Day 3 began with a return to Creperie Voila. Our escape from the concerts the night before allowed us to get the jump on the crowd... and unfortunately on the crepologists themselves. The place wasn't even open when we got there, so we sat around waiting for it to open, then stood in a line of about 4 people and got some more awesome crepes! Yay for crepes!
(Spot the yerfhat here!) Then it was time to stand in line for Family Feud, PAX Edition. It sounded kind of amusing, but mainly we went because it was in the theater where they were holding the second Penny Arcade Q&A panel, so we had to go to be sure we'd get into that. It was probably not necessary, but we didn't have anything else to do at the time, so we hung out. They handed out pipe cleaners to build things from. I made a pig you can see in the monthly
Newsletter.
The game was rather entertaining. They had surveyed PAX-goers and the questions were based on how they had answered.
When it ended, we stayed in our seats and enjoyed the the second Q&A panel! Sol exercised unimaginable courage and fortitude, getting in line to ask a question herself. Unfortunately, she wanted to ask them to sign the Yerfhat, and before she got up, someone else asked about signing and they were very clearly not going to do it. Apparently, they had had a signing table at some point on Saturday, and we never knew it. It was not in the schedule! So we lost out there. But eventually, about 2 people from the very end, she got to ask her question! She said some stuff about how their comic helps her to communicate with her gamer husband, and then went up and gave Gabe & Tycho each a copy of our CD.
I'm sure they weren't interested at all, but whatever, it was cool to give them out to influential people even if those influential people will never speak of them to anyone. It just takes one getting hooked though... if JoCo doesn't blog for a week and then comes back with "Oh, sorry guys, I was totally caught up playing
Supreme With Cheese!", then we get rich! Right after Sol asked her question, the Bad Horse chorus went up and Bad Horse'd the Penny Arcade guys. I saw the video of that on Youtube, but sadly Sol was already out of sight when they started filming.
Next, we sought out Wil Wheaton
again. This was our last chance to get him on the Yerfhat! Crushingly bad news... we showed up and an Enforcer told us the line was cut off because he had to leave. We wandered off into the expo hall for one last visit before the show wound down. Nothing terribly exciting inside, but we did manage to dispose of the last of our CDs. Also, it was a lot emptier. Many people had left before Sunday, I think, because there was actually room to walk in the expo hall on this day.
We came out of the expo hall set on getting lunch and moving on with our day, when the Enforcer who had stopped us from getting in line came running up to us. He said "I've been going around trying to find the people I turned away! Wil has decided to keep the line going for another hour!" So there it is! And how totally cool of that Enforcer. We ended up being about 3 people away from still managing to get cut off anyway, but we were in. We were out of CDs, which of course meant that people suddenly were desperately interested in Hamumu. We talked to about 6 different people while standing in that line who had all kinds of interesting questions, but we had no CDs to give. One of them did type the address into his blackberry for future reference, at least. Then we got up there, told Wil he was awesome (his writing that is - we own all his books, and know not to torture him with Star Trek), and got him to sign the Yerfhat. We of course had reserved
one final CD, which went to him. He did a truly amazing job of looking like he was excited about it.
So that was kind of the big finish. The denouement goes like this: we had lunch at the hotel restaurant again, then returned for the final Omegathon round (we missed the Jenga round which was earlier in the day), which is sort of the show's finale. It was packed. The game turned out to be Vs. Excitebike, a Japanese-only release of Excitebike with special features for competitive play. It was pretty fun to watch, and then Gabe & Tycho played a round of it themselves. The show concluded with them thanking everybody and saying we were awesome, and that was that!
We went back to the hotel and had dessert for dinner, went to bed, and flew home the next day.
What I left out of this report were the details of our day-to-day wandering from place to place. Everywhere we went, we got looked at funny, our picture taken, and
so many times people came up and told us our hats were cool. It was great. Every time they did, we gave them a CD. We kept the CD distribution to a really personal level like that, rather than running around flinging them at everyone, and it made things a lot cooler, and I hope it made people a lot more likely to actually try out the disc instead of throwing it away. Haven't noticed any suspicious new sales yet, but we'll see.
All good things must end, and frankly, I was ready for this one to. I loved it, totally. Had no idea it could've been that much fun. But I was exhausted physically and mentally, and it probably wouldn't have stayed fun for more than about another day. Three days of this a year, I wholeheartedly approve of. And I can't wait for next year! Look for the Hamumu booth then, because I'm thinking it's got a solid chance of happening! You all need to come out and see it. We're talking about holding a 48-hour contest during the show, so people can come up and watch games get made. A little like Mongolian BBQ, with less cabbage.
