Eurogamer Expo – Day 2 Roundup

Eurogamer Expo – Day 2 Roundup

Looking at the clock on my netbook and it says it is now past midnight, so I guess this Day 2 roundup is a teeny bit late, so apologies dear readers. It has been a long day today, up early to get to Earl’s Court for the 10am entry, all day at the Expo, then a trip to the Comedy Club and a HMV games room in Leicester Square. For a roundup of Day 2 at the Expo, just hit the jump.

The first order of business is to make mention of the WiFi situation at the Expo, it isn’t great. Well, to be frank it is pretty much non-existent. Despite there being several open WiFi channels, they all require a log-on once you connect. That is why I haven’t been able to bring any updates sooner, sadly it looks like the majority of my game reports will have to wait until I am back home in Cardiff before getting published. Hopefully I can get one or two online before then.

To the proper stuff though. My first two ports of call this morning were F1 Race Stars and GRID 2, both very impressive racers from Codemaster’s, although both are trying to achieve very, very different things. F1 Race Stars can best be described as being a grown-up Mario Kart and GRID 2 looks from first impressions to be the sequel we have long been waiting for. I’ll be having more on these two soon.

Next up was a conference session from Valve’s Chet Faliszek on ‘How to get a job in the games industry’, this was a very interesting talk, and while it doesn’t have any relevance to me (I’m not game designer of any sort) I was pleased I went. I made lots of bullet points about what Chet talked on, but to break it down to a few key bits:

– Make something that you can show off to potential employers.
– Ensure any projects you work on have a realistic scope.
– Don’t let anything stop you from shipping your product.
– Iterate and learn from feedback.

I had a blast with Far Cry 3, this was limited to the open world game without any targeted story missions, but I had a great laugh jumping into random vehicles and causing mayhem on any unsuspecting locals carrying weapons. My favourite moment was clearing out a militia outpost and defending it from a counter-attack. It came across very well, but I need to get some more time with it over the next two days. It definitely has potential to be a very good game.

I was less impressed with Little Big Planet Karting, while I love the main games, I came away feeling a little disappointed with this one. The karting action wasn’t anything to write home about and I felt that F1 Race Stars capture the karting feel much better. It might come into its own in the full game with all the character customisation, but if the underlying racing is a bit dull then it might not work out too good.

The best bit of my day though was getting some decent time with Dishonored, I will have a full report of my session on the site soon, but I was blown away. I took more time with it today than I did on Day 1 and made use of Corvo’s abilities and understood that this is going to be one great game. The last develop session of the day was on Dishonored headed up by two guys from Arkane. They spoke about it and showed off how to approach the demo level on the show floor in a stealthy way and a more action packed way. I came away very impressed.

That is all for today’s roundup, I’ll be back again with more tomorrow.

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