Well, as I half-expected, I haven’t had as much time here at PAX to post updates as I’d hoped. Hopefully you’ve been following along on The Twitter, which I’ll certainly keep updating. But for now, I thought I’d share some pics of some of the things I’ve come across around the show.

Above, you can see a group trying out for the Rock Band tournament. The stage is set up at the end of a long hall upstairs, with these huge, beautiful windows behind and all the way down the hall. Given the setting, the sound is surprisingly good. Except for when some guy is murdering a falsetto in “Kung Fu Fighting.” You know who you are, guy.

I’ll stash the rest of the pics after the break so as not to burden those of you with slow connections. Because I care, that’s why.

Here’s Harmonix and friends rocking out to Green Day: Rock Band on Thursday night. Left to right: Harmonix’s community developer Eric Pope on bass, Green Day lead designer project lead Chris Foster on guitar, and publicist Steph Myers on drums; in the foreground is Izzy of Rock Gamer Studios on lead vocals, and in the background is Tommy of RockBandAide on backing vocals. So basically just a great group of folks. Folks who are very poorly served by my godawful photographic skills. It is the fault of neither the players nor the game that everybody looks angry. It is mine; this was taken at a particularly tough section of [SONG NAME REDACTED], so what you’re seeing is intense focus. And, me being me, I utterly failed to take more than three pictures. The other two are worse.

Anyway, as I mentioned on Twitter, we played the crap out of this game for about two hours straight. And as I also mentioned, that’s pretty much all I can tell you until the embargo lifts on April 12. But at that point I’ll be able to talk at length about the game, and share with you an exclusive interview I had with lead designer project lead Chris Foster.

Here you see one of the strolling guitarists for Power Gig: Rise of the SixString. The company had a nice little booth set up with a few different guitar models…but wasn’t showing even a moment of gameplay. (They’re planning to unveil it at E3.) I’ll say this about the guitars: They look very, very slick — very professionally constructed — and the rock-star types they had playing them seemed to have no problem treating them just like a regular guitar. Which, basically, is what they are.

Here’s a close-up of the main interface of the Open Chord, a kit that lets you adapt any guitar for use in music games. I’m planning to write more on this next week, but for the moment I’ll say that the kit seems to work surprisingly well for single notes, and less well for chords — but it’s possible this is a result of the instruments getting bashed around on the floor.

This has nothing to do with music games, but I had to share anyway. There’s a company that has a whole range of huge, gorgeous, wood tables designed for tabletop gaming: D&D, Magic, strategy games, and the like. I don’t even play most games like this (I’m getting more and more into serious board games but this is way beyond me at the moment) — and even I found myself drooling. (UPDATE: The company’s name is Geek Chic, and the table you see here looks like it’ll run you about nine grand. But from what I saw of these gorgeous pieces, they’re worth it. At the moment it looks like their site only has renders of the tables, but it sounds like they’ll be rebooting the site with pics soon.)

Next time: I’ll grab more pics of the Rock Band lounge, the music-game free-play area Jamspace, and whatever else catches my eye. And remember, if you see me at the show, don’t be afraid to come and say hello. Here‘s a list of the panels I’m going to try to hit. See you there!