This is relevant to my interests

JUDAS PRIEST - FREEWHEEL BURNING
Who knew that one of my favorite Judas priest songs also looks like a typical day at work for me. Especially the dudes just totally headbanging as they're playing cabinets. Those dudes are my friends.


This chick makes time lapse photos of Tempest. That rules. Some of her other art is ok, too.

Rosemarie Fiore

FUCK YES!! I'm flying missions next weekend! Got them shits preordered and pre payed-for suckas! Dear skies: next weekend, I'm going to be all up in you. Love, Daniel
Ace Combat 6 wiki
And here's the trailer. Oh man, I fucking love Ace Combat.

I went to PAX and it was totally rad.

Ok. So if I should have written anything during my long absence from this blog, it should have been PAX. It took place August 24-26. In Seattle. It's a convention like none other. E3 has all the Japanese game debuts and stuff- announcements and so forth- but PAX is special in that it's a celebration of games and gamer community. It also isn't just for video games, it also covers tabletop and and card games. And Jenga, apparently. We headed up on Friday, the 24th. I stayed the whole time and left on Monday, the 27th, though some of my party left earlier. During this time I stayed at the glamorous Travel Lodge by the Space Needle. Next time you're in Seattle, I highly recommend their free parking and rough-around-the-edges charm. Plus you can't beat the ancient Zenith television that nearly exploded when I hooked my Wii up to it.


Friday - Wil Wheaton Keynote
We started early. I had to round up some people down at Backspace. Once we had the whole party together there were five of us, packin it up from Portland to Seattle. I borrowed my dad's truck. Anyway, after checking in at the hotel and getting my badge and everything, we were kind of whisked away into the Wil Wheaton keynote speech at PAX. We hadn't been there five minutes and just went into herd mode. The herd was heading into the main exhibition hall where Wil Wheaton, yeah that one dude that played Wesley Crusher in Next Generation, was speaking. Apparently he keeps a pretty popular blog about video games. I think this might be it. I dunno, I've never read it. So his speech was okay. First off, I have to tell you there were about 5,000 people listening. The hall was packed, with people standing and everything. Mostly, he just stuck to the general gaming topics. He could be accused of crowd pandering, because at one point he was just spouting out phrases from video games for people to cheer at. He said "BEWARE, I LIVE" from Sinistar, and I was among the enthusiastic few who cheered at that one. "YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY" got a huge round of applause, but us Sinistar geeks are few and far between. So yeah, he reminisced a lot to former game generations waxed nostalgic of the arcade scene. A big point he made was that people should start arcades back up and revive arcade culture. That part was kind of frustrating for me. I wanted to stand up on my chair and scream "FUCK! JUST- AH! COME TO GROUND KONTROL!!!" As I type this I'm tending bar on a slow night here at the beer-soaked arcade I work at. All the crazy enthusiasm Wheaton's arcade love was met with just made me wish all those people came to Ground Kontrol. So yeah. He also get into the controversial stuff and addressed the gaming violence and the social aspects of gaming and yadda yadda yadda. Lots of Jack Thompson hating. Overall it was a lot of preaching to the converted and pretty much just saying what we were all thinking, but I guess that's the point of a keynote address. Here's a clip. No, I didn't film it and of course not, that isn't me talking to Wil at the end. It's just some dude that lives in YouTubeopolis.

