PAX 10 Day 1 1517

Wow.

There are a lot of people here today, and Friday is usually a slow day for PAX. I took video of the demos for LOTR War in the North, Assassin's Creed's new multiplayer offering and Gears of War 3.

LotR:WitN looks really good. The graphics are impressive and the multiplayer is mandatory. If one of your characters dies (or the AI, if you don't have 4 players) then the quest is a fail. The game looks tough, too.

I didn't get a lot of info about Assassin's Creed, other than the multiplayer aspect. It seems to defeat the concept of the lone assassin, but this seems like the natural progression for the series.

Gears also looks to be a multiplayer, capture the flag type of game. I didn't watch that too long, I was looking for my wife.

WB Games had an interesting idea: of you want a shirt or aluminum water bottle you have to collect 5 badges. Badges are earned by demoing a game, or watching the demo video for LotR:WitN. We played Lego Universe, which is an interesting concept. It's an MMO where users can create their own content (hence universe). The first thing I thought of was the user generated world in Snow Crash. It has a very slick interface, which was designed and refined by kids according to the WB games rep who was handing out the badges.

I'm going to rest for a little while and then head back in. It's intense!