I flew up to Seattle on Thursday! Browsed around, found a decent Sushi place with some fairly decent sushi at a fairly decent price.

Other than that, browsed around Seattle for a bit, scouted out the convention center, and checked into the hotel. Staying at the Renaissance again, same as last year. Primarily because I found the room to be acceptable last year, the rates aren?t bad, and I?m about 4 blocks from the convention center where the expo hall is for PAX.

I?m only going to be at PAX for Friday and Saturday.

Today I hung out at the ArenaNet booth and picked up a t-shirt, and then played the game as a Human Ranger (there were two demo races on hand, Charr and Human, Human?s were being used to demonstrate the low level content, while Charr?s where higher level content.

Guild Wars 2 is shaping up to be a fairly fun game. Although it is quite a bit different from the original Guild Wars. Some of the changes they have discussed on the ArenaNet blog. Combat certainly feels different, and the world is quite a bit different. There won?t be anymore skill hunting, nor epic skill captures. It takes a bit of getting used to, the way skills change as you change your equipment (and as you swap back and forth between say a ranged weapon and a sword/shield combo).

The dynamic event system was quite nice, certainly helps to not have to be grouped up to participate in, although how that will work in real life when its not being assisted by developers guiding and helping out along side the limited number of players being allowed to demo the game at the same time. We?ll see, but I have my hopes up though.

Afterwards I checked out the Aion expansion that?s coming out, Assault on Balaurea. Nothing much to say there, it?s Aion.

Browsed around the rest of the expo floor. Dead Space 2, Portal 2, Epic Mickey, Assassin?s Creed Brotherhood, and a bunch of other interesting titles that are coming out here.

Afterwards I went to the NCSoft Launch Party for Aion: Assault on Balaurea.It featured the Wonder Girls? not exactly my kind of music, but Mona was going to be there and we had been trying to meet up all day long and kept missing each other. I finally managed to find her (she was well disguised!). She?s tiny and cute. Although I think Josh Petrie is smaller, but not nearly as cute.