Hey friends! So this is going to be a chronology of my three days at PAX East 2016, which is a convention I have attended in the past, but this is my first time going a) for more than one day, and b) as press. That being said, I want to thank all the fantastic PR folks and game developers I met over the weekend, proving to me that the games industry is quite a friendly and accepting place when we’re all sandwiched together to the point that Twitch.tv offers us free deodorant! (yes, that happened.) Another thanks must go to my personal friend Miles Staton being my cameraman for the weekend. Without him The Young Folks probably wouldn’t have physical proof of the interviews and demo highlights I had over the course of the weekend. I saw a lot in 3 days, so to give you a vicarious experience through my eyes, I’ll be providing three articles for each day of the weekend, highlighting the sights and sounds of each respective day of video game playing I did. So, here’s the highlights of Friday.
Pit People – The Behemoth
Our first official stop on Friday was at The Behemoth’s booth for their new title called Pit People. The company has taken their well known animated, comedic aesthetic that they grew into with Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theater, and broke into a new genre with the Real-Time Strategy game type. For new and veteran players of the RTS genre, including Fire Emblem, Advanced Wars, Civilization, and most recently The Banner Saga franchises, Pit People is a real treat. The game puts you in control of a squad of very different characters with unique abilities that can move around a board to attack enemies based on their skill and unique weapons. Pit People is also the company’s most complex narrative, as all the characters in a player’s party have an arc akin to the characters of A Game of Thrones. The Behemoth allowed players to test out Pit People with a very distinctive arcade controller board, in which the Y button is replaced with a lever to create a satisfying feeling of commitment to ending a turn in the battle.
Check the video below for an interview with The Behemoth’s own Ian Moreno about the game.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unBN-wERN6Y]
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Friday the 13th The Game
You mentioned what? A Friday the 13th game? Do you mean that awful NES one? No, so allow me to school you, boys and girls. A team of indie developers for Gun Media came together to make their own game inspired by their favorite horror franchise and called it “Slasher Vol. 1 Summer Camp” and their talent quickly impressed the creator of the film franchise, Sean S Cunningham, to the degree of partnership on making the game an official addition to the official Friday the 13th family. The result was a Kickstarter campaign that exploded with popularity due to the team’s dedicated recreation of Camp Crystal Lake’s locales, motion capture by one of the most well known actors to portray Jason Voorhees, Kane Hodder, and music composition by film and horror veteran Harry Manfredini. This indie production has gotten a lot of spotlight from fans of the series, but also from fans of video games looking for something new, as the game has promise for a unique game style with Asymmetrical Multiplayer, providing one player per match the control of a terrifyingly overpowered Jason Voorhees, and the rest in control of camp counselors, all of whom play and control differently, creating a genuine atmosphere for surviving the duration of a slasher film. On Friday night of PAX East, a panel gathered together consisting of the game’s main team, Ronnie Hobbs, Wes Keltner, Randy Greenback, Chick Brungardt and Ben Straus, and head consultant Adam Sessler of G4 and X-Play fame. There, they showed new motion capture behind the scenes and in game footage show what the team has been working on, and how they achieve the essence those classic, memorable kills from the film series. The in game footage is linked below, and more detail can be found on f13game.com
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK4woFN5ikc?rel=0]
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PROTOMEN Reveal ACT III Songs
The fawned over rock opera group based on Capcom’s Megaman franchise, The PROTOMEN played live for the first time in a long time at the Friday Night Concerts block at PAX East this year, in within the show, they worked the crowd with incredible lights, props monologues throughout the evening as they performed greatest hits of their albums Act I and Act II. And, after a long long period of silence on the project, gave the audience an in person sneak peak of their upcoming music video, and played a few select preview tracks from the soon to be release Act III.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBSHk2Mj13U?rel=0]
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