruments" done up Beatles-style.
- The sleeper hit of the floor is Scribblenauts, a Nintendo DS puzzle game. To solve puzzles, players type in any word they can think of, and a picture representing word will pop up on the screen. For this puzzle, I tried solving it with a party–Einstein’s manning the velvet rope, Grandma’s rocking the boombox, and the main character is holding a disco ball while wearing a pearl necklace. This didn’t solve the puzzle, but it was fun to see the game generate each of my nonsensical requests. (In another one, I glued a chainsaw to an aardvark’s butt, then got the aardvark angry and made it chop down a tree. Why? Because I could.)
I do not remember which video game is associated with this mechanical bull demo. (Note: That's not me.)
The combined lines for Microsoft's Xbox 360 stations and Valve Software's Left 4 Dead 2 were easily the most crowded. Good on you, local companies!
