Photoblog: Bit Brigade @ PAX South 2018

Greetings once again Steemians of 2018! Your friendly neighborhood drumoperator was on the scene at Pax South in San Antonio, TX this weekend with VGM speedrun cover band Bit Brigade and emerged unscathed with photos to tell the tale. Although Pax South is the smallest of the three domestic US Pax events, it was still stuffed full of new video game releases, over the top booths and abundant cosplay. There was also a smashed concert that may or may not have featured drumming by Steem’s only resident time traveling drummer cyborg. My lips are 2048-Bit encrypted.

So you wanna live the dream kid? Play the drums to thousands of seated fans, their poor feet obliterated by six miles of walking all day? Get used to this view. You will be seeing it for two consecutive ten hour drives.

Cosplay is a thing at PAX, though not quite on the Dragoncon or Comicon scale. Here we have (from left to right): shower curtain oops-wait-is-today-Pax Link, seriously ripped lady Sephiroth, the three masked ninjas from that game I played a decade ago possibly also FF7 but really that was a decade+ ago, a scarf wearing spacefaring desert trash can that looks like it deserves its own spinoff on Cartoon Network, and one of those things from the deleted scene in the new Star Wars. Note: I am not an expert in cosplay.

Discord booth was lit. You missed it. They had precurved “dad hats” ... my love for which made me feel very conflicted as I am incapable of rearing cybernetic offspring and will never be able to authentically wear such a fantastic accessory.

Monster Hunter: trying too hard? Or trying just hard enough? I’m going with the later. This thing was easily 30 ft across and I can’t see what’s wrong with that. Plus over a long enough period of time this will inevitably end up in somebody’s garage, and that just rules.

Biggest and baddest find of the show floor crawl: The Messenger is a indie platformer being done by a small team that, in so many words, is set in two time periods ten years apart and features mechanics that force you to switch from one time period’s version of a level to the other, in real time. The genius behind it is their inplimentation: the older time period is 100 percent 8-Bit graphics, music, playste... and when you switch to the modern age it drops you into 16-Bit seemlessly updating the graphics and music. It’s something you just need to see...but it’s worth noting these guys have iterated on just about every possible mechanic you could derive for such a system and the end result is more than just a gimmick!

There were a few people playing Magic.

On to the concert! These are some of the biggest events we do each year (Pax East is good for 3-4K people, which is madness) ... and South was no exception. Got couple thousand in again this go and the show did not disappoint. Here is Boston’s Videri String Quartet (their Modern Warfare piece is literally the first thing that has intrigued me about a modern shooter) opening the show and totally crushing it. You can barely see them, but our boy Chris from Triforce Quartet is filling in. Semi-traitorous. : )

Worth sacrificing the gratuitous crowd shot for the sweet lens flare shot? I thought so. We smashed Zelda in about forty minutes with zero problems. There was only one thing left to do, only one box to check on this triumphant weekend...

AND DONE.


If you enjoyed this photoblog, perhaps you like rowdy modular synth and drum live music performances. I’m not saying it’s likely, I’m just putting it out there:

Totally Rad Live Modular Synth EDM Jam
Totally Rad Live Drum + Modular Synth Jam