Eurogamer Expo 2012 Overview

http://www.eurogamer.net/expo/whats-on

The Good:
(Games which were fun, surprising, looked good or were creative)

Aliens Colonial Marines - We got to try the multiplayer, which was a team deathmatch Marines VS Alien, played out kind of like L4D versus mode, was a lot of fun running around with the shotgun and having aliens jump off from rooftops and trying to murder you (Had a sweet moment where I had a shotgun double kill, switched to pistol for a 3rd and shot him out of the sky as he was trying to leap away).

Chompy Chomp Chomp - (hyperlinked because its an obscure ass indie game for 80MSP) Pretty fun, frantic multiplayer game for 4 people, Its pretty much 'the ship' but sped up by about 100x, You have a target to kill, a player has you as their target, run around a maze, juke enemies, eat target. Its fun, and for 80 MSP seems pretty reasonable.

Hitman Absolution - Its obviously hard to judge this sort of game from a short play, but I have faith in this one, graphically amazing, the demo stage had about 5 ways to achieve the objective, seems like everything you would want from a hitman game.

Luigi's Mansion 3DS - Looked incredible for a handheld game, and looked like it was luigi's mansion, I didnt actually get to play this one, instead looking over my brothers shoulder, its a shame there is not right analogue stick, but the game lookd pretty good for sure.

Metal Gear Rising - Didn't get to play this one because of the massive queue, but holy shit this game looks amazing. 60fps, fluid slicing action, robot dogs with chainsaws, slice legs off metal gear rex? So annoyed the queue for so big.

Rocksmith - aka. Real life Guitar Hero. It works, Its good, Its also hard as shit. Goes through stuff like tuning all the way to power chords and probably way more.

SimCity (2013) - Looks good, didn't play it but watched some of the 'pre-alpha build' and seems to be a pretty version of the old simcity you knew and loved, mixed with a nice refined UI and 'the sims' aesthetic look. Seems like it has some fair depth as well, saw some guy looking at (what i think was) sewage pipe layout mode

Tokyo Jungle - Not sure what I was watching, but holy shit looks amazing fun.

Tomb Raider (2012) - Looks like a good reboot, an emphasis on survival rather than doing... whatever it was tomb raider used to do, graphically amazing, good voice acting and facial capture/mo-cap stuff. The demo we played was half platformy and then had a survival/hunting bit at the end and was pretty cool, I can see the game getting better later on fo sure.

Warface - Looks like a free call of duty, but on cryengine 2... Aint even mad.

The Wii U - Big one here, it works. It feels like you would essentially need 4 other friends to be with you for this to be worth it, but with the maximum amount of players, and the asymetrical gameplay on the screen thing, its pretty fucking sweet. We played 3/5 of the nintendoland games (luigi's mansion, animal crossing, zelda), all of which were clearly designed to showcase the strong points of the controller. Luigi's mansion was a hell of a lot of fun (I won when I played ghost obviously), the animal crossing one which was kind of like tag was cool as well, the zelda one was maybe my least favorite, but was in no means bad, the archery-move-the-controller-around thing worked fairly well and was accurate as long as you have sexy steady gamer hands like myself, the game did however have some issues with calibrating which meant that I was essentially standing backwards to aim forwards (not that it matters because you have your own screen anyway, but you arent going to be sitting down for this). We also played NSMBwiiU, where the new controller and block placing mechanic seems great for dicking over your friends like we do all the time. The wonderful 101 looked awesome, Rayman looked awesome, ZombieU looked awesome.

The 'Bad':
(Games which need polish, you've already played once, etc)

Crysis 3 - Looked pretty much identical to Crysis 2

DmC - A great Devil may Cry sequel, and its great fun, however it seemed to have some pretty serious framerate issues, shambling around at around 15-25fps, this is pretty much the only reason why its in this section and not 'the good' section. I hear its getting a PC release which I guess will sort this problem out, in which case I look forward to playing through the game when it comes out.
Also, Devil Trigger mode looks INCREDIBLE. The whole screen goes kind of white-out high saturation and blood and dante himself turn blood red.

Dust514 - Looks like Battlefield 2142 I suppose, my friend says it has some control issues, it also looked like it had some framerate issues, and no PC version for this one...

Fable the journey - Bare in mind I didn't play it, but looking from the sides, many players seemed to be having some serious controller issues. Dudes flailing their arms around clearly trying to hit a switch or something and just not being able to, gameplay itself seemed meh.

Gears of war judgement and God of War Ascension - Oh look, its this game again. (looked identical to all 3 other GoW games)

Halo 4 - Looked a little too similar to Halo Reach to me, polished up again for sure, but developers have to do more than just a graphical touchup to earn my money and respect these days.

Natural Selection 2 - Looked a little boring from what I was watching, maybe I just need to give it a go though. Graphically looks very nice however.

