Oh my goodness this was quite the day!
For our Friday adventures, check out this other really great post.
We woke up around 7 am to leave the hotel at 7:30. We went to a Target to pick up some walkie-talkies (Max forgot to bring his States phone) and see if we could do anything with the Target gift cards that are of no use in Canada.
After also hitting up Starbucks for some breakfast, we drove into downtown Vancouver to get in line for the Exhibition hall! We were there around 9, and the hall didn't open until 10 am! On the way in we picked up a PAX program, saw a huge sculpture of LoL character Ziggs, another one of Annie and her giant bear friend Tibbers, and grabbed lanyards for our passes!
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| Ziggs |
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| Annie and Tibbers |
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| The line to get into the main Expo Hall ran through the room where the LoL Finals would be held later that day |
Our program informed us that there were things to see on 4 different floors! We quickly realized we probably wouldn't make it through everything (In the end we covered 3 of the 4 floors to their (almost) entirety!!).
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| I found an Xbox game that I love!! |
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| There was a Sunset Overdrive demo booth that we waited in line for and eventually got to play! |
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| Pokemon booth!! I was hoping for a Ruby and Sapphire teaser, but all they had for demo was their online trading card game (super lame) |
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| Street fighter!! |
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| Borderlands! We spent a lot of time, multiple times, in line for Borderlands, but never quite made it around to the front for the demo play |
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| WarHammer character |
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| Evolve Boss |
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| Play Station had a big section |
After our experiences with lines for Sunset Overdrive and Borderlands, it started to seem like they've gotten too big for their britches. The lines would be an hour or longer, and you would be able to play a 5 to 7 minute controlled demo. It was still tons of fun, but just something to consider for next year.
We decided to head to the LoL games around 1 pm. We split up, Max heading to Subway to grab some lunch for us, me heading to the seating to find us somewhere to watch from.
They were just ramping up for the first rounds. This was to be TSM (Team SoloMid) vs. Team LMQ. Here's the results of their match-up. We had to stand on the side for the first game. We were still really near the front, to it was still pretty good.
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| The "Casters" (like the ESPN Football casters) |
We opted to leave after LMQ lost the first game to see some more of the entire convention. We went by a booth for a game called Strife, where Max chatted up one of the members of the dev team. They also had a mechanical bull, that was actually a mechanical dragon. Max would not ride it despite my most adamant protests. I then wondered out into a lobby area to pick up some shirts, when I encountered the man dressed as a lion (in the bottom of this series of pictures).
From here we went to a theatre a couple of blocks over where they were having a discussion panel with a set of the LoL developers. They opened the floor to questions after their prepared speech, and boy were there some bizarre, unrelated questions/comments.
On our way back into the hall, we really wandered around the bottom two floors.
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| A whole pile of bean bag chairs |
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| A game based around blowing into your Super Nintendo game cartridge! |
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| The arcade room! |
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| Escalators in the center of the exhibit hall |
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| Max playing Transistor |
Then we went back to the LoL hall. We caught the 5th game of LMQ vs. TSM (this was especially impressive because it's a best of 5 series! Also, it was SEVERAL HOURS later). We assumed our previous standing position on the side lines, then I bullied our way into two pretty awesome seats to watch Cloud 9 vs. Curse! This was an amazing series! Cloud 9 took it in 3 games, with Curse surrendering in the first game!
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| Fun crazy people near us in the audience |
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| Max on the live cast! See the next three photos, too! |
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| At the end we got to go take a picture with Cloud 9!! |
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| Max was wearing the same shirt as one of the casters! |
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| Also with the Casters! |
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| We saw TSM on our way out of the conventions center! |
We found our way back to the hotel after that. Sunday morning we had the easiest and most beautiful border crossing of our lives!!!
We've already looked into more conventions to attend. There's a big one in Vancouver next April. They haven't announced the location of PAX Prime 2015 yet, but I think it's always on the west coast somewhere.
