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This section of the site is home to special features that go beyond the weekly podcasts. They vary from full reports on expo's to general commentaries on the state of the gaming industry in the UK and Europe. CGE 04/Game Stars Live!/CGE 05/Play.Com Live!/PAX 08 So there I was staring at a computer screen with the words ‘Sinclair Research Ltd ©1982’ written at the bottom of it and wondering if I should type: 10 PRINT "CRIS RULZ’ But then I suddenly realised that wasn’t such a good idea as I wasn’t in WH Smith’s at the tender age of 13 in a wet Saturday afternoon in 1984. No, I was actually in a conference room full of people in Croydon surrounded by other 30 something’s all gawping at computers that quite frankly barely deserve the title. Why Croydon? Well Fairfield Halls in Croydon was the venue for the UK’s first ever Classic Gaming Expo over the weekend of 24-25th July 2004 and it was quite an eye opener. Many attendees were wandering around gawping at the items that hadn’t seen the light of day for quite some time ever since they’d been consigned to the loft/garage/skip. I attended the show and will be placing up some pictures and a video of the event on the web very soon so you can see for yourself what I got exposed to. It was interesting to see these old computers and some of the games were fun to play, for short periods at least but there was one nagging doubt that stuck with me throughout the event. I kept on thinking, ‘why the interest in this stuff?’. After all the average modern gaming PC could run emulators on most if not all of the hardware on display..at the same time....while burning a music CD...and playing Farcry to boot! Let’s just say Moore’s Law was in full evidence and it just got me wondering, is this the gaming industries way of staring at it’s own navel? Think about this for a moment. Looking back at the games of old a vast majority of them, especially from the late 70’s, early 80’s era relied upon the ‘twitch gaming’ mode of play. This has players reacting to the action on screen with little regard for what’s about to happen and the only difficulty factor was how often these events would occur requiring the player to react quicker. Now this is fine for the 1980’s but this is 2004. We have the joys of far more complex games on offer that quite frankly offer a far more rewarding experience than any retro game could offer due primarily to their complexity! But hang on a second. Isn’t this the very reason people cite ‘classic games’ are more fun and accessible even than the current crop of games for exactly that, their immediacy! There’s no need to wade through a manual that rivals War and Piece in it’s number of pages as all you have to do is pick up the joystick and press the fire button a few times. I would have to agree in that these games are initially entertaining but I found them to be lacking in some many of the things we now take for granted. To press this point further I’d like to describe to you a typical game of Outrun, one of the most celebrated arcade racing games ever to be released. Outrun was one of the first games to feature varying elevations in the road and traffic that the player had to avoid in order to reach the end of the track. It was very fast and featured the use of a 2 gear shift system that effectively negated the need for a brake as all the player had to do was downshift as they flew around the tighter corners to avoid crashing out of the track. All of this was presented in a brightly coloured 3D road map with stripes in the road to emphasise speed. Now let’s keep all of the above in mind and consider Project Gotham Racing 2. Here you can drive almost any car you can think of, not just a Ferrari, and sling it around tracks of various types. Each car has it’s own handing characteristics and the use of the brake at the right moment is a key gameplay element that is utterly lost on Outrun. There is also the added bonus of being able to race against other people online. Does Outrun, the ‘classic’ that it is so often pro ported to be do any of those things? No. Let’s look at it another way. Retro games are always viewed from one perspective. That is from someone in the future looking back. What cannot be done is for someone to see a game that will not be released until 10 years hence, the flip side of retro games. I suspect that if such a thing could be done and someone had indeed showed someone in 1984 a copy of Project Gotham Racing II running on an Xbox they’d probably feint and then, after telling the viewer of this game that 20 years from now people would still be playing C64 games and even making them they’d probably respond. ‘WHY WHEN YOU CAN PLAY GAMES LIKE PGR2???’ The reason? I’m not sure. I think there’s a mixture of both outright nostalgia, a keenness to get back to what makes games fun in the first place without the baggage of 3D rendered polygonal models flying about the screen and the desire to move away from ever more complex games. Right now though what is certain is that Retro games as they have become known are increasing in popularity as, in part at least, the generation who played them are now having children of their own and wish to share with their offspring what daddy/mummy played with when they were their age. I personally think that although ultimately pointless retro games are of little threat to the future development of games as a whole. They manage to impress on developers the importance of getting the player interested within a very simple environment due to the limited hardware available at the time. Think about it this way. One whole 8 bit game takes up the same memory as a single texture on a Unreal Tournament 2004 player model. So I say let it carry on, just don’t let the developers start to regress as the last thing we want is a return to the monotony of Space Invaders! I came, I saw, I walked away with very sore feet and a blinding headache (thanks Atari!)