PAX 2008 Day One: Friday

So, it's Tuesday morning and I'm still not fully recovered from PAX 2008. This year's PAX was quite possibly one of the most exhausting ones since the very first, and also the biggest one yet. It was so packed with events that this year, I didn't even have time to sit down and blog about it in the evenings afterwards (something that has been sort of the norm each year). I'll try to recap it all now, starting with Friday:

Friday morning began with a little breakfast at the Brown Bag Cafe in Kirkland with my dad and Ryan. Although both of my nephews were planning on coming up for PAX, Ryan was the only one who could actually make it. My Dad flew up with him (he was down in California on business anyway) and we enjoyed a hearty meal before heading down to the first day of the con.



When we arrived, the lines were as insane as ever. We met up with John, Scott and their friend Mike who had gotten there just ahead of us and started playing a little Mario Kart DS with insane lag.



Later, Jason, Montine and Shawn showed up and joined us in line. We waited for about 3 hours before the line started moving. Once inside, John went to the console tourney lines and found out that Halo signups weren't until Saturday (a good thing), while Ryan and I went to the Bungie booth to try to line up for the Recon challenge. It wasn't started yet, but they were demonstrating the new Halo map, which we got in line to play several times.



I spent a little time walking around the Expo hall on Friday, but mostly gravitated towards the Bungie booth trying to get into that Recon challenge with Ryan. At about 4pm, they decided to start it up, and a line instantly formed. We ended up waiting 2 hours and being the last two people to challenge the Bungie employees for a chance to win Recon armor. We lost 15-5.



After that was over, we had some dinner over at Pacific Place with John, Jason and Montine and then came back to try a little Rock Band. Our regular band did some practicing while Ryan played some Guitar Hero and challenged people to Smash Brothers (a game he doesn't have but is somehow good at). Eventually, our band entered our best score to qualify for the Rock Band tournament the next day. I took a peek at the signup sheet...and it appeared that we'd have a good chance at making the top 32 teams (that was the cut off). Unless there was another page somewhere, I figured we were good to go.

After Rock Band, we all walked over to the concert hall, but it was so packed that Ryan and I decided to take off and get some rest for Saturday instead. The rest of the group stayed to rock on through the night....

Next up, Day Two of PAX, which I'll do in a separate post later.