PAX Australia (PAXAUS) has become the premier gaming convention in Australia, bringing people from all over the country, and some people not from Australia to one location to preview games, meet or catch up with friends, and generally celebrate everything that makes our corner of the hobbyverse one of the best communities to be involved in. The last official gathering of gamers from all walks of life was in 2019, then the spicy cough came along and canceled 2 years of PAXAUS gatherings, moving a lot of it online instead. With 2022 allowing international travel, PAXAUS was once again returning to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre to celebrate what should have been its 10th year.
Usually, I would be presenting a few videos about PAXAUS involving developers who are happy to speak about their upcoming games… but… This year felt very different. I’ll get into what is different about PAXAUS this year later in this article, but for the moment I’ll talk about some of the things I got to experience at PAXAUS this year.
Final Fantasy XIV Online: Zodiark Raid and Ifrit Trial
Starting things out this year at PAXAUS was what I had booked in the media hour, the one-hour span before doors open to the public, and everything has a 1-2 hour wait time, which was a chance to win some items from the main draw of PAXAUS: Final Fantasy XIV Online. As many of you know, I have played Final Fantasy XIV Online for The Outerhaven on behalf of Square-Enix, so to jump in on one of the toughest raids in the game was obviously something I wanted to do. The raid in question was Zodiark, the “final boss” of the Endwalker expansion. You’d think that a group of media people, many of whom play Final Fantasy XIV and attend media nights and play together, would actually have a shot at beating a raid boss while max level and using item level 516 gear… Nope! We got our asses handed to us over and over again before we called time on the attempts at 9:50 am. Personally, there were some of us who didn’t know the fight and we had no way of communicating as some of the headsets were still being set up when we arrived. But we got the “I beat Zodiark” t-shirt and the Final Fantasy XIV water bottle (Which you got if you completed the Ifrit trial) since they love us so much… or out of pity…
JBL tells me about things I haven’t reviewed… Yet
The next stop on The Outerhaven‘s 2022 tour of PAXAUS was the JBL Quantum booth. As many of you already would have read, I’ve reviewed a few JBL products for the site already. So when I arrived at the JBL Quantum booth I was surprised that there were still things I haven’t reviewed… Yet. The products I saw there were some of the ones I reviewed previously, with the usual JBL quality on display, then there were the things I haven’t reviewed yet: JBL Quantum 350 wireless, JBL Quantum 400, and JBL Quantum One headsets, the JBL Quantum TWS headphones, and the JBL Quantum Stream microphone were all hanging on the wall waiting for people to come along and buy some while some larger JBL Speakers were at the front of the booth pumping out some tunes that demonstrate the quality I’ve talked about in my reviews. At the end of the booth tour, I was given a pair of the JBL Quantum TWS headphones to review and use, so you’ll see that sometime soon… and maybe some other JBL items.
HyperX Celebrates 20 Years of Computer Accessories
One of the bigger tech-based booths at PAXAUS was HyperX, with its big red banners standing out from a mile away. The big thing about HyperX was that they were celebrating 20 years in the gaming accessory space, showing off a wide range of products from their successful Cloud, Stinger and Alpha headset lines, their range of full size to 60% size keyboards, some microphones like their announced just before PAXAUS ProCast Large Diaphragm Condenser Microphone. Then there was the big draw for me: HyperX‘s announcement of 2 gaming monitors, the Armada 25 and Armada 27. Spending time with HyperX Public Relations Assistant Manager Michael Teng (A yearly thing we do) was as good as it always is. One of the best things about PAXAUS is catching up with PR people and friends, so it was a bonus to do both with HyperX. You might be seeing some more HyperX product reviews in the near future.
Alpha vs Beta: Street Fighter 6
To be honest, there weren’t too many games available to play from the bigger AAA publishers and developers at PAXAUS this year, so when the chance came up to pick up a controller and play Street Fighter 6 (Version 0.0100), I jumped at the chance. While this wasn’t the open beta version that people got their hands on during the same weekend, it was still very much a playable build. So while people at home were creating avatars and walking around the world hub, I was playing straight one-on-one matches with the 8 characters available: Ryu, Ken, Juri, Guile, Chun-Li, Kimberly, Jamie, and Luke (The other 3: Dhalsim, Blanka, and E.Honda were not available in the build I played).
After spending years, and a few hundred dollars, on Street Fighter V, which felt like it was designed for eSports-level competition, Street Fighter 6 was very beginner friendly with the changes to all the characters being both familiar yet challenging at the same time. The only new character I tried, Kimberly, played like a combination of Karin from Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Guy from Street Fighter Alpha 2. Kimberly felt familiar but also different in her own way, giving the character their own style. I also played Ryu and Ken, with both of them moving further apart from each other, with Ryu still being that standard middle-ground Shoto character he always has been, and Ken moving more into a kick-focused character, chaining different kicks into each other for combos. If Street fighter 6 looks and feels this good in the Alpha stage, the finishing product is going to be amazing.
Riding the Rooftops with Rooftop Renegade
If there is one thing that PAXAUS loves, it’s the independent games industry. PAX Rising is a section dedicated to games made by local and overseas (So mostly Australian and New Zealand) developers who are looking to become the next big thing in the scene. This year there was a larger focus on this section, with it taking up almost double the amount of room as usual, so there was a lot on display. While I would, and did, spend a lot of time in this area, there weren’t too many games that got my attention from the get-go. Rooftop Renegade, hidden at the back of the PAX Rising area, was something I tried out the second I had a chance to. Rooftop Renegade is a very simple yet challenging skating platformer where you race against the top-time player as well as do things like collect crystals, avoid obstacles, and outrun a corporation looking to capture you for some reason. As I said before, Rooftop Renegades is simple in design, but challenging in execution. I managed to get close to some of the top times during my playthrough but missed them due to my stupid inability to get my left and rights confused when it comes to buttons on a controller. However, that won’t stop me from keeping an eye on Rooftop Renegades in the future and putting some videos on our YouTube channel. Rooftop Renegade will be available through Steam.
Bustin’ has the most unique promotional item, and a good game too
There are more than a few mobile games being represented at PAXAUS in the PAX Rising area, and many of them have some interesting and unique ideas. However, when it comes to the most interesting and especially unique, Bustin’ has to be at the top of the list. Bustin’ is a simple mobile game based around the toilet paper shortage of the last 2+ years. It’s the apocalypse, and you are the last supplier of Toilet paper on the planet. Your mission is to go around various locations, distributing toilet paper rolls to the citizens in those areas before you run out or are smashed to bits by angry Karens. A very simple concept that had me hooked from the first level.
What also makes Bustin’ stand out from the crowd was its very unique promotional item: A toilet paper roll that was wrapped in the game’s logo. There were two options available: You bring your own toilet paper roll and they will teach you how to wrap it with their promotional wrap, or if you were very lucky, you were given a wrapped roll of toilet paper. Sure, there were other promotional items at the booth like t-shirts, buttons, stickers, and postcards… But honestly, you’ll remember a game that gave you actual toilet paper rolls to promote their game about giving away toilet paper. Learn more about Bustin’ here.
Dice, Cards, and Board Games
PAXAUS isn’t just about video games, it also got a very big tabletop, dice, and card game section where you can do anything from learning the latest card games like Dragon Ball Super, My Hero Academia, and Marvel Champions; to playing sessions of Dungeons and Dragons, and discovering a lot of new games from both bigger distributors and solo companies looking for their big break. I did spend some time learning Marvel Champions, only to discover that it’s a group game and not a solo game. Other than that, I spent time doing what so many other people did in this section: Use it as a meet-up spot, a place to sit down while eating and buy dice and board games.
Walking away from the Table Top section after 3 days I bought 5 sets of dice and would have bought more if I had found Random Encounter Dice sooner, and also copies of the Resident Evil 2 & Resident Evil 3 board games (pictured above), thus adding to my expanding Resident Evil collection of games.
Not everyone was there, and it was noticed by everyone
While you would think that PAXAUS is a place where all your chances at getting your hands on the latest and greatest would be a reality, this year had a lot missing. A small sampling of companies missing are as follows:
- Sony
- Nintendo
- Microsoft/Xbox
- Ubisoft
- Bethesda (They moved off-site to a smaller bar location and were separate from PAXAUS)
- Blizzard/Activision
- Riot
- EB Games
- Wizards of the Coast
- Games Workshop
- Bandai-Namco
- Square-Enix (Outside of Final Fantasy XIV Online)
The lack of bigger names in the gaming space was felt by many, with people complaining that there weren’t enough games to play compared to other years. While SEGA had brought Sonic Frontiers to the event, and Final Fantasy XIV Online was present also, same with Street Fighter 6, but that was it. While this did give the PAX Rising section a chance to take center stage, there wasn’t the excitement of seeing something truly special. Even the lack of Pokemon was felt as this year the usual Pokemon championships didn’t coincide with PAXAUS.
This left PAXAUS having to fill the gaps with some things that felt like very cheap promotional additions to cover the cost: Mostly the Amazon Prime TV section, which had costumes from 3 Prime original shows on display, the Crunchyroll booth that had photo rooms based around Spy x Family and other anime (Probably leftover from the horribly run Crunchyroll Expo a week or so before PAXAUS), and that biggest waste of space: The Twitch Streamer Lounge, which was a huge booth with one-way glass that all the “big” Australian streamers could use to take a break in with free drinks, food, coffee, etc. All of these booths were large and in the center of the main expo hall, taking up room that was just making congestion for people wanting to walk elsewhere.
Then there were the panels, mostly based on inclusion concepts. While I’m all for inclusion in gaming (Gaming is the most accepting and inclusive community on the planet, despite what some sites and streamers want you to believe), I didn’t need to see over 30 panels doing the same topic through different speakers. If you want to see how inclusive PAXAUS is in general, then all you needed to do was to go check out the PAX Together area.
PAXAUS: The final word
After spending 3 days at PAXAUS, I was tired and angry. I usually spend PAXAUS running around getting PR contacts and playing games, but this year I couldn’t wait to get out of the halls and get back to the hotel to have a swim in the pool. Sure, I spent a lot of time catching up with friends that I haven’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic or those I haven’t seen in a while, and that was a lot of fun. However, when I walked into the expo halls, I just felt like it was hollow. There were too many booths that just wanted to sell you stuff, or get you to post a selfie online to get a sticker, or they just didn’t want anything to do with you. PAXAUS felt less like a gaming convention and more like a trade show, or anime convention.
The absence of the big three and many other AAA publishers was felt by people online, with many posting about it through sites like Reddit. Another thing that people had issues with, and it’s an ongoing problem, were the “Enforcers”, a group of people who were paid to help and assist people with finding events, medical assistance, and other helpful things… Except most reports are coming back with the Enforcers bullying, harassing, and threatening people who did not do “as they were told” by this group. I have several stories of these things happening that I saw personally or others have told me directly, but I won’t post them here and will send them to the PAXAUS organizers directly as this needs to end now or there will be a lot of people not coming back in 2023.
Speaking of 2023, I won’t be back. I’ve been covering PAXAUS for 10 years and over the last few times I’ve been there in person, I’ve left angry and frustrated. While I thank all the PR people who booked me for interviews, and booth tours, and generally gave me the time of day to help gain contacts in this sector, I’m just going to be loyal to those who are loyal to us at The Outerhaven. After 10 years, I’m done. So instead of going to PAXAUS in 2023, I’m headed elsewhere… Maybe I’ll check out Fright Nights at Warner Brothers Movie World in Queensland and have a holiday.