!!! On Saturday 4th September 2004 at about 9:30 am I arrived at Custom House Docklands Light Railway station. For this is the station that is directly linked to the Excel centre, the venue for Game Stars Live! (GSL) computer and video gaming expo. I really had no idea what to expect. It was a blisteringly hot day and I for one was thankful that I was heading into an air-conditioned space. I met up with a couple of friends and we marched off to the nearest cafe for some breakfast. The show didn't start until 10am and we already had bought tickets some weeks before. As we sat in the cafe we saw hoards of pale faced people with black t shirts on all of them and they hadn't appeared to have been out in the sun for quite some time! Once breakfast was consumed we shuffled off towards the show with some trepidation. None of us knew what to expect and I for one had low expectations. A consumer gaming event? Purleese! How wrong I was... Have I been transported to LA, May 2004??? As I walked into the hall that was GSL I was gob smacked. It was HUGE. The booths rivaled those seen at any E3 you care to mention and the atmosphere matched it too. Quite amazing. I can best equate it to the West Hall at E3. It had everything. EA with a booth the size of Belgium, Ubisoft tucked away next to it and Atari fighting the sound battle against all the other booths and winning by quite a margin (my ears are still ringing). Once I realised I was in a situation like E3 I resolved to approach the whole event in a similar manner. By that I mean walk around the entire event and see what is where. Take some pictures whilst doing so then revisit everything to ensure I get to play some stuff and get some good video footage. Nintendo...why did you bother exactly? Whilst we trecked around we happened upon the Nintendo Booth. This was a large cordonned off area that required people to be let in in small groups to avoid over crowding. Sadly after getting in there wasn't a lot to see! Out of the games on display only 4 were of any interest. There was Tales of Symponia, an RPG, Animal Crossing (FINALLY!), Bongo Kong (rhythum game with bongos) and Metroid Prime 2. They were all tucked away into darkened rooms that simulated an amusement arcade. Metroid Prime 2 proved to be the biggest draw. The game pod units were set up for multiplayer games. MP2 looked and played like its predicessor only with greater speed. 3 HOURS TO PLAY 5 MINUTES OF HALO 2??? Yes that's right. People were queuing up to play Halo 2 for 3 hours! I decided not to bother for fear of missing out on everything else the show had to offer. Nevertheless I did get some anecdotal evidence that come 11th November (European release date) people will be getting this game....like we didn't know that already! EA dominates the show The publishing goliath that is Electronic Arts had a booth that was twice the size of everyone elses! It covered everything from it's EA Sports line right through to Sims 2 and Burnout 3 (more about which later). One of the key titles on display was Medal Of Honour: Pacific Assault which seems to have captured the same atmosphere from Call of Duty (YAY!). Whilst Atari deafens it The Atari booth was most definately the loudest booth and yet it had the least to shout about. The PC port of Shadow Ops, a laclustre XBox game was being demostrated with little interest. Also on offer was Rolller Coaster Tycoon 3 which was this time being developed by Frontier Developments as opposed to Chris Soyer and his team. It looked a worth successor to the series from that I saw. XBox puts PS2 in the shade The one recurring theme of the show was the dominance of the XBox. Everywhere you looked there was an XBox game of some description. Who ever said Microsofts's massive blob of plastic was going to follow in the footsteps of the Dreamcast was oh so wrong. I also took pains to compare PS2 titles and XBox ones. Burnout 3 really does show off the abilities of the XBox as the PS2 version seem to be somewhat duller. I did play the game extensively and I for one will definately be picking it up this Friday when it arrives here in the UK. The Classic Gaming Expo UK - 2005 This year I emblazoned my declaration of excellence onto two poorly guarded computers. A Commodore 64 and a ZX Spectrum. My statement to the world was: 10 PRINT "KROPOTKIN FOR TEH
WIN!!!!1111!!!SHIFTONE111!!!!’ 10 PRINT "ALLGAMES.COM R0X0RS’ Childish I know but it did divert me from the noise, kafuffle and heat from the hall within which CGE UK 2005 was being held. Before I go on to describe my experience there and what I saw it must be borne in mind that it almost never happened! CGE UK 05 was supposed to be run in the same venue as Gamezone Live but since that show was cancelled, despite its success of last year, the organisers have had to work quickly to set up CGE UK 2005 at a replacement venue. At around 9:45am I strolled up to Fairfield Halls in Croydon and noticed a distinct lack of people around. Last year a queue ran along the length of the building, this year there was hardly a queue at all! It almost got me thinking I'd come on the wrong day! Once I popped inside however there was indeed the hoardings for CGE UK 2005 along with a few other people milling about. After a short delay the few that were waiting to get in were allowed entrance. I noticed that those that had not come to the previous year's show dived head long to the two booths that were outside the main hall. These did not offer much of interest apart from the odd rare boxed console item. I quickly made my way to the main hall and took in who was present and indeed, who wasn't! First port of call was Console Passion. They again had an excellent display of items, most if not all for sale. One of the most interesting was the Intellivision computer module they had complete with music and qwerty keyboards. They also had on display a copy of Chrono Trigger which they were selling for the bargain price of...wait for it...