Tonight on GeekNights, we review and discuss PAX West 2023. The new venue is fantastic and it felt a lot like PAXes from the golden age of PAX. In the news, Scott suffered Airport Adventures yet made it to Chicaco, Steam (and our Steam accounts) are 20 years old, and the Unity game engine destroys itself with an actively hostile monetization model that is somehow worse than we expected from their 2022 merger with evil.

Tonight on GeekNights, we talk about all (except one) of the games we played at PAX East 2015 that stood out in some way. VA-11 HALL-A (Papers Please + visual novel + that bar in Idoru) looks amazing. Red7 is a solid warmup game. One More Line falls short. Videoball will be the fucking breakout game of the future (and we have formed a professional Videoball team). Morels is a solid 2-player game (one step under Battle Line, but much shorter).

In other news, Hotline Miami 2 releases to mixed reviews, Overwatch brings another chapter to the Blizzard vs Valve head-to-head, Long Live the Queen is worth playing, and we will be performing live at both Zenkaikon and Anime BostonYour text to link... this year!

Tonight on GeekNights, we present the full audio of Rym's second PAX Australia lecture: Losing.

Winning is good, and losing is bad. We strive to win, and this is the basis for most of the games we play. Challenges are binary: we either overcome them, advancing the story, or fail, and must try again. But, what if we were to toss this conventional wisdom aside? Do we really only have fun when we win? Have you ever had that moment in a game where epic and total failure was the most memorable part? What kinds of games would arise if we strove to make losing, instead of winning, the point?

Tonight on GeekNights, we return triumphant from PAX Australia to talk about... PAX Australia! PC gaming and anime are big there, and it was in all senses a proper PAX. It was, however, in a BIG TOP. In the news, Steam Summer Sale aside, there is talk of collusion in fight game tournaments and things aren't looking so great for Nintendo as the Wii continues to outsell the Wii-U, and they're making a lot of their money from Candy Box games. Maybe they should just break the glass and make the Pokemon MMO.

Tonight on GeekNights, returning from our brief absence, we bring you our coverage of MAGFest 9! The audio is a bit different than usual, on account of us videoing the whole thing for later release. But, with this, GeekNights returns more or less to its regular schedule!