Eurogamer Expo 2012

At the end of September a friend (Suburban Killbot) and myself went to the Eurogamer Expo at Earls. I was really excited about this as I had never been to a video game expo before. In the past I have antiquated a comic con in London, and that was just awesome.

So when the day arrived, I was pretty psyched. As we departed from the train station we headed toward the Expo, eagerly contemplating what we our battle plan should be. Attack the first game stand we see, strategically hit the ones with the smaller ques, or just do whatever takes our fancy. But what greeted us once our red, plastic expo band was securely attached to our wrists brought our plans crashing down like Donkey Kong's barrel. We were hit in the face by bright lights, a chaos of loud sound that couldn't be distinguished as how many and hundreds of people. So we did what we knew was safe and chose a direction to walk in and hoped for the best. We saw a ton of cosplayers and I spied a fair few booth babes, where I gloriously had a photo taken with one. Epic win!

The first game that we hit was Aliens Colonial Marines. The queue was about a 40 minute wait, which was short compared to our next venture. When we finally got to the end, a line of monitors awaited us. As we sat down at our designated monitor, my apprehension grew and my palms grew clammy. The thought of a dozen kids behind me and watching me fail gloriously was etched in my prefrontal cortex. Then at last the game began and the start of the Timed Death Match between a group of possibly highly skilled monkeys from Sega who been playing this game since 8am and us, a collective group of advanced gamer nerds and casual gamers. Were were totally going to get PWNED! Or for the record, I was. As I was finishing my possibly third Alien kill my screen froze in mid-death, my heart stopped for a split second, beads of perspiration glistened on my forehead. "@#*$" I exclaimed, I was a good two and a half minutes in and had little time left before I had to leave this seat for someone else. I hurridly ushered over a Sega monkey to get me back in the game and when he did I had T-minus 50 seconds. I hurriedly killed 2 more Aliens, died two more times and then DONE! As the screen changed to the player rank screen I felt a little disappointing and ultimately cheated in loosing a few precious minutes in deading a few Aliens. But my achievements were rewarded as I exited the game zone with a few Aliens Colonial Marines goodies. Job done!

Our next point of call was the ZombiU booth. As we calmly waited in line to get a taste for some zombie action, what awaited us next we were not prepared for. After a good hour in line we were both getting tiresome of all this queuing, I however had packed some essentials for such a time and took out my 3DS where I had several Mii's waiting for me. Then we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, we were only a few people away from the front of the queue. I could taste the rotting flesh of zombies in my mouth, my pupils were dilating with excitement. We got closer and closer and... wait what's this? We then discovered to our horror that the queue that were were in and had been in for an hour was actually the beginning of queuing system. There was a whole new queue in front of us. A whole hour to find our we had to do it again. It was then decided that it was too much, and exited the queue and went to find something else. At that time there were lines for everything and it didn't look like were were going to play anything that had a less than 40 minute queue at the beginning of it. So we milled around, checked out the sights. After an hour or so we headed out and back home.


The only other thing was that I was a bit  disappointing about the lack of free stuff that was available. In all I advise anyone who is going to Eurogamer is to get the whole weekend ticket, pack some munchies and possibly your trusty 3DS for those long waits in the queue.

Ad infinitum