£80! I'll have 10 please! Since last year a lot of the traders appeared to have had a very good year by all accounts! UK Retro had a very impressive spread of items as did The Attic Bug. Binary Dinosaurs teamed up with Dragon Archive and Quazar by sharing a booth which formed the main entrance to the event. They had some interesting kit on display including a fully functional ZX81 complete with wobbly 16k RAM pack that was running 3D Monster Maze. I tottered around the the rear of the hall where I encountered World of Spectrum. They were explaining to people how it is possible to transfer image files saved from ZX Spectrum games and putting them back onto tape so that they can be run on an original ZX Spectrum rather than an emulator. This saves on having to buy old tape software from eBay which may or may not work. Adjacent to WoS I found Retro Passion. They once again had their Sega Saturn set up to play Outrun which drew a lot of people's attention as they tried to complete the game with a group of spectators around them. Never easy that! Before I left the main hall a very surprising item caught my eye. There were two Vectrex consoles sitting side by side and they were linked up via a serial cable. The game they were both playing was Bezerk Arena. The game could be described as a very basic version of Doom as it required players to run around a 3D maze whilst trying to kill the other player. It was quite impressive to see and ran very smoothly. Footage of this can be seen on the video I have made here. I left the main hall up to the gallery area where a host of arcade machines had been put into place. Everything from Galaxian to Space Harrier were there. The noise from the machines brought back some memories for me as it was a kind of echo of the mid 1980's when people actually played arcade machines. Now however, people expect a cash reward for pumping in coins into a machine, not a high score. For that they can play games at home and post them up onto an online high score table. The show also had a string of competitions running through it including a high-score competition for who ever could get the most points on various arcade machines that littered the show. Twin Galaxies, the online scoreboard for arcade games were also on hand to organise the European Video Game Championship which was held throughout the day. By the end of the day it was confirmed that the Space Harrier record for scoring the most points on a single credit was broken. In addition to the traditional standing arcade machines there was also a Star Wars Trilogy machine that drew a large crowd. Despite the screen burn problems it had (the Star Wars Logo could be seen as a ghost image) it was an impressive sight and was also fun to play. Suffice to say there was plenty to see and do as well as to buy if you fancied picking up the odd Vectrex or rare game. Once I had left I did have me pondering the future of the retro scene in Europe and the UK. I enjoyed getting to play games from years back but there was always the knowledge that as of right now we are being offered digital entertainment that, in my view at least, far surpasses anything that can be offered from hardware that is over 20 years old. If you take a look at the current crop of games that are holding people's attention right now you it's difficult to see why anyone would choose Manic Miner over God of War. Yet people do! I have spoken about this concept of retro gaming before and I still have difficulty defining why people prefer the simplicity of older arcade games vs. the epic like modern games we now find ourselves playing. At the CGE UK 2005 I asked a few people why they liked these older games and the answer varied little. It was the games accessibility that attracted them to these older titles. Little needed to be known about how the game was played, even for the more complex titles (comparitively speaking) like Defender or Robotron. It's a question I shall continue to ponder I suspect... Worst Publicised Video Game Event Evar! Late last year MCV posted a very small story about the online retailer Play.com organising a video game consumer event. Very few people knew about it and tickets didn't go on sale until late January, 6 weeks prior to the event itself. The publicity was so bad that adverts in news papers and other such main stream media didn't appear until 48 hours before the event. I smelt a rat but I decided to go in the vain hope I'd find something of interest there. Thankfully the law of averages won through and I did see something of note, but not before wading through neck deep in poop. Worst Venue Evar! Wembley Stadium was to prove host to the event. Now for reasons I'll explain later in this text this choice was a tad interesting to me. I have an intimate knowledge of this building (see later for why) and could only guess as to how the event was to be laid out. As it happens it was spread out between 3 levels. On level 1 (formerly known as S0) there was a significant number of stands/booths hosted by a variety of publishers such as Sierra, Codemasters, Ubisoft and EA. This area was designed as a banquet hall, not a conference area but that didn't deter Play.com. In fact they placed a whopping great big stage where the dance area would normally be to allow various bands to perform to a rather indifferent audience who were more concerned about what was in the various TV screens dotted around the very confined space jammed between gridlines 45 & 60 (wha? oh yea, sorry, see below for what I mean by that). The rest of the show was on the Mezzanine level (AKA S1) and level 2 (S2). The mezzanine played host to SCEE whilst level 2 had XBox 360 titles for over 18's only and a closed demo for Farcry 2. The 3rd level had areas for exhibitors and press to get away from the heaving mass of people all cramped into a very small space. Worst