Like many other Destructoiders here, I'm spending my weekend up in lovely Seattle, at the super nerdy and totally awesome Penny Arcade Expo. If you'd like to hear about my day so far, read on. Otherwise, just leave me some nasty comments about how nobody cares about me personally. I swear I'll take them personally.

We started out the day fairly early, waking up at eight in the morning and leaving for downtown at nine. To step back, I'm not using the royal we; I was actually able to convince my non-hardcore-gamer friend John to come up with me. Now, the show didn't start until two, so that gave us plenty of time to roam around the actual city of Seattle before coming to the convention center.

Yesterday we hit up the famous (so I'm told) Pike Place Market, where we had some fish. Today, we dined at Elliot's Oyster House, which I can highly recommend if you've got the money to burn. But before then, we took the monorail up north to go up to the observation deck of the Space Needle. It was pretty neat. I bought some souvenirs in the shop and we headed back south. I really wanted to buy these, but they were overpriced:



After lunch, we walked back up the hill to the convention center.

First thing we did was watch the Omegathon round one. Tycho and Gabe were actually there, and when I Tycho passed by me I actually did a double take and froze up. He's Internet famous! I only watched until the first Jenga tower fell, but the crowd reaction was priceless. I'm not sure I'll ever again be in a room with dozens of other nerds shouting, "Jenga!" over and over again.

After that, we hit up the exhibition floor. After a brief walk around the floor checking out the exhibits, I nestled myself into Nintendo's corner (naturally). I played some Metroid Prime 3, some Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and some other games that don't really matter.

Metroid Prime 3: I'm still on the fence about this. I've been hearing that the Wiimote is revolutionizing first person controls, and MP3 is the game doing it, but after what I played, I'm not entirely convinced. They tell me it's very customizeable (and we CAN switch the first button to B and the jump button to A, thank Science), so it could still turn out well, but with the default controls, I found the aiming to be slightly too sensitive and the turning to be too slow. We'll have to wait until Monday to see how it runs after some tweaking.

Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, on the other hand, was pretty slick. The touch controls are awkward for about five minutes, but then it starts to flow and it plays like all the other classic Zeldas from the past. I'm definitely picking it up when it comes out.

After leaving the exhibition floor, I went to the Mega64 panel, which was mostly disappointing (with some people laughing too hard at not-so-funny things), but there were a few gems that made the panel worthwhile. They showed a video that they were supposedly not supposed to show anybody (because it was an ad that was never approved), and they did some Q&A.

After the Mega64 panel, I escorted my friend to the PC gaming lounge, where he plans to play nothing but Counter Strike 1.6, because he has no taste for the finer things in gaming. But before that, I ran into Tycho again, and this time I actually managed to say hello and thank him for PAX and Child's Play. I even got a picture with him, but I don't have it on my computer so that will have to wait.

And that brings me here, in the handheld lounge, typing on my laptop, battling random passers-by in the interesting yet frustrating massively multiplayer live role playing game, TerraDrive. It's glorified rock-paper-scissors (like the Pokemon cart that's sitting in my DS Lite), and so far I have a losing record, but it's actually kind of a clever way to get nerds interacting. I've got one life token left, so if I lose again, I'm out, but it will have been fun enough to be worth my time.

I think in a bit I'm going to set up in the tabletop gaming lounge with my board games out, so if anybody's reading this and is here (not likely), come by for some Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne. I'll be happy to see you. And maybe battle you for your TerraDrive life token.