1346: Exposition

I’m off to the Eurogamer Expo tomorrow to cover a bunch of interesting stuff for USgamer. It should be a fun experience, particularly because since Eurogamer’s parent company Gamer Network is also the parent company of USgamer, I’ll be there as “staff” and consequently should be able to wander around fairly freely and get hands-on with things without too much difficulty.

I last went to the Eurogamer Expo back in 2010. This was the same year I went to PAX for the first time, and it was interesting to compare the two. They’re very different events, of course; PAX is more of a cultural convention, while Eurogamer Expo that year (and possibly still is) more of a traditional consumer-facing trade show, with booths, queues and lots of things to play if you can be arsed to line up for them. Eurogamer does have a bunch of developer presentations, however, and it’s great to hear and see devs speak about their upcoming or recent projects. Peter Molyneux may be the master of broken promises, for example, but it’s easy to see how people get caught up in his grand posturing on stage.

I’m interested to see a selection of things around the show, and I have plenty of time to do so. I’m particularly interested to have a look at the next-gen consoles and see whether they’re noticeably better from current offerings, and I’m meeting up with a few smaller developers who are working on some interesting-sounding titles such as top-down bullet hell/Smash TV combo Assault Android Cactus, the NFL-inspired follow-up to Frozen Synapse, Frozen Endzone and Mike Bithell’s intriguing-sounding new stealth game Volume. I should also hopefully get a chance to see my friend Mitu, whose intriguing social media-themed strategy game/RPG/strangely undefinable thing Redshirt is looking pretty great, as well as inching ever-closer to release.

I should probably get some sleep beforehand, though. Tomorrow is going to be a long and hopefully exciting day, and that situation will continue for the next couple of days, then I’ll be back on Sunday. Hopefully I’ll have some interesting things to write about while I’m away, and a chance to get a bit of a rest on Sunday before next week kicks off once again!

Hopefully it’s also payday within the next couple of days… London ain’t cheap. And I need to buy a notebook. I do things old-school.