Ah yes, the dreaded Day 3 of a good con.  Dread because it comes with an accompanying feeling of “Damn, I wish this wasn’t over so soon” as well as wondering if you should be there at all, because the last days of most cons are always notoriously lacking, for obvious reasons.  GameX did come with the feeling of wishing it wasn’t over so soon, but surprisingly, seemed to maintain about 90% of exhibitors and celebrities throughout the third and final day.  We left mid-way through the day only because of scheduling issues with getting back to Pittsburgh at a decent time.  Barring that, we would have, without a doubt, stayed the entire third day.

The addiction of the convention and clear winner of Game of the Show in my mind was not from the industry juggernauts of Ubisoft, EA or Sega.  No, the winner was Global Agenda from Hi-Rez Studios.  Global Agenda is addicting, promising, fun, pulse-pounding and seems to being crafted by people with a passion for the game they are making.  I’m going to give a detailed write-up on it very soon, so I’ll leave it at that for now.  Watch this game, it is going to be epic, mark my words.

I have two small complaints about GameX.  First was the floor plan.  The booths seemed a bit too tightly packed in the front of the hall, and too sparse in the artist area in the back.  I think they could have used that oddly unpacked space in between those to kind of spread things a little more evenly out.  But again, that is very minor I suppose, it didn’t detract from my experience in the slightest.  The other problem was a little more, well, problematic for us.  The internet was spotty at best Friday and Saturday, non-existant on Sunday.  I truly feel for Mythic and their WarHammer setup they had running, which depended fully on having a working internet connection.  Their game lagged Friday and Saturday, and their booth was literally dead weight Sunday.  No internet, no online game.  Poor guys.  Knowing a thing or two about that type of situation, however, I hesitate to blame GameX for the problems, as it likely had more to do with the convention’s actual infrastructure than anything GameX did or didn’t to.

BAWLS also had a major presence at GameX as well.  Their booth had way under priced BAWLS cases, singles, 4 packs and a new invention called SnoBAWLS (Which we named our Rock Band 2 team after!), a frozen slushie like verson of classic BAWLS.  Not to mention their contests and giveaways they had like the chugging contest.  BAWLS wins the gamer drink market, as far as I’m concerned.  G33K B33R is the last word in delicious.

My bottom line?  Not only one of the most fun cons I’ve ever attended, but I found out this was its first year.  Wow.  I’ve been to bigger cons that have run for much longer that didn’t run this smoothly.  I highly recommend that everyone with any sort of means to get there next year attend.  BRING COSPLAY! A big thank you to the staff, exhibitors, celebrities, industry people, attendees and our fellow press for making this an excellent weekend full of win and funnel cakes.

Tags: convention, GameX, Global Agenda, Hi-Rez, Video Games