website tracking
Eurogamer Expo 2009 on Game and Player

Eurogamer Expo 2009

James Day  //  November 6, 2009


Hands-on at the UK's foremost public games event.

E

very year a series of consumer and trade events for the video games industry takes place as part of the London Games Festival. One such event, the Eurogamer Expo, offers the public the chance to get their hands-on with some of the biggest games to be released in the surrounding months. Organized by the prestigious Brighton-based Eurogamer website, its aim is to fill the void of publicly accessible tradeshows in the United Kingdom. On behalf of Game and Player I headed to central London to check it out.

Successfully showing an MMO can be a difficult task at trade shows, but thankfully the demo of Star Trek Online featured a focused single-player quest that presented a good slice of the combat both in space and on the ground. Jumping in as the captain of an updated Miranda-class starship, I quickly found that my vast experience of past Star Trek and Star Wars space sims failing me as the control scheme was not what I was expecting. However, after a quick glance at the nearby prompt card displaying the basic controls, I was soon successfully fending off three Birds of Prey before beaming down to a planet and taking the smack to some Klingons in-person. This part played mostly like a typical MMORPG, moving with the WASD keys and attacking with the numerical keys.



Being a Star Trek fan myself, I appreciated the fact that this mission featured the Guardian of Forever, an entity from one of the best-loved episodes of the original series. Though the demo didn't let me see any of the more advanced features of STO, such as the ship customization and multiplayer interaction, the solid game play and the overall attention to detail have left me hopeful for a fan-pleasing end product.

Bayonetta looked stunning in motion, with its gravity-defying battle set pieces looking to rival if not surpass the spectacle of similar games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry. While the hack-and-slash gameplay seemed really fluid, the game was locked into one of the easiest difficulty settings which may have been doing a lot of the hard work for me, so it was difficult to get a sense of how challenging some of the more sophisticated combos might be. The Sega PR representative there told me the game would last most experienced players about fifteen hours, though when I pressed him about the prospective replay value he seemed a little cagey. Still, it looks like one to watch for action fans.



Mass Effect 2 was one of my most anticipated games of the show, since the original game is one of my favorites for the Xbox 360. I was a little concerned when one of the four demo units crashed out during play, and after getting my hands on a controller and eagerly skipping through the lengthy opening cut scene my console also happened to crash out in the same manner. But from what I saw while standing in line the game had a far more stable frame rate from its predecessor, and what seemed to be a lot tighter character and weapon control. With other criticisms from its predecessor looking to be addressed in the full version of the game, Mass Effect 2 is still undoubtedly my most anticipated game of the first quarter of 2010.

I was surprised to find that another high-profile Wii game, Red Steel 2, was consigned to a single demo pod. Given its status as the sequel to one of the console's best selling launch games and the next big hope for the Motionplus peripheral I expected a much bigger presence. From what I saw of several people playing through a fairly long demo, it looked much more sophisticated than its predecessor. With a new cel-shaded art style that suits the Wii's graphical capabilities and a more fluid control scheme where you can switch between your firearms and swords at will, its looking somewhat promising.



New Super Mario Bros Wii was gathering queues despite having seven demo units and four players per console. When I jumped in with two other players late in the game, we found ourselves repeatedly getting in each other's way resulting in many shoves down holes or into enemies. To balance the increased likelihood of such accidents the game seems to have infinite continues, and you never lose your world progress even if your whole team is wiped out during the course of a level. Despite our ineptitude, it was a lot of fun and looks to retain the classic Mario charm and feel. I had the opportunity to make myself a hero by reaching the end of a castle by myself, though I failed to land the final blow on Iggy Koopa before being killed. While my scepticism remains about how playing solo will pan out given the wider, more open levels designed for four players, NSMBW looks to be the next great Wii multiplayer game after Wii Sports Resort.

Looking at James Cameron's Avatar from a distance, I mistook the game more than once for Lost Planet 2, with its mech stage taking place in a mute-colored rainforest. Although the game developers have promised it to be as revolutionary as the movie it's based on, presumably partly because of its use of stereoscopic 3D in the final version, so far it's looking merely like a competent amalgam of other popular action games.

Sega's new Alien versus Predator was another game I was very interested to play. I wasn't the only one — its area was mobbed with people every time I dropped by, despite its being set up on eight PlayStation 3 consoles. The players I watched seemed to be wandering around somewhat aimlessly as either an Alien or Predator so I didn't get a particularly clear impression of the game, but being developed by Rebellion who put out the 1999 game of the same name this is definitely one keep an eye on for franchise fans.



From afar, I got a good sense of how Heavy Rain works. One of the PS3's most anticipated games, the action scenes look to be controlled entirely with quick-time events. Coupled with cinematic visuals you might be fooled into thinking this is just the second coming of Dragon's Lair, albeit with a detective story at its core. Where it differs from a pre-rendered FMV game is its dynamism. One of the two scenes in the demo, a one-on-one fight in a junkyard showed this well with every correct and incorrect input of the onscreen prompts resulting in a unique animation and branching outcomes. Interactions are defined by the context of the moment, which included throwing a punch with one of the four face buttons, reaching for a nearby item by pushing the corresponding direction on the analog stick and rapidly mashing a button when trying to break out of a grapple. While this isn't revolutionary from a gameplay perspective, Heavy Rain looks to become one of the most cinematic video games yet.

Other interesting sights and sounds at the event included the PSP GO Café where Sony's latest iteration of the portable was built in to the coffee tables, a large stage where people could play The Beatles Rock Band and a rare appearance of a Street Fighter IV arcade machine. The Gamesindustry.biz career fair was crammed onto the upstairs gallery featuring some of the Europe's finest developers such as Rare, Lionhead Studios and Crytek. Keynote speeches were given on the second day by developers from Valve and Quantic Dream. Other notable appearances included Jason Bradbury of popular UK program The Gadget Show and Charles Martinet, the voice actor behind Mario and countless other Nintendo characters.




Michael Ubaldi // November 6, 2009 // 8:24 PM

Well done, James. STO stands out for me, especially with its mythos-accurate scenario.


Join the Discussion


G&P Latest

July 1, 2011



June 28, 2011




About  //  Editors  //  Contributors  //  Terms of Use