PAX East Archives

Wolfenstein II is a pretty great game, I think just about all of us can agree on that. If you can’t, well then, you’re probably a Nazi. With the Switch release, Bethesda and Machine Games’ “what-if” WWII experiment will exist on all four current gen platforms – Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

The Houses of Morrowind expansion for Elder Scrolls Legends requires you to re-learn the game thanks to the many changes it brings with it. Bethesda have managed to predict this by adding some new tools for players - specifically, a new set of puzzles.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset is the latest expansion coming to Bethesda's Elder Scrolls MMO, and it was playable during Bethesda's PAX East event. The demo itself was relatively short for a massive open-world game, with demo windows capped at 20 minutes.

Sometimes when you're running from one appointment to the other on the PAX East floor, someone will just reach out and ask "can you see my game?" If I got a spare five minutes, sure! This was the case with Wormhole Wars brought to the convention by 1047 Games. 

The last item we received from our visit with ThinkGeek at their booth at PAX East was this cool Wall Mounted Bottle Opener from Bethesda, created specifically with the Nuka-Cola product in mind from the Fallout series.

Another fun item we managed to pick up from the ThinkGeek booth over at PAX East was an interesting officially licensed Nintendo product I never thought I'd see them brand as they produced a Cartridge Canteen. 

For the longest time in my personal collection of Doctor Strange-ish items, I have had a proper gaming dice set of speckled black and red design from Chessex, which have both served me well and been the bain of my existence at critical times. 

We're big fans of the crew at Skybound Games, and when we had a brief moment between appointments, we dropped by their booth at PAX East to say hello and check out what they had to offer. Along with playing a brand new game involving movie scripts, we got to snag two new expansion packs for Red Flags.

As we are one to do, we made our way over to the ThinkGeek booth at PAX East to say hi and see how things are going. And is the case sometimes, we got a few items from the event to properly review. One of the many unexpected items to come our way was a figure from Funko.

I'm a fan of noir games, but for a lot of the titles we receive in a given year, a lot of them start string and fail miserably after that until the end. When we tried out the brief demo of Genesis Noir from Surprise Attack Games at PAX East, that fear was instantly quelled. 

Back at PAX West last year, we got to try a quick demo of Crimson Keep, and while it was cool to check out, there wasn't a lot of substance to it then. Flash-forward eight months and here we are at PAX East checking out an improved demo of the title from Merge Games.

One of the last appointments I had at PAX East this year came from the crew at Surprise Attack Games. They had a number of games on display, some we'd seen before and others we hadn't. One of the brand new games on the table for us to see was a game called The Stillness Of The Wind.

The last time we saw Floor Kids, it was a demo at the Nindies Showcase in Seattle before PAX West kicked off the next day. This time around they were on the main floor of PAX East showing off the game in custom-made arcade cabinets for people to play.

Probably one of the funniest games we came across on the last day of PAX East came to us from Iceberg Interactive in the form of Headsnatchers. If you didn't get the concept from the title, it's basically a game where you snatch heads off your opponent's bodies.

Nearing the end of our last day at PAX East, we made our way over to the Iceberg Interactive booth to try out a couple different games. The first one on the list turned out to be the last racing title of the con with Antigraviator.

Citadel Games' Legends of Aria is an MMO designed to be controlled more by the players than by the game developers themselves. Its an open form MMO that flies in the face of what we expect from MMORPGs these days, because it is pretty much nothing like World of Warcraft.

On occasion, when you're dealing with a drop-down shooter, dealing with one ship is already bad enough. But the folks at Ask An Enemy Studios decided to up the ante, as we saw int he game they brought to PAX East with Trackher. 

Right, let's get this one out of the way first: No, Underworld Ascendant is not part of the Underworld film series starring Kate Beckinsale. I know, I know, we all wanna play as Selene and go murder some dumb vampires, but this is not that game.

We always have fun chatting with the people at Jinx, so we were particularly interested to go check out their booth at PAX East this year as they would be showing off a few new items that we desperately need in our closet. 

At PAX West last year, we got an invite to try out Dunk Lords from Story Fort, but we missed out because our schedules were packed at that point. We weren't making the same mistake twice as we visited with the crew on the last day of PAX East.

If you've ever wanted to play a game that was basically a first-person view of an action film, you're in luck, as the last game we saw from Rising Star Games at PAX East was their cop drama shooter RICO. 

The second game we got to try out at the Rising Star Games booth over at PAX East last week was a little racing game they made with a couple different twists called Trailblazers. 

One the final day of PAX East, we got to hit up the booth from Rising Star Games where they had several games on display for us to try, the first of which was an action RPG title called Decay Of Logos. 

One of the shorter but friendlier visits we got to have at PAX East was when we checked out the booth for Cygames, who were basically there to show off all the titles they were bringing to the states from Japan and looking ahead to the future. 

We, unfortunately, didn't get to book much of anything with Nintendo this time around at PAX East inside their booth. The one appointment we were able to secure was with inside developer Henchman & Goon who wanted to show off their game Pode on the Nintendo Switch.

During our visit to PAX East last week, we got to check in with a few people here and there that we've chatted with before. One of those groups was the team behind DropMix, as they had a few things to pass out and show us.

Monopoly, in general, gets a bad rap for being a game that causes a lot of fights. And it should to a degree, because the goal of the game is to be a capitalist and put everyone else in the poor house. Which is why we enjoyed seeing a new version stray away from that in Monopoly Gamer from Hasbro, which we saw at PAX

Limbic Entertainment GmbH and 505 Games' Memories of Mars is a sci-fi survival open-world game with a decent bit of tower-defense mechanics thrown in there.

One of the few racing titles we came across at PAX East came to us on the final day of the convention as Wired Productions showed off their new futuristic title GRIP. One of the first things we were asked before playing it was "Do you remember F-Zero?"

So knowing the stigma that the original Shaq Fu has on it, (as well as our own memories of playing it) we went into our demo of Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn at PAX East with a little bit of hesitation but still kept a space open in our minds for some home.