Slashdot Mirror
"E For All" Game Expo Withers, PAX Thrives
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.
I'm no wordsmith, but this article comes as no huge surprise to me; PAX is awesome (and hopefully it continues to be).
I'm a bit worried about that, they've announced plans to "expand" it to the east coast, which is a really horrible idea. It means that it's going from "let's get a bunch of people together and celebrate gaming" to "let's see how much money we can suck out of people!"
Not to mention that all the interesting gaming people are on the west coast. I can't imagine what an east coast PAX would be. Who'd show up? I know there are obviously gamers on the east coast, but I mean "gaming celebrity" wise, like Wil Wheaton? The only person I can think of is the Ctrl-Alt-Del guy, and he's more infamous than famous.
Plus you'd have to drag all the developers out to the east coast, which means that either it's going to be more expensive to pay for, or it'll devolve into just a marketing exercise, or that no developers will bother paying to show up. In all cases, it stops being PAX.
So hopefully they'll decide not to bother with the east coast thing and keep PAX the way it is. Spreading themselves thin on both coasts is just a horrible idea. I think everyone would much rather have one great PAX where it belongs than two mediocre PAXs positioned to optimize attendance (and therefore, of course, profit).
Fuck you, go to the Digital Overload gamer thing that someone else mentioned, or buy a plane ticket. Really, it costs about the same for someone on the west coast to go to PAX as someone on the east coast.
Doing an east coast one means its no longer just a fun event from the Penny Arcade people but has instead become a money-making venture, which destroys it.
The simple reality is that PAX east won't be PAX anyway, and at best, the real PAX will be left unaffected.
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 suffice, and they're full of endless walls of text explaining the joke he's just told so it's even less funny. The dialogue is laughably bad.
The main character is a Mary-Sue for the author, and half of the strips revolve around his girlfriend having an abortion*. How hilarious! It might help if the main character was actually likeable, but he's a complete and utter prick and in each strip you're wondering why all the other characters don't just beat the shit out of him.
* Yes I know it's supposed to be a miscarriage, but I like to think that she had it aborted because she couldn't face the thought of raising a retarded Buckley-spawn.