Buddha Finger - (Iphone App, linked 4 indie) A mix between elite beat agents and the fist of the north star arcade cabinet (Fighting Mania). You have to hit XYZ button prompts to 'fight' your opponent, its kind of cool I guess and probably fun for short bursts, needs some polish though - I tried to give some tips on how they could improve it, whether or not she gave a shit about anything I was saying is another matter completely - Also needs an android version, which she says is coming after the Iphone version.

The Ugly:
(Won't buy, were very disappointing, didnt make sense, etc)

Dishonored - Very very disappointing. Bioshock above ground, where combat seems less effective than stealth, and stealth is boring and uninventive. Graphically mediocre, melee combat defense seems sketchy, ranged weapons lack impact. The powers didn't seem particularly interesting either, on offer from what I remember was blink, see through walls, mindjack, fus-ro-dah.

Didn't properly look at - Looked Good:
AC3, BLOPS2, Dance Central 3, Company Of Heroes 2, Forza horizon, GRID2, Hell Yeah (dead rabbit), Hotline Miami, Criteron NFS:MW, Ni no Kuni, Pikmin 3, Rayman Legends, Wonderful 101, Ratchet and Clank, Unfinished Swan, When Vikings Attack, ZOE HD, The Cave

Didn't properly look at - Looked Bad:
Far Cry 3, Air buccaneers, MOH warfighter, Merlin, Prison Architect, Strike Suit Zero, XCOM

Faster Than Light (FTL)

FTL is an odd game, introduced to me by pyrion flax from le youtubes, whose video review is probably better than the mini-review im about to write.


Your ultimate goal in the game is to journey from Sector 1 to Sector 8,and kill the enemy mothership - easier said than done because you are constantly being chased by 'the empire'  and the final enemy mothership is a cheating bastard and you need a crap-ton of space-xp to even stand a chance.

Maps are randomly generated, and as you can see, the empire closes in on every warp, and you really, REALLY don't want any part of their shit

The game is a roguelike, which is a fancy way of saying 1 life/perma death - Stressful for obvious reasons, which is made more stressful by the general difficulty of the game, where random ships in space will happily carve you up, set your medbay on fire, board you and rape your crew.
Sometimes you'll die not even to other ships but just by the world itself, run out of fuel? you die. Run into an Ion storm unprepared? you probably die. Randomly get boarded by 4 mantis troops? You die. Starting to see a trend here?

Actual gameplay itself is fairly simply, float along to sector 8, try to get as much scrap as you can so you can upgrade your ship, this can be done by killing other ships, or random encounters in space (helping people, distress signals, mercenary work). Then spend your scrap on stuff at space-shops, where you can buy new bays (giving access to drones, cloaking, boarding) or new weapons/drones (lazers, missiles, boarding drones, defense drones, sentries).
Combat itself is mostly just firing onto the enemy shields, and then going for their weapons bay, the problem occurs however when your ship is underequipped - and by that i mean some combination of...
A) You do not have enough damage to get through their shields
B) Your shields are not strong enough
C) You are being boarded and your crew is getting slaughtered
D) Your ship does not have enough energy
Option B is most common, with enemy weaponry damaging your bays, when a bay is damaged it does not work, meaning you now have to direct your crew to fix stuff, put out fires, or fight boarders. Remember that you can't attack if your weapons bay is damaged, and you have no shields if your shield bay is damaged.
If you are having option D, then you now have to reroute power to the areas which need it most.... do you want oxygen, or do you want weapons? Tough choice? but if you don't kill the enemy ship, they'll eventually tear through your hull and you die anyway.
You can also manually control the doors to vacumn out fires and things like that, assuming your door controls are working.



Now im probably not really selling the game too well here, but it is strangely fun and will sap hours away from you, and you wont really understand why or how you are still playing, or why you are restarting the game again. There is a fair bit of re-playability, with various achievements and 8 ships to unlock, so there is always that
I'd definitely recommend it, the game itself is only £7 at the moment on steam, I bought it the other day and have clocked 8 hours already, and at £1/hour it's already cheaper than half the xbox experiences you'll have.

Owl City - The midsummer Station (2012) review

Just a little plug for ol' owl city since im 'borrowing' the album

'The midsummer Station' is good. Surprisingly good.

Not that his older albums were bad (ive listened to them all), but this album has more of a grownup feel to it, utilizing heavier beats and effects usually saved for dance/dubstep artists.
Songs in this album seem to be divided into pop-rock stuff and what is essentially dance/club music, both of which are pretty catchy.

For example, bombshell blonde (linked below, cant embed as copyrighted and stuff)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sREbkI2gcE

Like... wat.

Remember this is the pansy that made fireflies.

Give it a try, turn it up, you might actually enjoy it, although you probably still wont tell your friends about it, nobody wants to be that guy listening to Owl city after all.