I had a chance to make it to this year’s Penny Arcade Expo, and while most of legit coverage is over at Destructoid, and I can’t really talk about them here without breaching copyright, I’d like to take the time to write about the best weekend… ever. This will mostly include my highlights from the show floor, and a few light impressions of things.
At the Bethesda booth I managed to get some time with Skyrim. It was pretty much precisely what I expected- Oblivion but better and with more pretty. The highlight for me was the Prey 2 “demo”. As excited as I am for Prey 2, (and if you aren’t then you should definitely watch the Prey 2 trailer (as shown above)) the demo that was shown seemed really off. Attendees could not play it outright. A member of the dev team played it and talked about the actions he was performing. I say it was odd primarily because it seemed like it was a recorded video. I saw him play the demo twice, and they seemed IDENTICAL. Plus a few times he got way more headshots than I think is reasonable. Something just felt… off.
That said, Prey 2 was gorgeous. I really liked the aesthetic of “Alien Noire”, contrasting bright neon signs and deep shadows between buildings. Combat looked fine, and I guess my one concern would be that I really hope they don’t build this deep world and then squander it with superficiality. I think a lot could be accomplished by including some RPG elements and making NPC’s a large part of gameplay. But, we’ll see. I have high hopes because every single thing that was in the trailer shows up in gameplay. Even the HUD is the same.
Lolipop Chainsaw was another highlight. A Suda 51 game that stars a high-school cheerleader named Juliet who wields a chainsaw against hordes of zombified classmates and teachers. It plays quite a bit like No More Heroes with a few subtler combos available. Stars and rainbows pop out of the chainsaw as you mow through mountains of enemies, and copious amounts of blood splatters all over the screen. This game is over-the-top in every conceivable manner and I loved it.
For me, the highlight of the show was the PAX 10, a set of indie games selected by leading developers, writers, artists, and Penny Arcade. Fez, Solar 2, Antichamber, Vanessa Saint-Pierre Delacroix and Her Nightmare, and many more had much interesting premises and were doing creative things with gameplay and design. I won’t lie; I’ve grown VERY tired of most shooters. Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare lost my interest long ago. With the exception of graphical upgrades, they really aren’t doing anything that we haven’t seen done before and better.
Being able to talk directly to the entire development team of a game and see the kind of passion and care they poured into it is a lot more invigorating than filtering a message through layers and layers of public relations specialists and press embargoes. To bring this rant to a close and move on: I sat down to play Solar 2, and was poked in the shoulder 30 minutes later by the project lead. “Hey man, are you okay? Have you blinked?” It’s rare that I just lose myself in a AAA title like that. Call me a hipster, but I think the indie scene is a lot more promising than most of the things coming out of the bigger publishers.
This turned out taking longer than I thought it would to write, and I still have plenty more to say, including full previews for a couple of the games mentioned above. So I will be splitting this up into a short series. And if you want to catch my previews of Firefall, Torchlight 2, Blacklight: Retribution and more check out Destructoid.com
