Never one to miss out on inappropriately dressed ladies, TheSixthAxis’ roving reporter Jamie Brown took up the mantel and braved the crowds at this weekend’s Play.com Live event in London. Read on for his full story, and of course, lots of pictures of said ladies.
On entering the grounds of Wembley, there was an Ironman VR ride (which had unfortunately broken by the time we were about to leave after the morning session) an Ecto1 from Ghostbusters and a large, inflatable Mr Staypuft. Hey, maybe we’d get to play Ghostbusters inside? That’s if we could actually get inside, security was quite tight – even to the point of confiscating bottles of drink from people’s bags incase we happened to get on a plane at some point.
On entering the main doors there was a lovely Aston Martin DB9 being showcased to promote – yep, you guessed it, the secret agent James Bond 007 – but he was such a good secret agent that he was nowhere to be found. Not even a look-alike.
Into the event fully, and at the rear of the main stage the main theme seemed to be based around Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 as there were three women dressed up to the nines, dancing to different songs such as “Big Spender” and “Viva Las Vegas” (which is still stuck in my head), with a roulette table not far away.
From there, I noticed Sega Superstars Tennis with a rep from Sega playing the game, so I thought I’d go and have a chat. He told me that the game was built on the Virtua Tennis engine, which really played quite well in comparison to Wii Sports Tennis, giving you three options of control on Nintendo’s console:
1. the classic Wii Sports tennis control and not worrying about moving the character,
2. using the Wii-mote as game controller (D-pad and buttons), or
3. using the D-pad to move the character, and swinging the wii-mote to hit the ball.
I felt that this game was set apart from the others, with features such as availability of power-ups based on the length of time you hold a rally for, and the game not only concentrating on the Sonic franchise, but including other Sega IPs for characters and locations. TheSixthAxis will have a full review of the PS3 version, which we’ve been playing all weekend, later today.
Ghostbusters (yay) was being showcased alongside Prototype. Sadly, neither were playable, but gameplay footage was being shown, and from what I saw it looks really good: the graphics look outstanding with attention to detail on everything including the PKE meter, and food exploding when a stream hits it. Unfortunately, the video didn’t seem too much different to what’s already being shown on Youtube and similar, and there certainly wasn’t much new content. The Prototype video kept stopping so, unfortunately, I can’t really comment on that.
There was a competition running on Rockband, with the host being more annoying than anything else. The game looked to play and react to the controllers really well, but we still couldn’t get an answer to when the damned thing would be out here in Europe. The Bourne Conspiracy was also being demoed on the X360, gameplay seemed to gel quite well, however the controls seemed a little confusing. This, teamed with the high difficulty setting, meant that we got beaten up quite easily.
On to the second floor looking down, the venue was really starting to get quite packed, but there was enough space to move without too much of an issue, with live bands playing, keeping everyone quite interested. There were posters for Star Wars Force Unleashed all over, but no game was being demoed, which was quite a shame. Booth babes were also doing the rounds, and it was my duty to take pictures; so I couldn’t be rude and not to (for research purposes of course).
Haze (a game I especially was looking out for) was playable, unfortunately I couldn’t even get close, so had to make do with videos (coming soon) and a few pictures. The only problems I found were that you couldn’t bypass the intro FMV’s, and when you shot someone they just seemed to fall down. There was also no kick back from the bullets, which was disappointing, but there’s still time to go and as we said over the weekend, the game is now exclusive to the PS3.
Capcom has a video showcase of their up and coming games which included Bionic Commando and Street Fighter 4, again no playable demos. Just around the corner there were 4 GT 5 Prologue pods with seats and steering wheels, two with rolling video demos and the other two playable – again, this being awash with people – I was lucky to get pictures. Remember that the F1 car is in GT 5 Prologue! Next came the games I was really hoping to get a good look at, LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2. Yet again I was sorely disappointed with only rolling video demos of each, and not new ones either. Nothing playable…
Due to constant reading from their cards, lack of audience participation, and visible eagerness to get off stage, Gemma Atkinson and Iain Lee, the main stage hosts, didn’t really seem to be either that interested or that well prepared before going out on stage to announce the next act, which was a little disappointing. However, next we found Soul Caliber 4, which, for some reason you had to sit in an egg to play (maybe this was due to the main Stage being loud and not too far away). The play had nice fluid motion and, with no loading screens inbetween bouts, made for some nice gameplay. However there was no sign of Yoda or Darth Vader. Despite this, it was another game absolutely awash with people.
Square Enix were showing FMVs of Crisis Core and some small exerts of Final Fantasy XI:Online on five LCD’s. The next level up was the trade floor for Sandisk, Blu-Ray and a Sci-Fi collectable stand with Tom Baker as the guest celebrity signing things. They were also promoting the new Batman film “The Dark Knight”.
At that point a voice on the overhead started to advise of the morning session closure, ending our allotted time slot and we had to make our way out and home. This gave a good chance to get better pictures of the Ecto 1 and Mr Staypuft. The session went really well, despite the lack of demos of soon to be released games, but hopefully next year Play.com can secure a few more exclusives and hopefully some more playable code out on the shop floor. GT 5 was obviously a highlight (for us and for Sony) but there’s stacks of cool stuff out this year.
