All Articles: Just Shapes and Beats
The PAXpocalypse List: The Best of PAX East 2016
Believe it or not, we’re not living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape (depending on your political affiliation, insert your own Trump/Hillary joke here). But you’d never know it if all you had to go by was the 2016 PAX East show floor, which was overrun by dozens of titles that took place after the collapse of society… and a lot of them were pretty good.
But what if some disaster did befall the world and force PAX East attendees to forever wander the halls of the Boston Convention and Exhibition, feasting on whatever mac and cheese bowls or turkey legs they may find? That’s where Warp Zoned’s PAXpocalypse List comes in, because these are the games we’d keep playing if we could never venture outside again… (more…)
Dear Diary: Saturday and Sunday at PAX East 2016 I Played…
Another PAX East has come to an end, but Mike “Gabe” Krahulik, Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, and game developers from around the world will return to Boston next year for more shenanigans. In the meantime, I’ve got an overflowing notebook and thoughts on more than a dozen titles from the final days of the expo. (more…)
The PAXpocalypse List: The Best of PAX East 2015
Most of the big publishers chose to skip the 2015 edition of PAX East and even those that did attend (like Nintendo and Microsoft) kept their most anticipated projects home. But that didn’t stop a wide variety of indie developers from setting up shop in the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to wow the assembled masses. These developers set the tone for this year’s expo, which featured a heavy focus on games that attempted to reinterpret classic gameplay concepts for a new generation of players. And the crazy thing is that many of the developers hyping these games looked like they would have been in diapers the first time I fired up an SNES.
It was a welcome sight with the rest of the industry pivoting away from those types of games and towards a competition to see who can push the most polygons. So if you were a fan of gaming in the NES, Super NES, and Genesis days, this PAXpocalypse List is for you. Because these are the games we would have played over and over again if some horrible snow storm had trapped us inside the convention center beyond the last day of the expo. (more…)