PAX East 2011 Day 1 - Duke Nukem Forever & Gears of War 3
Posted on Mar 11, 2011
Today was day one of PAX East 2011 in Boston. For those of you who do not know it, PAX East is a huge gaming conference run by the Penny Arcade folks. Last year was the first East Coast edition which drew well over 60,000 attendees to the Back Bay of Boston - pretty much exceeding the capacity of the Hynes Convention Center where it was being held. This year, in order to accomodate another sellout capacity expected to be well above last year's they have moved the event to the Boston Convention Center which is significantly bigger in size to the prior venue. This meant what felt like an endless walk through cavernous halls just to pick up my lanyard and program. In fact, this year the size feels quite overwhelming.
Before I discuss my, albeit brief, first day experience, I should note that while the conference deals in video games, board games and card games, I am only really interested in the video game portion. Also, I am specifically interested in the console games as I am not a PC gamer. Lastly, I attend these events to see the demos on the expo floor - I generally am not interested in seeing sessions about gaming. Today I spent only a couple hours on the expo floor but I was able to try a couple of high profile games including Gears of War 3 and Duke Nukem Forever. Below are my thoughts on these two games.
I was a big fan of Gears of War though I will admit I never purchased Gears of War 2, mostly due to a lack of time to devote to gaming (especially those I cannot play in front of the kids). The Gears of War 3 demo at PAX East was specifically the multiplayer death match experience. I thought that, having not played this game in years, it would be hard to pick up, but it was not at all. In fact, I really enjoyed the match and was impressd by the overall experience (enough to make me want to finally grab Gears 2 while I wait). The graphics were impressive; the controls were intuitive and the gameplay was fun. I definitely am looking forward to this game's release.
On the other hand, after waiting an hour and forty five minutes for a chance to play Duke Nukem Forever, after 12 years in development, I was pretty disappointed. Perhaps nothing in development 12 years (and requiring that degree of patience to wait out the line) could have lived up to the expectations. Yes, it was raunchy, if you are into that kind of thing - way over the top raunchy to be honest. It was humorous, but honestly the demo seemed to be trying too hard to be funny. The graphics were decent but not great but the gameplay, at least in this demo, was not particularly fun. When I wasn't doing dumb stuff like peeing in a urinal or scribbling on a whiteboard for no apparent reason, the game made it difficult to navigate around and nearly impossible to aim with an XBox controller. It didn't help that the control scheme was set to "push up looks down" but given any lack of auto "lock on," aiming became a tedious chore and I actually gave up before my time was over.
Tomorrow, I hope to get to test a 3DS among other items. I will also be bringing my 8 year old son and will share his reaction to some of the games for those of you with kids (thus why I tried games like Duke Nukem today).
 Gears of War 3 |
 Duke Nukem Booth Babes |
 Duke Nukem Forever gameplay |
Comments
Posted By KigityKev / Posted on 03/12/2011 at 11:40 AM
Posted By brian rinaldi / Posted on 03/12/2011 at 11:55 AM