The second day of my time at PAX Australia pretty much went to plan with me heading over to another session with the Penny Arcade team – the yearly “Make a Strip” and Q&A. This year they’ve taken a significant step forward on the accessibility front with all the sessions I’ve been to having live captions. It’s a huge bit of work for the people responsible but I have to give them credit because they did well keeping up with the hosts.

I also visited the classic gaming area to see what’s new/old and this time around. First up was a really nice collection of Amiga titles from Psygnosis – famous for their high quality Atari ST and Amiga games of that era and some pretty special box art too. I remember one of the first games I saw on the ST was Barbarian (not the head choppy one from Palace) and the company’s distinctive logo would appear on a lot of gamer’s machines over the years.

There were also a handful of developer kits on display including two for the Nintendo 64 and one for the Atari Jaguar. Before modern conveniences such as SD card based cartridges this was often the only way for developers to get their games onto systems. It’s pretty cool seeing that these are being preserved especially for the Atari side as the company under that name now isn’t much more than a holding house for the IP.

There was plenty more in the exhibition hall including a PUBG tournament, Square Enix going in hard with Final Fantasy VII Remake and the latest from Final Fantasy XIV and the continually busy indie booths. I might have to try and see about trying Minecraft Dungeons tomorrow which looks like it was getting a lot of attention in the Xbox booth and still looks EXACTLY like you’d imagine a cross between Diablo and Minecraft to be. Overall a nice day out! 🙂