The
general perception of gamers is that they aren’t particularly
social creatures, that stereotypically they will hole themselves up
with a stash of fast food and an overriding sense of fear and disdain
for the outside world. While this isn’t a completely invalid view,
the Eurogamer Expo proves that at least a significant portion of us
don’t mind getting together and having a chat. As long as it’s
about games. It seems like a good point to mention that if you’re
not really into computer gaming, particularly console based, then
these words aren’t really for you. Read them by all means, but it
will bore you to tears. I really enjoyed the day, but even I got a
bit fed up writing it all down. Also I can’t guarantee your
satisfaction, even if you do like games. It’s tricky to get across
the scale of the thing, there’s too much to do in one day so the
experience is peculiarly distorted. Everything sort of blends into
one fuzzy memory. Right, I’ve sold it brilliantly so let us begin…
For
four glorious days (September 22nd – 25th) Earls Court played host
to the UK’s largest dedicated gaming convention, showcasing a
selection of new consoles and a glut of upcoming titles. Effectively
it serves as a reminder that summer is pretty much gone and that it
has taken the video game drought with it. Soon it will be Christmas,
and basically that means in the next twelve weeks there will be more
decent releases than you can possibly afford, so why not come and
look at them and really get your consumer juices flowing. Which is
just what I did. I’d never been to one of these things before so
the only thing I knew to expect was queues, and in no way was I
disappointed. There was a huge one to join in order to gain entry,
there was one for the coatroom and then there was one for every
single attraction. Sometimes, if I was really lucky, there was two.
Regular readers will have been able to work out that I’m not the
sort of man who likes to queue, and they’d be right. Clever them.
Even I don’t mind a bit of a wait but it seemed to me that there
weren’t enough screens and consoles to go around, there was a lot
of unused space that should have been utilised.
Thankfully
spirits were high, with practically everyone attending displaying
wide, childish grins of excitement, so the long lines and waiting
times weren’t too tiresome. If there’s one thing a glimpse of a
highly anticipated game can do, it’s regress a large number of
traditionally quiet, insular types into a group of infants, all
desperate to share their glee. I was part of a group of four: two of
us were Xbox 360 owners, two had opted for a Playstation 3. The first
thing we happened upon was a multiplayer demo of the new Uncharted
(PS3), I used to have the second game in that series, back before I
sold my PS3, so we stopped and had a quick go. It was good, very fun
to play but a bit too similar to the last game, and I can’t play it
when it comes out so wasn’t overly interested. Pointed my phone at
it anyway though.
After
that, us Xboxers made straight for Batman: Arkham City and joined
what was to be a 45 minute queue, while the Playstations went for
Battlefield 3. Both were titles I was interested in but let’s be
honest here, compared to being Batman, shooting anyone in the head
with any weapon in any war torn environment is a poor second. There
were several first person shooters doing the rounds, so I knew I’d
get a go on some of them, but there is only one Bruce Wayne. Arkham
Asylum is still one of the best games ever made and its sequel was a
guaranteed improvement, promising a much wider playing area, some
A-List villains and a more open world feel. The tight, layered combat
mechanic is as solid as ever, with a few tweaks and new tricks thrown
in to keep things interesting. For some reason they’ve decided to
let you play as Catwoman, Robin and possibly others in this game, a
concept I can’t really get behind. It’s a Batman game. I want to
be Batman. Come on guys.
Still,
it’s pretty much perfect. The city streets are a much more
interesting playground than the often claustrophobic corridors of
Asylum and allow you to – quite literally – spread your wings.
It’s quite a sight to behold, Batman soaring across the sky,
leaping from one building to the next before swishing down to street
level and kicking in some heads. Majestic and graceful. I quite like
Batman. I’m not so keen on controlling periphery characters, but
they make me do it anyway. It’s certainly not a deal breaker but it
irritates me, however I am in no way a (completely) petty man. I took
a video and everything.
