Tales From PAX West 2019: Day Zero

Aww yes you’ve found me. I decided to start blogging again and what better time than to share my current PAX West trip with you? Last year I failed miserably to jot down the experiences we (Zac/Patrick/Myself) had and it really bummed me out. This time around I wanted to share with you what it’s like for me to attend these events. So grab a beverage and something to snack on if you need it and enjoy our Tales From Pax West 2019: Day Zero

It all began on a cool summer evening in August when a young man nam— You should be warned that I’ve had maybe two hours of sleep in the last forty or so hours and some of this is going to be silly. But getting back into things takes a bit of silly to make it work. I’ll be proofing this later after I’ve had the opportunity to finally rest and will most likely erase everything I just wrote down (joke was on me). I read this and thought it should be shared because an overtired me can sometimes be funny.

Why exactly haven’t I slept you ask? Well, our tale begins late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning. Our flight was scheduled to take off around 0630 and we still had to drive two hours to get to the airport. After a difficult goodbye to my children, both of whom didn’t want me to leave, I went home to finish packing and downloading movies onto my tablet. By the time I was finished it was 11PM and I would only get three hours of sleep before needing to meet my Uncle at his place. The problem is that when I’m overtired, which I already was after being awake for 15 hours at that point, I know that I’ll sleep through my alarms. Not to mention I was stressed out knowing that I was going to be on a plane soon and, boy, do I hate flying.

I was hoping I’d get some decent rest during our travels, but that was an empty reach in my mind due to my irrational fear of flying. It’s not natural to shove humans into a metal tube and then shuttle them across the planet thousands of feet in the air. Regardless of my fear I endured the turbulence ridden flight until we landed safely. I was pleasantly surprised to find out during the flight that Delta still serves snacks at no additional charge and even allowed us to watch free movies that recently came out. I opted for Pet Semetery, but wound up shutting it off near the end of the flight.

After we landed and secured a means to travel, we made our way to the AirBnb. The lady wouldn’t let us check in early unless we were willing to pay ten dollars an hour for every hour that we were early. It would’ve been sixty bucks. Um bullshit lady… She did, however, let us check our bags in so we didn’t have to carry them around all day. This place is weird, though. It looks like an apartment in a crappy movie where the good guy throws someone around to get answers about, “who’s selling the stuff?” It’s barely even furnished and yet we had to drop another twenty bucks for the lady to pop open the fold-out couch. She’s one of those people. Nickel and dime your ass outside of AirBnb so she can make some extra coin. It costs 3 dollars to even use the restroom… I’m kidding but it’s not too far-fetched to think she wouldn’t do something crazy like that.

So, we left to explore Seattle for a bit after grabbing breakfast at Ihop. We walked all the way to the Farmer’s Market, or was it Public Market? I was so hot and sweaty I began developing some… um… chaffing issues that hurt every time I moved. I was starting to get miserable, so we sat down at a pub and hung out until we could go check in. It wasn’t a bad way at all to spend the time with the fellas. We eventually dined on fish & chips and ice cream on our way out.

Once we did finally get checked in to our room I passed out almost immediately, or so I’m told. I didn’t realize that I did at the time but I was out like a light. I only slept for about an hour though because we needed to catch an Uber to the Indie Showcase event that Microsoft was hosting. We anticipated it was going to be slammed like it was last year, but we were pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t anywhere near as bad. We managed to eat some pizza before hopping in line to play Gears of War 5 Horde. It was a long wait but we had a lot of fun. I’ve always been a fan of Gears and horde mode is a blast. There are some notable changes that stood out, like the ability to use and upgrade perks, which I don’t remember being in Gears of War 4. Also, each character can only be used by one person at a time and the engineer class doesn’t exist anymore because everyone is capable of doing engineer stuff.

Later on Zac played Deep Blue, a neat Indie game reminiscent of Abzu. After that, we wandered around snagging a ton of free mints, a free game from the Xbox Ambassador booth, and some beverages while waiting for the raffle at the end of the night. We sincerely wanted to win some of the cool things they were giving away like Xbox controllers, skateboards, and even an Xbox One X. We didn’t win though because that would’ve been just way too cool. We then traveled back to our room and wound down for the evening. Day zero was the most eventful I’ve had in my previous four experiences with PAX. Some of it was miserable for me for personal reasons (re-read above) but, for the most part, it was a great day once the chaffing, flying, and heat issues were dealt with. We got to check out some cool new Indie games at the Microsoft event and we even got some cool swag that I’ll share with you folks who watch my stream at a later date. See you tomorrow in our Pax West Day 1 blog and if you’re not following me on Twitch you’re dead to me… I mean, you should rectify that…
K bye

Zac’s Notes

-Deep blue was cool~ Exact quote
-Tankard and Tun had a cool octopus logo
-Why are you asking me questions this late?
-Get out of the bathroom, I’ll answer that later.
Ericco Notes

-zzzzzz *snores* ~ Sleeping Rico