Eurogamer Expo: Round-Up

Posted on 06. Nov, 2009 by James Dilks in Eurogamer Expo 2009, Featured, Hands-on impressions, Opinion, PC, PS3, Xbox 360

The Eurogamer Expo 2009 certainly feels like a big deal from the outside; queuing amongst largely paying customers, I was safe in the smugness of my press pass. I won’t even pretend to be outraged about not being fasttracked to the front, although it appears that only school groups are being allowed to jump the line on this mild half-term Friday, which is a bit of a slap in the face. After finally getting my much-coveted white wristband – the only wristband that gets you access to a small ‘press office’ with a fridgefull of drinks to blag – I head inside and feel terribly underwhelmed. Not because I’m disappointed by the setup of the show, just that it’s exactly what I was expecting; multicoloured spotlights illuminating banks of painfully huge flatscreens, an awkward feeling in the air, and a lot of people queuing for a long time to play videogames. All this I could gladly accept, but it would have been nice to have more people involved with the making of each game alongside the demos; rather than largely clueless PR practitioners, Nintendo’s especially are full of information; we’re told New Super Mario Bros. Wii is “out, er, next month, I think.”

Having wandered the exhibition floor in a state of bemusement I decide it’s time to actually play something. I stumble across a free Xbox 360 running a demo of Bayonetta, essentially an even flashier Devil May Cry, and if the demo is anything to go by you spend much of the game going in about twelve directions at once. As an athletic hack-and-slasher it certainly doesn’t feel over simplistic, with a myriad of combos, double jumping, and running up things that are fun to pull off in the practise mode. When it comes to the demo level, my coherence is as scant as Bayonetta’s protagonist’s clothing. I’m plummeting off a cliff, standing on a chunk of a clock tower with its own gravitational field, fighting off large groups of demons. Exhilaration quickly turns to cynicism when my character becomes impossible to make out behind the enemy hordes and colourful runes that fill up the screen, not to mention the horrifically disorientating effect the rotating, falling, clock faces have. When I die, I walk away.

Downstairs in the basement, the organisers seem to have gone for some sort of subterranean nightclub aesthetic; it’s dark and cramped. Saw offers an equally horrifying experience to the movies that spawned it. And if you feel like that films have been getting somewhat repetitive and formulaic, then I suppose you can apply that to the game as well. It’s a mix of gruesome puzzle-solving, quick time events, and presumably a few fist sandwich encounters to liven things up along the way. I don’t have much luck with demo, simply working out that you can hold a lighter and punch at the same time. Others get stuck into a lot of stick swivelling and button mashing to onscreen cues while a pre-animated character attempts to get a timed bear-trap off his face. It’s immediately apparent that the Jigsaw killer is getting a bit short of ideas, because even I know that it’s been lifted straight from one of the films.

It would be unfair to say that The Saboteur is just GTA4 set in Second World War Paris, but that’s what it could easily become. Near identical controls, and a very familiar (and very anachronistic) GPS-enabled minimap are big hints. Remember how Mafia had those 1930s cars that could hardly make it up hills, let alone get anywhere need the speed limit? Well forget that, because The Saboteur’s vehicles zip around with surprising ease. In the spirit of testing the game’s limits, I grab the nearest roadster and sending it crashing around the quiet suburb the demo begins in, the first time I run over an innocent bystander I’m awarded (or punished) with what looks like a top trumps card describing my ‘atrocity’. Friendly fire rampages amongst the Resistance? Perhaps. Otherwise, the game’s climbing system is well-implemented, and doesn’t feel over-the-top; Sean can grab most ledges and isn’t put off by an overhang above him, but I don’t notice any swan-dives into bales of hay. The zonal colouring system is on show too; bright and happy in ‘safe’ relatively Nazi-free areas, practically monochrome where the Third Reich are prominent.

I find Star Trek Online similarly bemusing. A fight with some bad guys in an asteroid belt is my first mission; you can control the speed and direction of your ship, but weapon firing is automated, once you’ve activated it and are in range. It tried to crash my member of the Starfleet into a nearby asteroid, but some sort of phasing technology allowed me to pass right through it. Similarly, hoping sending my crew to certain death, plummeting towards a planet’s surface results in nothing, because it takes an infinitely long length of time to reach it. Space is too big.

The rest of the games we saw over the two days are covered elsewhere on the site, with more coming over the next few days.

As a final point I would like to question the decision to include a whole host of games that have already been released. I understand that publishers chose which games to bring, but large areas are devoted to The Beatles Rock Band and FIFA 10, the latter having more than 15 machines. It left me with the slightly bitter idea that publishers are using the expo to try and push games to consumers that they know have already been well-received: Forza 3, Need For Speed: Shift, and others all have prominent displays, and there’s a handy HMV onsite to pounce on any game-addled impulse-buyer.

Cynicism aside, the team at Eurogamer deserves a lot of credit for putting together such an accomplished show, especially in only its second year. The talks were informative, the careers fair was always bustling, and most importantly the gamers were happy.