The New Flesh

That's me on the left

I experienced one of the perks of moving to London this weekend when I spent the weekend at that Eurogamer Expo (can we start calling it E2?). I’m not going to say much about it because I should really be reading ‘The myth of sense-date’ by some berk called Winston Barnes but I want to mention a few things so I’ll just jot a paragraph or two down on each of the highlights and shove them up below. First (or rather last since I’ll post this post last to delibrately break the reverse time order blog format of the site) let me tell a bit of my story of the weekend because it was quite cool dammit.

This confuses me, why is it that people are rewarded for being first the queue? I mean really, why is it considered good to turn up to events incredibly early? Why is it a good thing to wait six bloody hours early when turning up an hour early will get you in the venue at about the same time? It makes no damn sense. However as a selfish consumer if there are freebies on offer for turning up six hours early then they’re going to bloody well be mine! So yeah, I sat in the cold on a dreay monday morning and for my troubles I got a free copy of Uncharted 2, the chance to meet Ellie and Bertie of Eurogamer, a WET t-shirt (I also tried out the game when I was in there, my impression: it’s rather shit) and an apearence on the Eurogamer website. I don’t own a PS3 which did lessen my excitement at what was theoretically the main prize but I intend to get one once my university gets round to paying me so you know, still cool and it’s great to have a physical momento of the event.

I also managed to purely accidentally sneak in early to the Split/Second presentation and for some reason nobody threw me out (maybe Eurogamer thought I was with Black Rock and Black Rock thought I was with Eurogamer? Or maybe it was just because I was wearing a shirt and thus obviously important? I dunno) but appart from the heart pounding induced form my the growing realisation that I really wasn’t meant to be there that was actually pretty dull. Apart from that my experience was probably quite normal. I went to a lot of presentations on a lot of cool games. I got to ask Tom Bramwell why the heck he changed the scoring policy in the Ask Eurogamer session and then made a right mess of my second question because two ideas got mixed up in my head. I got some hands on time with a lot of other cool games, the highlights of which I’ll write about below. I chatted to a few random people, one of whom turned out to work for a friend of mine and another turned out to be LewieP of savygamer. In short I can’t wait till next year. I wonder how much I have to write here in order to qualify for a press pass…

Now for some links to what I saw: -

Plain Sight – my personal game of the show

Split/Second – a new one for my watch list

Aliens vs Predator – very good fun so far

Heavy Rain – the other reason I’ll need to by a PS3

I can’t shake the feeling that this is big. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is more than just a game, more than just a port of an old game onto modern computers, a paradigm for the future of video game preservation, that LucasArts has made the move to produce this game may ultimately prove as important as the Abandonware movement, Good Old Games or DOSbox. Right now it’s an amusement but culturally this is a big step forward. Also as a game it freakin’ rocks.

Just a quick post to give you the good news that in an interveiw for CNET News Bill Gates himself has said that they’re bringing Project Natal to PC and also to say that I called it. It may have been obvious, sure anyone with half a brain could have called it but guess who did call it? ME! Jack Black wrote the one note song and I called Project Natal for PC.

I mentioned in my last post that I’d acquired a copy of The Sims 3. This might not seem that surprising  since it’s a game that’s selling like hotcakes but it was a surprise to me because I didn’t expect to own that game for at least another year. See I’m a frugal kind of guy so I have this rule, I never pay over £20 for a game, I’ve broken the rule sometimes but having got only mild enjoyment out of Sims 1 and 2 I didn’t have a very strong urge to break it for Sims 3 and given the likely decay in prices for an utterly mainstream hit like Sims 3 I couldn’t see it dropping below £20 for at least a year. So how did this happen? Simple, I got a grey import… I hope.

It seems odd to me that for all the fuss that Project Natal, Microsoft’s new motion-video-voice controllerless controller has caused at this years E3 that not many people are talking about the potential of Project Natal for PC and asking Microsoft the big question: when if ever will Natal be supported on PC?