Eurogamer 2010

Okay, so it’s taken a few days to get back into the swing of things after the expo but there is one thing that I have definitely learned from the experience, next year I’m going to all three days. (or however many they have).

The expo itself was great, but for the amount of things there, there just wasn’t enough time in one day to get round everything and I sadly missed all the developer talks, but on the plus side, I did get to meet a lot of fellow students from the Train2Game course and finally put faces to names.

The weirdest thing is, having spoken to so many of them on the forum, IRC, MSN and Skype you start to make a friendly connection and even though many of us met face to face for the first time, it was like we’d known each other for much longer.

I think of all, MyKittensANinja, FeeTheGiraffe, VampireDuck and FateFirst were the biggest surprises, don’t know, but knowing someone as a giraffe for so long you get a bit surprised when they’re not towering above you (except in FateFirst’s case where he was considerably larger than I expected, that guy is huge!)

It was great to see MattB, Tony, Dave, Gabe and Gnipper again as well as finally being able to put a person behind IndigoWhite, FeeTheGiraffe, VampireDuck, MyKitten’sANinja, Ashitaka, Create’n'Play, WKDBOI, Dazaster, FateFirst, Rico3K, Wixi, Soul-Grinder, Secura, Thomas, Danakin and anyone else that I created a T-shirt for that I haven’t named.

Of course getting there was one mammoth task, and for the life of me I can’t understand why it costs £42 to get from Washington to Newcastle and back, and £44 to get from Newcastle to London and back, even more annoying that on both occasions the coach drove past the service station that was five minutes down the road from my house but that’s one of life’s great mysteries.

I was advised to wear a shirt on the off chance of meeting some potential “business” people and knowing that I had a 7 hour coach trip ahead of me I didn’t really want to wear a big heavy coat, I didn’t want to go all dressed up or ruin a good jacket on the coach and I had no other options, so given that the weather forecast said that it would be raining in London I decided to take my umbrella and a hoodie just in case.

Imagine my annoyance when I turned up to bright sunny skies and not a cloud in sight!

Fortunately, after a good two hours or so of queuing up we finally got in and I was pleased to find that they had a cloakroom so I checked Aaron’s bag and my umbrella in and headed off to see what was there.

First port of call was one of Aaron’s favourites, Rock Band, in which I was proud to watch him join the rest of the band, chose expert on a song he’d never played before, using a guitar he’d never played before and nailed approximately 98% of the song. (yay, GO AARON!!!!).

After that we introduced ourselves at the Train2Game stand and was pleasantly surprised to see Galoop playing away on a little screen in the corner. Not long after this we were attacked by Fee and I have to agree with Sam(Indigo) that she is a very huggy person, but not long after that, Aaron and her son Toby ran off to play games and leave us to get on with the rest of the expo.

There were a lot of games to see and huge queues of people hovering round waiting for their turn so sadly I never really got a chance to play much until some time later on, but the majority of things that I did see were impressive and after playing XBox on either a 17″ LCD TV or a 26″ CRT TV, actually seeing the games in all their HD glory on larger screens made a lot of difference and really made me wish I had more money to invest in some proper gaming gear.

The 3D games looked like they would have been impressive if I’d had the opportunity to view them through the proper glasses, although from what I heard from a few people Gran Turismo 5 in 3D seemed a little pointless, but I would probably attribute that to speed and the depth in which the game is generally presented, unlike Killzone (pictured right) which I could imagine would give you a much more immersive experience, something I hope to try out one day.

Aaron was somewhat gutted that a lot of games that he wanted to see were in the 18′s section, for which he wasn’t allowed for obvious reasons but to be honest, I wasn’t as impressed with this area as I thought I would be and a lot of the games struck me as being hard to really get to grips with through a demo. Fallout New Vegas (pictured left) looked pretty much like Fallout 3, except for I previously played Fallout 3 on the PC in windowed mode with a second monitor sitting next to it with MSN conversations going on, so seeing it larger and sharper did make  difference, and for all I was looking forward to BulletStorm, there was something about it that didn’t really differentiate it from the Gears of War 3 demo around the corner. I never got to see Brink as that was somewhat closed off and the queues were massive for it, but having watched various videos for it I got pretty much the same idea as I would have done if I’d been in there, Dead Space 2 looked impressive as did Crysis 2, although I wasn’t quite sure what was going on with one of the displays I was watching as the game seemed to lag quite a bit from time to time but hopefully when it comes out it will be as impressive as the original Crysis was when that first came out.

After a quick trip to the pub at 3 for a liquid lunch courtesy of TonyB from DR Studios it was back to wandering around the expo and again Aaron ran off, this time with Rico3K who I’m still deliberating over whether it was a good idea to let my son loose with someone who pre-orders games and consoles before they’ve even been written, but we’ll see how that pans out and after having a quick look around the Indie Arcade I finally caught up with Aaron, Rico3K and Secura playing Little Big Planet 2 and after a couple of rather bizarre levels they ended up doing the stupidest thing and went on to a button mashing level. Something Aaron’s good at is Guitar Hero and all associated “press this button at the right time” games so while Rico3K and Secura were getting up to 1400-1500 points, Aaron was merrily racing away up to 3000+ and once again, it was another proud father son moment as they couldn’t get anywhere near his scores on it.

Sadly 7pm rolled along and it was time to head over to the cloak room to collect our belongings before heading off to Nando’s for tea and all I can say is, I’m REALLY PLEASED I took my umbrella. The heavens had opened and the rain was bouncing off the ground, but we made it to Nando’s somewhat earlier than planned and ordered our food. Having never been I wasn’t sure what to expect but price wise it wasn’t that bad, the food and company was great and it was nice to meet up with Kren again before finishing up and descending on MattB in the local pub for a quick pint or two before heading back to Victoria Station for another 7 hour coach trip back to Newcastle.

All in all, a great weekend, definitely something I will be doing again but this time next year we’ll most definitely be making a full weekend of it, visiting as many of the developer sessions as possible and meeting a few more faces.