SmaCkexe and his Adventures at Pax

Friday-The First Day of the Badassery that is Pax

Pax was great! Absolutely GREAT! I met a lot of people. I hooked up with several developers and spent the majority of my time going around and talking to "Developers". Friday I spent a lot of time at the Riot booth and even Danced the "BROLOF" for a thousand people to see. Late Friday night I was tweeted by Melissa from Hawken " WHERE ARE YOU DIRT NAP WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!" We had to bail on Pax at 4pm and skip the Lan Party so we could go party with Melissa, Paula( she wears our crest on her finger and phone!), Danielle( and yes they were all smokin' hot), Jason and Mark! I am forgetting someone but I cant find his card so Ill just have to apologize(SORRY)! I only played about 10 games of Hawken in that 4 hours. The rest of the time I spent drinking with Melissa. She is absolutely hilarious and I am quite sure she is my Sister from another Mister. I also talked with Mark quite a bit. It turns out he worked on the series that got me into PC gaming! He was great to talk to. He took a video of Toryne and Myself talking about how badass Hawken is.
After that, the party started to wind down. They started to give away video cards and wouldn't ya know ... TORYNE won a 560ti which I promptly convinced him to give to Halfblud ( his brown ) so his new PC would be BEAST Mode and could finally step into 2012 not running a 9800gtx. After the giveaway they started to push us out of the bar. BUT, I stood strong and waited till everyone left so I could talk to Jason Hughes, Producer for Adhesive Games. We voiced some concerns regarding private servers and other things that CoD does that we absolutely hate. He spent nearly 30 minutes talking to me individually. Throughout the 4 hour party I only played 10 games and spent well over 3 hours talking to the Devs. We completely bailed on Pax and skipped the Riot Lan party so we could hang out with Adhesive Games and Meteor Entertainment and it was worth every second. Hawken has easily become the game I am most excited for in 2012.


Saturday - Prepare for disaster!

Saturday was a whole lot of the same thing! I spent hours at the Riot and Edge of Reality (Loadout) booth. I also played Blacklight:Retribution, a F2P shooter that recently released. Blacklight was a BLAST! You can completely customize your gun. I am talking Magazin/Clip, Stock, Barrel, Sight, and Design. It has a realistic setting with absolutely stunning graphics for a free to play game. I would HIGHLY recommend playing it.
I spent a significant amount of time playing Loadout, AGAIN! During one of my many trips to the booth I ended up on a team with 3 other guys who were wearing a Loadout Tshirt just like mine. Whenever your team won a game they would give you a shirt to wear. So all of us had one a game. The Dev's at Edge of Reality then decide to have a Fans vs. Dev's Challenge! They take pictures and then begin the game. You start Load out by customizing your gun. It is very unique in this respect. You can choose all kinds of modifications. For more info on Edge of Reality and the Badassery that is Loadout go here. After customization and testing your weapon the pull up the game lobby. I am, of course, talking mad crap on them. Randall, My new nemesis, quickly shuts me up and ultimately destroys my whole team. The game was not even close and I quickly realize how important the gun customization in that game really is. At this point I realize I am late for the Sexual Harassment Seminar and head upstairs.
After my Loadout beat down by Randall, I headed up to the seminar on "Sexual Harassment in Video Games". I sat through it, listening intently about the things people say to women and at the end they let us line up to ask questions. I unfortunately was last so I was not able to ask any questions but they did let me speak. After listening to the horror stories about some of the things that are said to women, I decided to inform the ladies running this Seminar that there was a community out there that was handling the very problem they wanted to be addressed. They asked me who I was and what community I represented. I said " I am SmaCkexe of DirtNapGaming.com". I then explained how we have an entire HR team dedicated to handling conflicts and sexual harassment. Before I could even finish my sentence everyone was standing and applauding me. It was really a great moment for Dirt Nap. At that moment I was sure that we were on the right track.
After the "Sexual Harassment" seminar, I walked out of the auditorium with a renewed sense of vigor! "Bring on the Riot Pub Crawl", I shouted inwardly. At this point, Toryne quickly pointed out that the GW2 lady was in the Audience and that I should ask her for a Beta code. With my Fat Batman ego fully inflated to maximum lunar capactiy, I walked up next to Regina Beunaobra of Arena.net and said, "Man oh man, do I love me some Guild Wars!"

