D: The Internet Website

So last weekend me and bunch of mates from college went down to London for that Play.com Live thing. Spread over two days, it was hyped to be Britain’s ‘biggest-ever UK consumer-gaming event’. Which is a real good reminder as to how little we actually have of that sort of thing here.

Almost every game on show was either already released, or in trailer form. Playable unreleased games on show included Rock Band, Soul Caliber 4… Shit, if there were any more then I’ve forgotten them now there was that little.

The show felt like a bit of a rip off. We traveled way the fuck down from South Yorkshire hoping to get a go on upcoming games, (or at the very least see some new videos of them.) Best we got in most cases were trailers we saw last year.
Resident Evil 5 for example, I was looking forward to seeing something new on the game. There wasn’t a lot of chance I would be able play it (though I will admit I was hoping to.) only for me to get there and find that the Resident Evil 5 exhibit was nothing more than a single screen looping the trailer we got way the hell back last year. Star Wars Force Unleashed was the worst offender. Play.com stated the game would be there, what they didn’t mention that it was going to be there in poster form only. Lego Batman was said to be there and if it was then I don’t have a fucking clue where it was. I found Lego Indiana Jones which looked pretty good. They even held a scavenger hunt to win a PS3 or something. They’d hidden a red X somewhere at the show and if you found it you’d be entered into the draw. It was on the ceiling of their exhibit, because they couldn’t get permission off the other publishers to use their exhibits for their little game.

The entire film part of the event save the Dark Knight exhibit was a projector screen showing trailers of films that are already released in cinemas. (or in some cases on DVD)

The only real exclusive at the event was Far Cry 2. Which we queued up for almost 20 minutes to see. We got in there and watched two blokes from canada play through the November 2007 build of the game, which looked great might I add. The game will beset in an open world which the developer claimed was larger than that of Oblivion. The player could explore the place choosing which missions he wanted to do. It will be set in a realistic world, so all the stupid Feral abilities and crap have been ditched. The game is set for release in Autumn.

There were some decent freebies on offer. Know anybody with atleast 30 copies of Ice Age on DVD? Chances are they went to Play. On offer were DVDs of Ice Age, Surfs Up, Spongebob Squarepants the Movie and for older visitors Knocked Up. (All of which were the 2-disc extended editions) The venue had Ice Age DVDs coming out of its ass. I ended up with about 5. Surfs up and Spongebob were only available sunday morning and went pretty quickly. Knocked up was brought out late sunday afternoon and went within minutes.

All in all the event was disapointing but I guess Play.com have an excuse. Its their first event and couldn’t exactly prove to the developers earlier that it would be a success. I’m sure next year they’ll be able to show them the figures from this year and that will encourage publishers to show off more stuff. We all enjoyed the weekend despite the event not being all it was cracked up to be. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t too brilliant so everytime we went outside for one butt-fucking minute we came back piss-wet through. D: