Welcome to part one of my PAXU 2023 writeup! If you’re mostly here for game coverage, you can skip this one. If you’re willing to indulge me in a bit of rambling on air travel, Philly, and the new OLED Steam Deck, feel free to stick around. Unlike most of the other posts in this series, this is just going to be some thoughts about everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.
First off, air travel! I actually don’t mind flying, and I used to do a fair amount of it for work. But I haven’t flown for work in years, so every time I think about it, I feel like the guy who talks about how he was great at high school football. But anyway, point is, I’m pretty familiar with airports, flying, and the whole thing.
Except this time I flew Cape Air, a smaller airline that services the New England area, and it was a bit of a doozy. First off, all the planes are Cessnas (I think—plane people don’t kill me please), which are very small. My flight back had 3 people on it, and one of them was the pilot.
It was an incredibly different experience than I was used to, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a weird way. The plane was much louder than I expected even with earplugs, and I could see out every inch of the plane. Honestly, it was pretty staggering. I’m fairly jaded on flying at this point. Doing it bi-weekly for 3 years will do that. But coming up through the fog and into the massive sprawling plain of clouds was just incredible. I have some photos, but they really don’t do it justice.
Also spent some time in a fancy airport lounge, and felt more upper middle class than I ever have before.
Some of this airplane and airplane adjacent time was spent testing out my new Steam Deck. I’ll probably do a full writeup once I play through a few more games on it, but in brief: good battery life, good screen, don’t love the controls, currently still mixed on it as a system. It’s also a bit bulky, but I wasn’t going to get a better chance to try it out than this weekend. I played a bunch of Shadows Over Loathing, which I’ve found to be quite good!
However, the Steam Deck didn’t get much time to shine because I spent very little time waiting in lines this week. That’s not say there weren’t lines, but they were mostly for food rather than games or demos. As always, I’m obligated to shout out Reading Terminal Market, and I’d like to specifically call out Sweet Nina’s, which makes killer banana pudding. Is Reading Terminal Market reasonably priced? Not quite, but the quality of the food is so much better than anything you’d get in any convention hall, I don’t know why you’d ever buy anything from the convention.
Seriously though. If you’re at PAX Unplugged, you should either be 1. Bringing your own food in, or 2. Going out and getting food. If you get convention hall food you’re being gouged for terrible food, at terrible prices, in terrible lines.
Speaking of terrible lines, here’s a riddle: what do you get when you try to have 10,000 people use a single escalator to enter a convention hall? Answer: a mess! There was a line stretching around Reading Terminal just to get into the line to get into security to get into the queue hall line. No, I didn’t mistype that last sentence, and you’re not having a stroke, it was that bad. Whoever thought having a single entrance with one staircase and one escalator to actually get in was an idiot.
Outside of that though, I was able to avoid most of the awful lines this week, and I’d consider it to be a pretty good show. My notes are a bit more chaotic, and I feel like I spent less time just grinding things out than I normally would.
Anyway, now that I’ve covered everything else, it’s time for board game posts! Which will be going up slowly over the rest of this week.