She quickly turned her head and said, "Hey, your the guy with the website!"

"Yup thats me!"

We conversed for a bit and she gave me 30 BETA keys to give out to people from Dirt Nap.
A few hours after the "Sexual Harassment" Seminar ended, we started up on the Riot Pub Crawl. It began rather slow and uneventful, but by bar #2 it was starting to turn around. Moose7 had his first shot of terrible tequila (Jose Cuervo Gold) and Nikasaur was there to watch him slam that bad boy down. Riot and Dirt Nap Gaming were there for Moose7 losing his Tequila virginity. Nikasaur gave Moose7 a big knuckle bump and we moved onto bar #6 (we skipped bars #3, #4, and #5 so we could grab some dinner). At bar #5 we decided to give Moose7 a taste of good tequila (Patron). He took it like a Champ! He ordered the steak tips and rice so he could keep drinking. We left Bar #6 and realized very quickly that the next 3 bars were completely PACKED!!! We decided to skip those and go right to Shenanigans ("Hey Farva whats that bar with all the goofy shit on the wall?" "SHENANIGANS?!" -SuperTroopers-) Yes, that Shenanigans. It was there that I ran into a very cool Riot Employee named Goshzilla. I ended up dancing with Goshzilla for a very long time. It was a blast. She is a very intelligent and quite funny lady. Funny thing about Goshzilla... It is Morello's wife! So, unbeknownst to me, I spent a large portion of my night dancing the night away with Morello's wife. He was very cool about it and encouraged me to keep dancing, so we kept dancing for a bit longer. At this point a very generous LoL fan bought 40 shots of Tequila and handed them out around the bar and we all did a shot with a cheer of " BROMACIA"! After a bit more dancing we moved onto the last bar where DRAMA ENSUED!!!
After Shenanigans, we moved onto ONE last bar where we shut it down! But before we shut it down for good, we had a small bar fight. Yes, I said "bar fight". Now this fight was small, but it was definitely awesome. The summation of this fight goes as follows:


Local guy dances with large breasted drunk girl on the Riot Pub Crawl.

Gay buddy sees him creepin' on her so he starts dancing with her.

Local says, "Hey! This ya boyfriend?"

The gay guy laughs and says, " No buddy, Im gay."

The local is a bit taken aback by this revelation and puts his hand on the gay guy's throat, which in hindsight turned out to be a bad move because the local then got punched square in the face by said gay guy.

From there the local attempted to bull rush said homosexual counterpart, but was quite swiftly incapacitated by yours truly. When I saw him step toward my dancing buddy I stepped up and slid my arm thru one of his, lifted it up his back, and slammed him down on the table. He was a bit upset by this maneuver and began swearing that he would kill me and feed my soul to little baby kittens and things of that nature. I began yelling at the gay guy to get outside and calm down. From there I tell the guy I have pinned down that I was just trying to keep it calm so the Cops dint get called. "No one wants to go to Jail tonight. Right?"

He calmed down a bit and I bought him a beer and things were cheery. OR WERE THEY? At this point I went outside to make sure things were ok with my gay dancing buddy. Yes ... I danced with a gay guy. No, it wasnt sexy. Yes, it was very fun. He seemed ok, but while I was talking to him I noticed his boyfriend, whom was a very large man (and by large I mean muscular and built like a Mack Truck), walk inside and punch the local guy square in the face. This made me laugh so hard I could barely breathe. At this point the barkeeper informs me and another person that the bar is literally out of booze. We literally shut the bar down.

