My first day at PAX East 2010 started and ended with great things, sandwiched around an unfortunate crossing of signals, a mystery meeting room, some interesting new games for the Wii and the DS, an RPG sequel with some amazing production values, and a very creepy survival horror game. All of that, plus a vast sea of game-loving humanity taking up residence in the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

The day actually began for me 28 floors above the action in a hotel around the corner from the venue. Jamie Cheng, CEO of Vancouver-based Klei Entertainment, let me get some hands-on time with Shank, a side-scrolling action game that Cheng describes as “a cinematic brawler.” “We love the movies of Robert Rodriguez, and we also love games like Double Dragon,” Cheng explained, “and we felt that we could do something really special.” And from what I saw this morning, they’ve succeeded. Shank takes visual elements from movies such as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and the “Kill Bill” films of Quentin Tarantino, dresses them up in a comic-book graphical style, then tops it all off with a playable character who can carry four weapons at one time, including twin hand cannons and a chainsaw. One of the most interesting parts of the game is that, unlike many side-scrollers, you’re not always going from the left edge of the screen to the right. Shank makes use of both the horizontal and vertical axes, allowing the action to move in both directions. Toss in some blood-soaked finishing moves (there’s no gore toggle, so an “M” rating is almost assured) and you have a bloody good time. I am a bit worried that the game will lack replayability, but the demo that I played was ridiculously fun. Shank is being published by Electronic Arts and is scheduled for a summer release. I’ll have more about Shank at E3 in June.

As luck would have it, my next appointment was scheduled an hour later in the same hotel. The lobby was awash with geekness. Kids gathered around tables in the lobby playing board games and card games such as Magic: The Gathering. A long table in the hotel lounge had been taken over by a gaggle of games journalists. There was even a nifty version of checkers being played on a tabletop PC running Microsoft Surface technology. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to make my connection with my contact, who was to show me the iPhone version of Fallen Earth, so it was finally time to brave the crowds in the convention center.

Attendance at the show for the entire weekend is rumored to approach 70,000 people, and when I arrived in the lobby, it seemed that all of them were there at the same time. The rope pathway that I described in yesterday’s blog was full. The end of the line stretched up the stairs leading to the exit, then did a U-turn around the railing in the staircase and back down into the lobby. Another enormous line built at the bottom of the escalators leading to the second floor, where the main exhibit hall is located; a staircase set aside for media and staff allowed me to avoid that particular queue.

The exhibit hall is where most of the action happens at PAX. Most of the gaming industry’s heavy hitters have booths there (2K Games, Rockstar, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Nintendo and others). There’s a section set aside for Boston-area indie developers looking to get their games noticed by the public. Some colleges that offer game-design curricula are represented as well. And PC hardware companies are not forgotten; Dell, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Antec and EVGA are in attendance showing off the latest and greatest in laptops, CPUs, cases and graphics cards.

My next stop was the Hudson Entertainment booth, where I was introduced to the company’s new and upcoming releases for consoles and the Nintendo DS. DecaSports is a collection of 10 athletics sims for the Wii and the DS. The list of included sports is rather eclectic, featuring rugby, sky diving, cheerleading (?), arm wrestling, and a volleyball/soccer hybrid called Sepak Takraw, a team sport that is apparently popular in the far east. The package was shown to me on the DS, so there were graphics and control-scheme limitations, but it does have a handy feature: you can play wirelessly with up to five of your friends, and only one of you needs to actually have the game card installed. Calling is a survival horror game for the Wii that includes elements of point-and-click PC adventures. You work your way through a scary mystery story from the points of view of several characters. Along the way you use the Wiimote to move a cursor around the screen, revealing hot spots that conceal important facts about the story. Military Madness: Nectaris has roots in the similarly titled TurboGrafx game from the early 1990s. It’s a turn-based, hex-based RPG in which you can play as either escaped prisoners on the moon or the force tasked with stopping them before they destroy the Earth. The XBLA and PSN versions of Military Madness are already available, while the Wiiware version releases on April 12. Last on my Hudson menu was Rooms, a game for the DS and the Wii that was designed by a South Korean teenager for the Independent Games Festival. It’s a sliding tile puzzle that tasks you with trying to manipulate rooms in a mansion so that your character can escape. You start with a four-room mansion, leading eventually to buildings with as many as 20 rooms that you have to slide back and forth. Rooms is currently available on both platforms.

I stayed a bit too long at Hudson’s booth, and I paid for it. My next stop was to be in a meeting room that none of the show volunteers (clearly identified by their bright red shirts with “Enforcer” printed on the back in large, ominous letters) could correctly locate. By the time I finally got good directions, I was late for my private, hands-on look at Deep Silver’s TV show adaptation, Prison Break: Conspiracy. Most of the original show’s actors provide voices for their characters in this adventure game, in which you play Tom Paxton, an undercover agent for a shadowy organization known as The Company, who has been ordered to make sure that brooding anti-hero Lincoln Burroughs is murdered in prison. You accomplish this by making alliances in the slammer and fulfilling the requests of your new friends. The demo that I played had me stealing rat poison and adding it to a character’s food, forcing him to be sent to the sickbay. A series of well planned button presses had my Paxton avoiding armed guards, picking locks, even fighting mentally unbalanced patients, all without being caught and sent back to his cell. Fans of the first season of the show will get a kick out of meeting Burroughs; his brilliant and extravagantly tattooed brother, Michael; and the rest of the series’ rogue’s gallery of characters. Prison Break: Conspiracy releases on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 on March 30.

I also was given some hands-on time with Dementium II, a disturbing horror adventure for the DS from SouthPeak Games. You play a patient in a mental hospital who drifts in and out of a bloody dream world in which he’s attacked by zombie-like inmates and other enemies while trying to escape from captivity. These dreams become so vivid that you start to question which of the situations is the actual reality. The control scheme could tie some players’ hands in knots; you move with the DS’s D-pad, pan the camera around the rooms with the stylus, and attack enemies by pressing the left shoulder button. Dementium II is a game that you’ll want to play while wearing headphones; the music is creepy, and it provides warning when an enemy is near. Release date is April 20.

My final gaming appointment of the day was to see a demo of developer TopWare’s RPG sequel Two Worlds II, which began life as Two Worlds: The Temptation, the proposed second PC expansion of 2007’s Two Worlds. TopWare has created separate engines for the game for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in an effort to take advantage of each platform’s attributes. The hero of the first game is rescued from a year’s confinement in prison by four orcs, and together they battle the forces of the series’ main villain. The most impressive feature of the demo is the amazing level of detail found in the graphics. Lightning flashes through the openings in a castle, interior light sources cast accurate shadows on moving characters, and almost all of the in-game cutscenes are rendered using the game engine, making transitions almost seamless. Two Worlds II offers up to 40 hours of single-player content as well as online co-op and multiplayer modes, and DirectX10 graphics are included in the PC version.

One more treat remained in a long and interesting day. I was invited to attend a cocktail party thrown by 2K Games at a nearby restaurant. A good time was had by all, especially me; I had to cut my visit short or I wouldn’t have been in any shape to finally get this post done. But tomorrow is another day, which will include an hour in which the show floor will be open to media only, giving us a chance to check things out before the other attendees are admitted. I’ll be getting some time with Mafia II, Civilization V, Red Dead Redemption, Making History II, student game project The Devil’s Tuning Fork and the powerful new gaming laptop being built by Origin PC. I’ll also try to attend several of the panel discussions that are being held throughout the day. And with any luck, I’ll also be running into Chris Micieli, co-host of the Avault podcast.