pax-east-2011 posts

Developer Red 5 Studios finally let the general public play its upcoming free-to-play sci-fi shooter Firefall last month at PAX East in Boston. Today the development team released its first video dev diary with the PAX East event.

The video shows a lot of fans playing the game at PAX East and giving their reactions which all seem positive. There's also some new in-game footage from Firefall mixed in with the PAX East exhibit footage. Red 5 Studios officially announced Firefall last fall and introduced it at PAX Prime in Seattle. At the moment the game is set for its official launch sometime in the fall of 2011.

Primal Carnage switched over to the UDK engine months ago and since then the upcoming humans-versus-dinos first person shooter has never looked better. The team at developer Lukewarm Media have released some new screenshots of the game to prove that point.

The shots come from the build of the game that the team brought with them to show off Primal Carnage for the first time in public at the PAX East 2011 event in Boston earlier this month. The build let folks who stopped by the EGVA booth a chance to play a human going up against a T-Rex. As you can see in the above shot, the dino is ready to chow down. There's still no word on an exact release date for the game. You can check out a trailer that shows Primal Carnage's display at PAX East 2011 after the jump:

PAX East 2011 is now in the history books and the second annual east coast event in the Penny Arcade Expo consumer video-PC game show line up is now even bigger than the PAX Prime event in Seattle. Penny Arcade's head biz guy Robert Khoo has revealed to Big Download that this week's PAX East 2011 show in Boston brought in a whopping 69,500 attendees. By comparison, the first PAX East event in 2010 (held in a smaller convention center than this year's event) brought in 52,290 attendees.

Khoo told us via email, "The venue we have this year is massive - it's legitimately 2-3x larger than last year's venue, so the amount of breathing room was fantastic. I didn't hear a single complaint about overcrowding. I never thought I would see the day." 2010's PAX Prime show in Seattle, the highest attended yet, brought in 67,600 attendees. The 2011 edition of PAX Prime will be held on August 26-28 and Khoo told us that 2012's PAX East event will be held on April 6-8.

And what about the rumors of a PAX event overseas, perhaps in London? Khoo told us, "Haha, no sorry - there really isn't anything to say! we look at all sorts of places to see if it's right for PAX. I think the UK rumors got picked up because it's just so... Out there."

There's a couple of Portal 2 news bits coming from PAX East 2011 that might be of some interest. Kotaku reports that Valve's Erik Wolpaw told them that there will be some kind of reveal about the game's back story before the puzzle shooter is released on April 18. He states, "We're actually going to release something that we're not talking about yet that will give a little bit of the story of the interim time (between Portal 1 and 2).

Meanwhile our sister site Joystiq reports that actor J.K. Simmons, best known for his role as J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies, will be voicing the role of Cave Johnson in Portal 2. Wolpaw wouldn't say how big the role the character will be in the game but did say, "You'll hear a lot of him."

Just ahead of PAX East 2011, the team at developer Uber Entertainment have just released a new PC version update for its multiplayer action game Monday Night Combat. The update, via Steam, has some neat content additions, including being able to outfit the game's Assassin character in Penny Arcade's Cardboard Tube Samurai.

Other new additions include new Outlander gear for your team (complete with new taunts) and a new All-Star player ranking system where players can guage how good of a player they are compared to other players on a server. Your player rating will automatically adjust; if you are on a killing spree your rating will go up. If you keep getting killed the ranking will go down. You can check out the new content for the game at the trailer after the jump:

If you are attending PAX East 2011 this weekend you can drop by the Uber Entertainment booth and get access to a code that will unlock an exclusive Authentic Battle Damage version of the Cardboard Tube Samurai outfit. You will also see a preview of an upcoming new map, Uncle Tully's Funland.

PAX East 2011 will be filled with exhibitors showing off upcoming games but there will also be some PC game hardware companies showing off their new and/or upcoming products. One of them is the gaming PC maker iBuyPower and today the company sent over word that it will be showing its upcoming Erebus gaming PC at the show this weekend in Boston at the Nvidia booth.

While iBuyPower is keeping much of the details of the Erebus system to themselves it did post a teaser trailer on YouTube which you can check out after the jump. As you will see there's lots of tight closeups on the system, particularity its fans and liquid cooling system, along with some three way Nvidia GeForce SLI action. Over clocking seems to be the theme of this gaming PC rig. The Erebus is scheduled to be available for sale in a few weeks.

It's official. The second annual PAX East gaming event in Boston is officially sold out. The official Penny Arcade Expo web site has confirmed that all of the tickets for the March 11-13 event at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center are spoken for. In case that wasn't clear, the web site states, "We will not sell any (tickets) at the show. There are no more available. Please do not email us asking if this is a real thing. It is real. I'm serious."

For those of you lucky enough to have tickets to PAX East 2011 the web site has some helpful info for attendees including the fact that it will be first come, first serve for attending the Friday and Saturday night concerts. There will also be a giant food court created especially for the show in the convention center since there are not many places to eat nearby.

Moonshot Games, a game developer formed by former Bungie team members back in October 2009, have finally announced its first project, titled Fallen Frontier. At the moment details are still a bit scarce but the game is at its core a side-scroller sci-fi shooter with both single and co-op gameplay. The storyline concerns a law enforcer from Earth who comes to the Alpha Centauri frontier "on a mission of vengeance."

The game will let players use firearms and grenades along with unnamed "special abilities" to fight off enemies. The game will be show at PAX East 2011 later this week. At the moment there's no word on what platforms the game will appear on. You can check out a gameplay trailer for Fallen Frontier after the jump.

Update: A post on Moonshot Games' web site states that Fallen Frontier is due for release in the first half of 2012. The dev team would like to release the game on the PC via Steam but apparently they are waiting to hear from a publisher first.

PAX East 2011 is coming up next weekend and our very own Steven Wong will be there in Boston to report on all of the various things that go on at the show. Could PAX East attendance numbers actually beat PAX Prime's numbers? Stay tuned.

• Check out nearly 30 minutes of Guild Wars 2 gameplay footage from GDC 2011.
• Not exactly a shock but plans for a trilogy of inSane games from THQ will be scrapped if the first doesn't sell well.
• Here's some more very ShakyCam footage from that Battlefield 3 press presentation.
• Speaking of which, don't expect a Battlefield MMO anytime soon.

PAX East 2011 is less than a week away but opportunity to attend at least one day of the March 11-13 gaming event in Boston are slipping away. According to a post today on the official PAX Twitter page, " ... we only have about 250 Sunday badges left!". Those tickets are expected to sell out before the start of PAX East on Friday.

Meanwhile game publishers and developers are starting to annouce their PAX East exhibit plans:

• Irrational Games will be holding an invite only party on March 12.
• ArenaNet will show off a playable version of Guild Wars 2 at PAX East.
• FireFall will be shown off for the first time in playable form at PAX East.
• Nvidia is rumored to launch its new dual GPU graphics card the GeForce GTX 590 at PAX East.