The bar ran out of 1's, ice, beer, and most of its hard alcohol. I am not quite sure why he told me and this other gentleman and not one of the 30 Riot members in attendance but, he did so we simply made the Riot Devs aware and we shut that bitch down. From there I started calling cabs for the seriously intoxicated and got them going to there respective destinations before I finally crawled into a cab with Moose7 and headed back to our hotel.

Sunday Sunday Sunday

By this point, Sunday morning, I am ready to be done with Pax. My feet hurt. I could not talk because I lost my voice. My head hurt from the massive hang over and I was ready to hop a plane back home. Despite all that, I decided to stick it out for 1 more day of PAX badassery! And let me tell you, I am glad I stayed. Riot once again did not dissappoint! The Cosplays were amazing


*These images were taken from the League of Legends Forums .

I spent an absolute ridiculous amount of time at the Loadout booth for a 3rd day in a row. One of the Dev's ended up giving me his Xbox Live and invited me to come down to Rooster Teeth in Austin, Texas in July and Ty Root gave me his business card and told me to give him a list of emails of people whod like beta access. I brought multiple Riot Dev's over to the game and would literally walk around telling people to go try the game. Near the end of the day I ran into Jatt (formerly of Dignitas), one of Riot's newest employees. We talked for a very long time about LoL and shoutcasting. Jatt turned out to be just how you'd think he'd be: very humble and very pleasant. We talked for a very long time, and I found out that the very first Jatt shoutcast I watched was actually his first. This blew my mind as I honestly thought Jatt had been shoutcasting for a very long time. In my opinion, he is one of the very best shoutcasters in e-sports and I still cannot believe that it was his first Shoutcast. I eventually convinced him to go over to the Edge of Reality booth so he could try Loadout. He played 1 game and had an absolute blast. All in all, Jatt was a very cool person and very approachable. I was glad I took the time to talk to him and I look forward to talking to him again in the future.

After Jatt had to go I ended up standing next to a Riot Employee that I did not recognize. Her name is Princess Aura. She turned out to be absolutely splendid to talk to. There was a SC2 fan who was standing with us and he began asking questions about the game. I watched and listened as Princess Aura explained the finer points of League to a person who knew absolutely nothing about the game. He asked questions that we all asked in the beginning but, now we think are silly. He seemed to grasp the the concept well enough and his questions became less and less simple. She explained the game in a manner that the most experienced Summoner could not. She was simple yet elegant and it was quite apparent the guy was memorized by her. After we were done explaining the game we ended up talking about other games like Super Smash Bros. Turns out she is pretty pro at that game too. You can follow Princess Aura on Facebook. I must say that Princess Aura was an extremely genuine person and very easy to talk to. She was very fun to talk to and she quite literally was the topping on my Sunday Cake. At this point Pax is winding down in its final 30 minutes and I am plain BEAT! I decided to call it quits. I walk over to the Loadout booth one last time and shake hands with all of the Devs. Even Randall who flat out smoked me in Loadout the previous day. They all told me Thank You and told me to find them at Rooster Teeth. At this point I start walking out of the building and head for the Subway with Moose7 and Nicket. We discuss the loot we made out with over the weekend and head for the Hotel.

The Aftermath

Sunday night I sat in my hotel room with Moose and Nicket. We order some delivery Chinese food that tasted something similar to a dogs brown eye. Despite the terrible take out, we were elated. Our beds were covered in Pax Swag and Loots! We netted 50+ LoL skins, 30 GW2 Beta Invites, 10 Tera invites, Contact information for countless developers, and a ridiculous amount of random stuff that we just wanted to give away.

The Rundown

I loved Pax East. It was a very long weekend but it was well worth it. I met a lot of people and made some big connections for Dirt Nap Gaming. I realized at Pax East that I want a career in Video Games. I discovered that the skills I learned in other industry's translate well with Video Games. Pax was a very hectic scramble from Friday to Sundy. Would I do it again? You bet your ass I would. In fact I have already planned on attending Rooster Teeth and Pax Prime this year as well.


Thanks to DJResonance for taking the time to make this jumbled mess readable.