Despite being in on of Melbourne’s largest venue’s the Exhibition Centre, the eGames expo only took up one room.
Perhaps I had expected 2 much, but I’d imagined an expo that would have taken a good solid couple of hours to get around and see it all. Unfortunately after 30 minutes I was heading out the door.
There were a couple of highlights, a Guitar Hero 3 rock off competition, sadly on a large washed out projector screen, and despite it’s delayed launch in Aus, I got 2 see Assassins Creed in person.
That gets me 2 another point, if your going 2 launch a game, don’t have 1 copy, one x360, on one tv. There should have been 5, maybe even 10 stands where gamers could get hands on, increase the hype as they spread the word of mouth about the game leading up to its release this week, it would have been the perfect setup. But it seems UbiSoft dropped the ball on this one, a prime opportunity to market to gamers and they missed it.
Moving on to Sony, they had a trailer kited out with about 10 PS3’s, that was full of people enjoying Sony’s latest offerings, in the glow of the neon blue light coming from the plastic encased PS3’s. Not a bad job, yet still relatively small.
I did get play Grand Turismo 5. All I can say is that I was very underwealmed, graphically screen shots online had me expecting something amazing. Sadly it felt remarkably like Forza 2, however without triggers for accel and braking, ure forced to use either buttons, or the thumbsticks. For me triggers on the xbox 360 controller win hands down.
Strangely enough the driving setups were over represented, without a number of retailers aiming at landing the $1k plus for a steering wheel, pedals, racing seat setup for your home. This looks great, however the reality for most people is they don’t have half a lounge room to dedicate to the rig. So the question remains what to do with the wanna be race-car when ure not playing games. No foldaway option, not even wheels to roll it away. Still some work to do in this area and the price could do with some work 2.
Overall very disappointed, I entered thinking the $16 entry would be soooo worth it, but left there knowing it wasn’t.
If you went, then leave a comment and let me know what you thought.
