The Star Wars the Old Republic people were at pax demoing their game during one of two very packed events in the main hall. Most attendees (including myself) waited 2 hours or more to get into the theater for the show. My main attraction to TOR is directly connected to my love of the original KOTOR. I expect Bioware to put out a decent game, but I am worried about the direction of this new mmo. The producers on the stage were very proud to label their mmo kotor 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 all in one package. The team recently announced that the game will have fully voiced dialog and a story driven game play experience. This sounds great for a single player game but I am concerned about how they will connect the dots. Single player mmo’s have been tried, as well as mmo’s for single players; how does Bioware expect to succeed where others have failed?
They also made the announcement that Coruscant will be a playable zone, which was apparently PAX exclusive news. They also had a video clip of the zone but its not worth talking about.
All in all I was a bit disappointed in the presentation. I liked getting updated on some of the features of the classes, but nothing they presented or talked about could not have taken place in a booth with a PLAYABLE DEMO. Oh, all the attendees received a free steam copy of KOTOR; I do not wish to knock the game, but come on guys, how about a raffle for beta access or something other than a free copy of a six year old game.
Also, back to the story. The original kotor was great because it felt like the developers told LucasArts to sit in a corner and leave the story to Bioware. The strength of the game was due to the very minor attachment to the movies and thus, to George Lucas. Unfortunately the designers of this mmo were emphasizing connections to the movies and original story, which goes against the very foundation of the original KOTOR game. While I am a Star Wars fan for the most part, I feel that having as little to do with George Lucas these days is a strength. So while they were standing up there announcing all this back story as connected to the movies, I was sitting very uncomfortably praying they really do know what they are doing.

Something else that was really big this year were the 3d glasses from nVidia. Honestly I find the glasses fun, but rather pointless. I have a couple of major gripes with this technology. Firstly, in order for a game to be supported a profile must be made for it by an nVidia dev. Now, the library of supported games is huge, and since its nVidia you probably will not have to worry about any AAA titles shipping without 3d support, but its still a drawback that the device cannot simply work with all games. I realize I am asking the impossible, which is why I do not expect 3d glasses to take off anytime soon. My other problem is with the obvious viewing problems. Not for the person playing the game, I mean for the people watching. A major thing that makes some games fun is the party aspect. Where other people can watch you being a badass. They cannot watch your screen unless they too have 3d specs; I somehow do not expect every gamer to invest in 3-4 pairs of glasses just so they can show off to their friends when no glasses and no 3d works just as well.
In the end its just a gimmick. A very nicely executed and kinda interesting gimmick, but developers cannot use the tech to build game play elements into their games, and thus it fails to have any appeal outside of the cool kid gamer crowd.
Another thing that was at pax was a gamer suit that would provide feedback to the player when punched, hurt, thrown around, whatever. Again, a cool gimmick but nothing more. When I think of these things I picture some form of uber gamer sitting around with 3d glasses, gaming vest, feedback chair, climate feedback; It is not to big of a jump to just say ‘virtual reality.’ While I do hope that all these little pieces to eventually contribute to the eventual realization of true VR, by themselves they are not worth the sometimes very large investment.

I just have a couple more pictures to post so here is my wrap up. The picture here is one an artist took all three days at pax to finish and as you can see it is very well realized. Speaking with a little bit of experience with pastels I greatly respect this man for having the stamina to not only endure all three days surrounded by really big nerds asking questions all the time, but also to do great work with what has to be one of the messiest drawing materials in existence.

My final pic is of one of the table at the Geek Chic booth, where I would say they have perfected the ultimate table top for paper game players. Each table is multifunction, multiuse, the tables themselves come with addons, designs for every style of game, tons of utility features, and much more. As a consumer you are looking at a cost of $1500 or more for the basic table so a bit out of the price range of the standard gamer but I think they are doing some neat stuff over there.

On a side note, I am not sure how long this video will last, but I filmed a friend of mine playing Dragon Age: Origins at the Intel booth on a PC. The video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuQWQVZU–E

Blizzard wins the award for best booth in my opinion. They did not do anything too fancy, they just setup twenty or so computers with playable demos for Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft Cataclysm. Even though Blizzard can easily afford to have three major games in development their booth was both simple and to the point. The line for each computer was at least 4 people long all throughout the day; as such I did not actually play any of the games.

Other notable booths include Wizards of the Coast and Bioshock 2. I enjoyed WoC’s booth because they had gm’s running participants through dungeons in dnd 4. They had computers setup to generate characters which you would then use to participate in a short session right there in the exhibition hall. The noise in the hall must have made it really hard to hear the gm for the most part; but I thought it was a neat idea.

Bioshock 2′s booth wins the award for most creative. They put a movie set up with old fashioned furnishings complete with radio, typewriter, etc. The room was messy, papers and books all over the place. There were clues written on papers and letters; all in all it was a very unique booth and I am afraid my picture does not quite do it justice. The actually footage of the game available at the show was no different than what is available online.

There are panels at pax, where experts talk to a crowded room about certain things; I went to a couple today but I will hold off on writing about those until later. Some of the data or ideas they present are interesting so I want to write a review and critique of all the panels I go to in one article.

Firstly, for those like me, the Core i7 is the newest cpu from Intel.  The chip has four cores and two process threads each, so you can run

eight concurrent programs without a hitch.  The truly amazing part of this cpu though is the overclockability.  I bought the Core i7 920 which is clocked at 2.6Ghz by default.  After toying around for 6+ hours tweaking this and that I ended up stable at 4Ghz.

The cpu is very stable and sturdy, even at almost 1.7v core (default 1.25).  Compared to my old FX-55 ( remember how leet that processor used to be, haha ) its like a different world.  As you can see from the picture I am currently running at 3.6Ghz because the processor was getting a little to hot when under load.  It would peak at 90 degrees celcius at 4Ghz, max operating tempurature is widely accepted as 100 degrees celcius.  This is not documented or set by Intel, its more of a rumor.  Apparently at 100 degrees the cpu starts to underclock itself, therefore 100 degrees is the max.

Also, unless you are very lucky in order to achieve 4Ghz you must enable Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, which automatically adjusts the cpu multiplier based on load.  Usually the cpu’s multiplier is set to 20, but with Turbo enabled and heavy load the cpu will overclock to 21.  Unfortunently according to the posts I read online when the cpu overclocks itself it only overclocks a couple of cores.  Therefore even though the cpu makes it to 4Ghz when under load its really just a number, the true frequency is a bit lower.

Therefore I decided to disable Turbo and leave the cpu at 3.8Ghz for a time.  After a few days I decided to lower it further to 3.6Ghz to keep the voltage within spec.  Believe me though, the Core i7 is an amazingly strong overclocker.

As a special note, the board I got does not allow setting the multiplier over 20, but I hear talk of a future bios update to allow it.