Selection of Games, Evar! 80-90% of games on display were all released on store shelves. Some 3-6 months prior to the event. What is the point in that? It was so bad that on an entire floor of Xbox 360 consoles only one had a yet to be released title on it and that was Viking. Everything else had already been released some time ago which begs the question, why bother? EA certainly didn't want to. The only yet to be released game they had on display was Rock Band which they cruelly taunted the UK audience with on no less than 3 stages, the curs with no release date in sight for the blasted game over here. Bah! Worst miss-understanding by this editorial, Evar! Play.com was not a press event. It was a consumer event to sell games to people, that's it. In light of this there is no point showing off a bunch of yet to be released games as people won't be able to buy them. If you take this into account then the event was a success, however I still think they could have done a lot more. They did in 2004 with the short lived Gamestars Live! event which lasted exactly 1 year. The venue was a massive open complex called ExCel that can best be likened to the LA Convention Center. This should would have been better off there but sadly they chose Wembley for reasons best known to Play.com. Worst running thread for subject titles, Evar! So what about the 20% that was new? What was shown and did any of it have any merit? Well folks, in order of preference here is the run down of notable games that were show off that Play.com Live!: Farcry 2 Behind closed doors requiring people to queue up outside to watch a 20 minute demonstration of the game running on a PC. Open world design with a stunning engine that will require a very powerful machine to run. There are all kinds of nuances to the game such as choosing 1 out of 10 characters to play with the remaining 9 becoming NPC's in the game when you play it through. You can also repair vehicles and set light to objects which catch light to other things depending on the direction of the wind. There are no breaks in the game world with sections/levels being loaded as you progress. Without a doubt the highlight of the show. Jaw dropping stuff. Race Driver: GRID The 4th game in the TOCA Race Driver titles from Codemasters it uses the same engine as DIRT only modified for on-road racing. Visually very impressive with a fully featured damage modelling system it was an impressive title. The handling of the cars in the game appeared to be similar to that found in both TOCA and DIRT which isn't surprising considering the above mentioned heritage and engine origins. The game is due out in June and looks to be quite a contender for racer of the year. Viking A visceral blood bath of a game which has the player taking control of a heroic Viking that must save his homeland from rampaging evil folk. Visually very impressive and the combat is somewhat similar to the likes of God Of War which is no bad thing. The game is non-linear with a mechanic that allows the player to tackle quests in almost any order they wish. Sadly it does have collection quests making it an MMORPEGUH to quote Zero Punctuation. Bourne Conspiracy Strange to see a licensed property become a game worthy of note but this title appears to be something special. It is a 3rd person action adventure with pop and cover ranged combat and a fully featured melee combat mode to mirror the antics of Mr Daemon in the original films. The game is set between the first and second film with the main protagonist still suffering from amnesia. There is also car driving sequences which is unusual for a 3rd person action adventure and there is no plans for a multiplayer mode. Echo Chrome Bizarre Escher based puzzle game that gave me a head-ache 10 mins into playing it. Fun but confusing. I hope they release a demo of it soon. GT5: Prologue You get to drive a car, similar to your neighbours, really fast around a track. oooooh, now that's sooooo much fun, right? RIGHT? Soul Calibur 4 Button mashing goodness for those that can't play a proper beat'em up for toffee, a bit like me really. More of the same and no I didn't get to see Yoda do his thing in the game. Lego Indiana Jones Indy has a whip, oh yes. He likes to use it a lot in this game. Meanwhile all of his side-kicks have shovels the reason for which I cannot fathom. Plays largely the same as the Star Wars titles only with more whip action. Worst miss-advertising incident Evar! Many of the titles on show were not playable. This included SFIV, all of Square Enix titles, Little Big Planet, Killzone 2 (no surprises there) and Ghost Busters. These were all on a rolling video display with people only looking on passively as the show reel flashed before them. This was not really described by Play.Com who even said that Star Wars: Force Unleashed would be at the show as well as Ninja Gaiden 2, niether of them were! Worst sence of irony, Evar! Above I stated that I know a little bit about Wembley Stadium. This is because I designed a large proportion of its structure and worked on it for over 5 years. The irony is that the section of the structure I designed was the very area Play.com had decided to host their show. Whoda thunk it eh? I was tempted at one point to close down the show due to health and safety concerns over inappropriate use of the structure but decided against it. It's not the first time that I've but the kybosh into an event at that place for that very reason and a quick phone call by yours truly could have brought the entire event to a premature close. Sense prevailed however so there was no risk of me carrying out such a foul act. May have been amusing to do though. Oh the powah! MUHAHAHAHAHA...ahem. Worst....oh you get the gist. If Play.Com want to make this an annual event then they can be my guest but I for one will probably not go to another one. Probably... Coming soon!
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