The keynote was followed on the same stage by a Q & A session with Gabe & Tycho, the masterminds behind PAX and Penny Arcade. It was funny, with people lining up to ask them questions and stuff. I didn't stick around for this whole thing. At this point I was pretty ready for coffee & a smoke. The fatigue was starting to sink in. I needed a really strong maté. And I got one!
Friday - Show Floor
So after that, I took a look at the show floor. I spent a lot of time at the Namco Bandai booth playing Ace Combat 6. You may or may not know this about me, but I am a big Ace Combat fan. And 6 looks totally rad. Namco Bandai had a really good showing, one of the only Japanese companies that did. I was also taken with Jeanne D'arc for PSP, which I have since purchased. Great game. Rock Band looks like it'll be really good. The Kain & Lynch booth was crazy. That game looks weird.
So Sony was the only exhibitor that had booth babes, and they were about as stoked as you could imagine. I just felt bad for them, having to feign enthusiasm for something they probably know very little about. I tried out one of the at-the-time-unreleased PSP Slims, and it was tethered to the waist of a particularly humiliated booth babe. Which was kind of awkward. There were a few vendors- Pink Godzilla was there, and so were their prices. I got to play Heavenly Sword, which is totally totally a God of War clone. Or at least it was when I played it.
The biggest booth was for AMERICA'S ARMY, this spooky game that is as much a piece of recruitment propaganda as people say it is. One had to give all their info (to Army recruiters) to try the game, which was housed in a literal huge black shroud of mystery. I could hear mechanical guns clicking from inside of it, so they probably had some big-ass screens and guns and shit. Actual army dudes working the booth. The whole interest-in-the-military and interest-in-playing-video-games circles unfortunately intersect on the great ven diagram of the gamer demographic, and there are plenty of ghouls that wish to capitalize on the poor souls stuck in that shaded area. This is why I never played Halo, or Counterstike or even SW: Battlefront. Whatever. Good gameplay is good gameplay, I guess, but warping our hobby into a flagrant recruitment tool is rather offensive. America's Army probably sucks anyway. Does anyone even play it? And why am I ripping on military games so hard when I totally love Ace Combat and would totally fly fighter jets if I could?
After that, we went to this pretty hilarious trivia thing. It was put on by the Chatterbox folk. The game had a Jeopardy format. Most of the questions were really easy, but it was a fun piece of PAX community. I think Chatterbox has a recording of the whole thing on their website.
Around this time PAX was closing up, aside from the gaming rooms that stayed open until late. I had little interest in the console freeplay, though come to think of it, it could have been kinda fun. I did go into those rooms and actually see a PS3 with my own eyes for the first time. No wonder that system is failing. It's the ugliest damn thing I've ever seen ever.
Friday - Shorty's
Friday closed with a rowdy evening at my favorite Seattle bar, Shorty's. I met up with some Seattle friends and drank copious amounts of warm Jim Beam with a lot of great people. Shorty's pinball selection is totally great. They have one of my rare favorite tables, Championship Pub. And fifteen others. The Shorty's visit was followed by a stumble back to the ol' Travel Lodge, where I drunkenly tried and failed to play Resident Evil 4 for the Wii. And some other stuff probably happened. I'm not sure.

SATURDAY
I didn't go to PAX on Saturday. Instead, I went to my friends Garek and Christine's house and ate some delicious food. Then I slept on their couch. Then I walked over to Seahawks Stadium and attended their preseason home opener, where they handily defeated the Minnesota Vikings 30-13. With the awesome hookup from some awesome friends and the good folks at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I had the best seats I've ever had at an NFL game. 9 rows back from the 50 yard line. Which was pretty incredible.
Saturday ended quietly with dinner at Cyclops and a chill night at the hotel with Flight of the Concords watching and YTMND viewing. Particularly the ones where people yell things, ala Metal Gear Solid. That shit is hilarious.

SUNDAY
I woke up Sunday determined to attend PAX all I could. I showed up shortly after opening and went to this lame-ass Family Feud game trivia thing. It was sort of the sequel of the one I attended on Friday, but much bigger and much more lame. I didn't even stay for the whole thing. Instead, I milled around the show floor and played everything I wanted while collecting swag. I still have the giant swag bag in my apartment. I haven't really gone through it yet. What am I gonna do, proudly display the Lara Croft poster on my wall? Actually, maybe that's a good idea. I should put it in the bathroom. Wait a minute, probably not. My friend Connor told me that my bathroom reminds him of BioShock. That's an ambiance I wouldn't want to ruin.
ANYWAY, we ended up getting hungry and went down to Pike place to eat, which ate precious PAX time. By the time we got back to the expo, it was pretty much closing up. And it was getting windy. Everyone left and I retreated back to the good ol' Travel Lodge by my lonesome.
Having the hotel to myself meant ordering a strange Seattle pizza and going for a swim in a really dingy pool. With dried out chlorine skin, I drank Jim Beam and played Excite Truck and Ace Combat 5. Then my friend Drew came over. My night remained the same even with Drew there. Jim Beam, Ace Combat 5 and strange Seattle pizza.

I checked out Monday morning and drove back rather groggily. Ended up staying the night in Olympia with my old friends JP and Alison, which was really nice. We half-assedly watched the Monday night game and I ate food smothered in Dave's insanity sauce. JP has turned his garage into a bar, with a pool table and bar lights and stuff. It's rad. He also has this high powered pellet gun and we played of a few rounds of What Can We Shoot With This Surprisingly Powerful Gun?
Then I watched some movies and fell asleep while their three dogs and four cats provided a gentle woofing and meowing white noise. That was a nice night.

This entry is no longer about PAX, and was too long several paragraphs ago.
To learn more about PAX, here is their official site, and some Flikrs of the whole scene can be found here and here.

Five months of no World Breaker - where to begin?

Sup. I haven't touched this blog since April. This is the obligatory "I haven't touched this blog in a long time" post. Just about every blog at this level has these posts. Not that there's been a shortage of things for me to write about, mind you. During the months that have passed with no entries I attended three gaming conventions, acquired an Xbox 360, Wii & PSP, and just generally continued my exceedingly interesting life that's often about video games. I could have written about any number of things that would fit in well for a blog that's mostly about video games, and I do intend to catch up. So why didn't I keep up these pages? Was there something that kept me utterly blocked and afraid to update a blog with no readers? Meh, not really. I just didn't feel like it. Plus my internet connection sucks.