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Eurogamer Expo 2010 – Our Impressions

Earlier on this month the 3rd Eurogamer Expo took place at Earl’s Court in London. Weefz, Tikipod and I all attended the show, with Weefz doing the blogging bit for the London Games Festival. What struck me whilst waiting for the doors to open was how many buses turned up jam packed with gamers. If you check out Events For The Average Gamer, you will notice a couple of things. Firstly, there aren’t that many big gaming exhibitions and secondly many of the events happen in London. Whilst this is great for those of us who live in London, it does mean a crap load of travelling for gamers in the rest of the country. Hence all the buses.
EurogamerExpo2010_EarlsCourt
Once, Tikipod and I had got through the queue of exited gamers (Weefz had VIP press access so skipped the main queue, lucky thing), we were greeted by lots of games, TV screens, gamers and noise. Awesome!!! Actually come to think of it we were visually bombarded by Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which had a massive presence at the show and aurally assaulted Lady Gaga’s poker face blasting out all day from the Kinect: Dance Central stage.

It was a busy show too with a lot of people milling around the show floor. As there were lots and lots of consoles and PCs to play games on queue times were bearable for most games, at around the 10 minute mark. The frequent developer sessions (including Lionhead, Media Molecule and ID Software) did thin out the show floor as people went off to queue for these sessions. But there were some games that were immensely popular throughout the show:

  • Brink – 2 hour waits were the order of the day for the whole weekend. Madness!
  • Gear of War 3 – Massive queue for the multiplayer Beast mode which sees you switch allegiance (play as the Locust horde instead and kill Mr Fenix and mates).
  • Legend of Zelda – Skyward Sword – 1 secret booth and 1 not so secret massive queue to play.

Unsurprisingly enough, I couldn’t be arsed to wait that long to play any of these games, I don’t care how good they are meant to be 2 hours is a long time to wait. Also I don’t understand why Nintendo chose to piss people off by making them queue ages for 1 measly Wii running Zelda – Skyward Sword. Seriously, it was the ONLY thing people were queuing for in the Nintendo booth, which was a lot quieter than anywhere else in the show.

There was an Indie games section tucked away towards the back of the Expo, which had some interesting games to play. Tikipod played Revenge of the Titans from Puppy Games and I got to chat to one of their developers, mostly about Droid Assault (a cool looking Paradroid type game). The main problem with the Indie section was the total lack of promotional material for each of the games. I would have expected at least a sign behind the screen or somewhere nearby telling me what game I was playing. Instead, I got white walls.

Many of the other big games at the Expo like Fable III, FIFA 11, Kirby’s Epic Yar, Crysis 2, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Vanquish, LittleBigPlanet 2 (here’s a complete list of Eurogamer Expo playables), I didn’t chance to play as big chunk of my time was spent queueing for ID Software’s developer session where they showed off their latest game – Rage.

I will be posting all this week about the games I did get to play, starting off with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Gran Turismo 5 (both 2D and 3D versions). Weefz will also be covering The Witcher 2 and you can also read about her impressions of the Eurogamer Expo and the developer sessions on the London Games Festival blog.

Update 8th Nov 2010: Eurogamer Expo 2011 will be taking place at Earls Court from 22nd – 25th September 2011.