Then
you get to be Bruce and it’s all good. Swooping about is awesome
fun, the world is perfectly stylised, continuing to prove that it’s
creators understand the tone of the character it focuses on. And the
fighting is still nice and violent, which is important. While we were
waiting in the line to play, an awkward looking man engaged us in
what I suspect was supposed to be conversation. I’m afraid I didn’t
want to talk to him, so I politely, kind of, ignored him, while
Xboxer 1 drew his fire until he went away. Just before we got to play
they stopped moving the line to ask boring questions and give out
tat. Every time they asked a question we were supposed to raise our
hand and wait to be asked, so that the answers weren’t given away
with chaos ensuing. Awkward man couldn’t grasp the concept of not
excitedly shouting out an answer. Eventually he managed to shout out
an answer, immediately realise his mistake, raise his hand and shout
it out again, but he never got better at it than that. It bears no
relevance but it was funny. I got an Arkham City keyring too.R
CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT (17 U.S.C. SECTION 1
After
the hilariously long wait for Batman we regrouped. The Playstation
servers had gone down so our fellow travelers had been forced to play
on an Xbox. We mocked them, obviously, and then we had a quick look
at Battlefield 3 as well. It’s a very pretty game indeed, even on
the consoles it looks fantastic, but on the PC it looks incredible.
It’s very much more of the same shooty shooty bang bang, but with a
level of detail I’ve not seen before. The environments pop and
explode around you, the movements of your squad are more fluid and
natural, the sound is impeccable and the immersion is complete. Me
want. I tried to get some video of it, but it was at this point I was
told that you’re not allowed to video the screens, so what I
actually got was a few seconds of very dull gameplay and some blurry
footage of the floor, as I sheepishly apologise and fumble to sheath
my phone. I have managed to convince myself that I was like some sort
of media spy, but at the time it was quite embarrassing. It’s not a
very good video, you can’t really see anything and it’s very
short. So I’m not going to show you.
We
all ate some hideously expensive, pitifully small pizzas to refuel
and try to steady our hangovers, which were threatening to piss on
our chips. Thankfully, sustenance and rage were exactly the two
things we needed to continue, and that we did. We saw Saints Row: The
Third, which looks to be brilliant fun so long as you like vans that
suck people up and fire them out of a cannon, puerile base humour and
guns. I do, it turns out. We saw the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved,
which looked like a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved. We saw Elder
Scrolls V: Skyrim, or at least we saw a tiny bit of a tiny bit of it,
and it looked immense and beautiful. And it looked epic, but so was
the wait to play it, so we didn’t bother. We saw the new Mass
Effect, the new Driver, the new Zelda, the new Assassins Creed and
the new Need for Speed, which was called The Run, and they were all,
well, ‘the new’. Each was what you’d expect from the next game
in a series, doing what it needs to do to keep a franchise ticking
along. Except for The Run, which was basically Burnout.
There
were lots of games, too many to see all of them in the time available
to us. However, by this point it wasn’t the time that was a
problem. It was the queues. The only other things we were interested
in were the Playstation Vita, something that I cited as a reason for
going at all in a previous post, and the OnLive, cloud based gaming
service that allows you to choose from a huge selection of titles,
hosting and running the software on a remote server and streaming it
to your TV, PC, phone or tablet device. Both of these new toys
interested me. That’s right, past tense, because they don’t
anymore. Vita, it turns out, uses yet another proprietary memory
format from our friends at Sony, and at the moment they’ve quoted
$29 for 4 GB, which should equate to a little under £20, but the
price of these things usually translates poorly. Even at £25, Sony
can sod off. So I probably won’t be getting one of those. OnLive
was more intriguing than actually likely to be purchased. I was drawn
in by the ‘future of gaming’ possibilities and innovation. Sadly,
the minimum Internet connection required is 2mbps and they recommend
5mbps. I don’t have a 5mbps connection and doubt I can get one
where I am, and it seems foolish to use the minimum bandwidth
required. My fellow Xboxer doesn’t even have 2mbps, so he was less
than impressed. So I’m no longer interested in OnLive either, at
least not until super high speed cable broadband is the standard.
If
we’d queued for two hours we could have had a free OnLive home
console, which apparently retails for around £80, but by now we’d
all had enough. Everyone had seen brilliant games that made them feel
painfully low on funds, everyone had seen powerful new toys from afar
that they subsequently realised they didn’t really want and
everyone had stood still for a large part of the day. It had been
magical. We agreed that drinking heavily the night before had been a
bit stupid, we were tired, irritable and over stimulated. The geek
part of our collective brain was sick of all the other people.
Personally, I was on the edge of sanity, only just swallowing the
urge to openly mock the Anakin Skywalker cosplay attendee who had the
head of a forty year old Milkybar kid with binge eating and alcohol
problems. It would have been so easy. We needed to cool down and rest
our bones. Maybe with a drink. In a pub.
I’ve
been recovering since then, which is why it’s taken so long to get
this on here, where you can look at it. Normal services will now be
resumed, so look forward to regular posts about things that make me
ramble for a bit, brushing on several points and ideas, in a kind of
annoyed tone. Exciting, isn’t it.
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