Happy PAX Aus week!

Plus the future of Halo, weird Nintendo toys, and more!

Hello there, and happy local PAX kickoff day to all who observe. May your shoes be resilient and your hands ever sanitised. This week we’re lookign at what we’re excited about at the show and why you should definitely come visit to Together lounge, as well as this week’s two biggest non-hurricane news items: a new Halo tease and a Nintendo alarm clock. Let’s go!

It’s PAX Aus today, somehow, already!

By Alice

It’s PAX Aus this weekend! Huzzah! October sure does roll around quickly. Way, way too quickly. This year has a few interesting inclusions on the expo floor that have me a bit curious. Full disclosure: I may run PAX Together as a contractor, but I have zero visibility on what happens in the rest of the show, so all of this is speculation. I can’t be the only person who saw that Steam has a booth at PAX Aus for the first time (that I’m aware of, at least), and immediately thought this might mean a local Steam Deck announcement. I wouldn’t bet on it, given that Valve (Steam’s parent company) is still upset with the ACCC upholding our consumer laws, however it’s nice to dream.

What I’m really excited about is the expanded tabletop area. There is so much more of a focus on board games this year, and I think that makes sense for a convention, so more people can make new friends and play new games. There’s a huge focus on Lorcana, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, TTRPGs in general and, of course, the massive tabletop library. I won’t be able to leave my PAX Together area much, so please play all the board games on my behalf.

I’m also really happy that The Sims has a booth. Interesting that it’s The Sims and not EA, but I will take any opportunity to see more Sims stuff, so I am very into this.

What are you looking forward to at PAX this weekend?

What to play

• New to Game Pass and perfect for spooky season is ​​Inscrpytion, the deckbuilding roguelike / escape room psychological horror thing. Also Mad Streets, a party game brawler.

• Free right now on Epic Games is adorable management sim Bear and Breakfast. Over the weekend it’s being replaced by both space sandbox survival adventure Empyrion and African mythology souls-like Outliver: Tribulation.

• Over on Steam, the entire Tomb Raider franchise has been steeply reduced for the next couple of weeks. It’s one of those slightly disappointing sales where I clicked on it and then saw I already own every single one, so please buy some on my behalf! The definitive versions of the entire Survivor trilogy can be had for a total of $18, and the new remasters of the original trilogy are $22. Or get the surprisingly good spinoffs Guardian of Light or Lara Croft Go for around $2 each.

Article headline

By Tim

This week we learned that 343 Industries, the company that’s been making Halo games since it took over from series creator Bungie, is changing its name to Halo Studios. It’s also moving to developing with Unreal Engine so it can spend less time on tech and more on creating the multiple new Halo games it has in the works. We saw a flashy trailer with graphics tests, and studio leadership claiming they have a plan to put Halo back on top. The overall vibe was apologetic that Halo Infinite didn’t resonate, and assuring that a “new recipe” would turn things around.

Call me pessimistic, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I love Halo, primarily as a single-player experience, and I don’t think it’s controversial to say Infinite was not the start of the problems.

The original Halo is more or less unimpeachable, and not because it was the most cutting edge graphical showcase at the time. It’s because of the lore, including the suggestion of a wider universe you never and is never explained to you but leaves its mark with mystery and suspense. And it’s because of the diversity of gameplay, the freedom, and the fact that nobody else was doing anything close at the time.

The series has never hit that high point again, with the two direct sequels biting off more than they could chew, and both ODST and Reach moving laterally to explore interesting sections of the lore while losing some of the awesome, tight, Master Chief gameplay. Halo 4 is a great game but ultimately a misstep in the direction of the series overall, and I don’t think any game has disappointed me like Halo 5. (Note: this entire paragraph would probably look very different for anyone interested in the multiplayer side of Halo).

As for Infinite, its pre-release troubles are well-documented. In the end I loved playing through it, but it needed to either have a satisfying self-contained story or ongoing narrative updates, and it had neither.

Along the way Halo has been pulled in far too many directions, a victim of its own success that’s often put massive expansion, trans-media tie-ins or “next big things” ahead of what made the original great. I sincerely hope the next move turns that around.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

Allow me to be a little self indulgent for a moment, but this weekend marks the tenth year that my wife and I have co-curated the PAX Together space (formerly the Diversity Lounge), and it’s amazing to see how far this space has come. Ten years ago we were in a tiny room, around a third the size of our current lounge, and we had our community groups, a few tables for board games, and a few consoles shoved in. I had no idea what the space was supposed to be, so we just made a queer mini PAX with its own panel schedule, board game library, and exhibitors.

Now we have a massive lounge, a well-stocked tabletop library, indie developers showing their games, a separate community group area, and our own separate theatre with a full schedule.

Some things are still the same, we still have the Xena Nintendo 64 Fighting Game tournament (though, the prizes are bigger), and we still have NerdKwiz (the queer quiz show I host with Donald Duong). But some things have changed, we don’t have any sitting senators presenting panels this year, nor do we have Nintendo Wii classic, Muscle March, playable in the lounge.

I think this year is our strongest lineup yet, with the Big Ol’ Music Game Jam bringing musicians together to play music on stage, the PAX Lip Sync Roulette drag show, The Book of Divergence (an RPG DJ show), and Jess Zammit and I are hosting a panel to explain what queerbaiting is and isn’t so people can stop using that word wrong.

If you’re at PAX this weekend, come upstairs to check out how far the space has come, and say hi! We’re in room 210 on the second floor of the convention centre (the building that doesn’t have expo in it).

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Given Nintendo announced a completely ludicrous motion-sensing alarm clock this week, and given I’ve just recently returned from a trip to the Nintendo Museum, I thought it might be a good time to look back on some of the company’s stranger physical creations.

Selling toys isn’t unusual for Nintendo in the Switch era. Look at amiibo, or Labo, or Mario Kart Live, or even all the plastic stuff you can get from the My Nintendo store. But the alarm clock (Alarmo) feels a lot more like weird old Nintendo, the one that will latch onto a random piece of interesting technology and turn it into a kooky curio in a way nobody else has thought of.

Way back in the 60s it was using relatively ordinary components to create new imagination-firing toys like the Ultra Hand grabbing arm, an automatic pitching machine that flung table-tennis balls at you, and a home Love Tester.

In the 70s, it was using projectors and laser guns to turn abandoned bowling alleys into virtual shooting ranges.

That same kind of technology came over to Nintendo’s home consoles, but also led to R.O.B., a robot that could play the NES alongside you by “seeing” the screen and stacking blocks or discs accordingly.

From the 90s on, things got a lot less weird. Between SNES and Gamecube we got some odd accessories like microphones and voice recognition modules, and the Game Boy was an oasis of strangeness with beautiful nonsense like the Game Boy Camera, Printer and E-reader, but for the most part Nintendo innovated with the systems directly, whether that’s with the N64’s analog stick or the touchscreen on the DS.

Today it mostly sticks to this same system-level hardware weirdness, with the occasional random pedometer or cardboard piano thrown in. But if Alarmo is the first step toward a plastic Nintendo weirdness major return, I’m all for it.