We awoke on Saturday in relative comfort. With Marri disappearing to a hotel closer to the conference, the night had passed without her fervent vigil over our supine bodies (though I could feel a dull power penetrating the window through the dew and the darkness, as if from some caged owl, insane with hunger). The day’s itinerary was something to get excited about.

We met up with Hothead’s COO Joel DeYoung about PAA: Episode 2, Deathspank, and the state of digitally distributed games. They’re a really great team, and we thank them for their time. It was an awesome interview (should be up soon).

Tom and Luke hit up the Destructioid.com panel. They had this to say about that:

The ‘How to Make People Give a Shit About Your Gaming Blog’ panel was hosted by the Destructoid team, and lemme tell you, it was nothing but a jiggling mound of internet hubris dancing and shouting at itself, wearing red briefs and a funny hat. At least that’s how I remember it. The crowd was there to mingle; it was just like reading the C-Blogs and D-Toid forums, but brought to you in brilliant three-dee. Every character showed up in costume and entered the stage area with a shout ‘n dance combo, announcing their presence. There was an abundance of inside jokes I couldn’t hope to understand, and much meemery. The panel’s stirring advice regarding jumpstarting your blog could be summed up as ‘keep at it.’

While Tom and Luke were suffering through D-toid self-buggery, Marri and I were at a panel called ‘Old Journalism and New Media,’ or ‘Old Journalism and the New Journalism,’ or something. It broke down the differences between a review, preview, and critical article. What’s useful, what you can write when, and when you should write what you think. Very insightful, charming panel. It wrapped up with Karen Chu’s discussion on the danger of review aggregators; how they favour the high score, forcing an unfair majority opinion that really discusses nothing. Honest fun.

Then the Fallout 3 demo happened. I had played Fallout 3 on the show floor the day before and was impressed by the richness of the world and the micro-management that takes place even during tense close-quarters combat, but the hour-long demo preformed for thousands of gamers in the main theatre blew every quality to some new and extreme size. What I take away from my Fallout 3 experience over the last few days is that It’s a lot more like Bioshock than I thought. Is that crazy? I’ll ramble on about that in some other post.

After the Big Show, we ponied on down to the Totally Rad Show’s meet-up, then 1Up’s meet-up. Both were awesome. We met some interesting folks and our hosts were humble.