Limited Edition

Yesterday a pick up group of epic enjoyment was formed. After an early start followed by a boat, train and tube journey I arrived in the east end of London for the EuroGamer Expo.

It didn’t take long for the Avengers to assemble and soon the group consisted of various gamers, bloggers and podcasters from the community and Virgin Worlds. This sort of event makes meeting up easier as you have common interests along with plenty of things to discuss and talk about.

Having press access was a real bonus, Matt and I managed to traverse the queue of plenty to the front and walk in before hordes of people arrived.

I have to point out that this event had very little to do with comics (read nothing) and wasn’t MMO focused. This is why much to our delight we found an MMO! In the dolby area we discovered a piece of alpha code that made use of Dolby voice technology and therefore was a last minute display. The name of this game you ask? Jumpgate Evolution.

When I saw the Jumpgate sign I may have made a small unexpected squeel, we headed over and played it on the big screens. Obviously you can’t really get a good idea from an MMO in a few minutes of play. however, it looked pretty and the twitched based combat was so enjoyable and responsive. Waypoints were obvious and after killing ten rater..er..spaceships I got a ‘Medal’ the acievement junky in me was instantly satisfied.

The game had the usual affair of menus such as upgrades, pilot (character sheet), missions. in-fact it was so familiar I needed little thought about how to play it. On further inquisition with the attendant I asked if it would have PVP, he told me that it was mostly a PVP game. It would be in a battleground style though with safe areas. Games would be capture the flag or other similar style rules of engagement. The economy is important and player run and crafting will be in the game too. Despite being PVP centric the server we were on was labelled PVP. I guess this was just for the event and was a local server. It will be interesting to see how the game performs on a live server as a large amount of the machines playable were laptops.

It was fun to play, but early days to tell anything major. All I can say is it looked pretty and most of the usual MMO systems were inplace at the start.

We headed to the pub after checking out a few other titles, the most fun being Little Big Planet. Watching Jon and VanHemlock play this was pure joy. The laughs had by all were many. Pubs and gaming conversation go together like Farcry 2 tournaments and console rage, many topics came up and it was a perfect bunch of gamers all of whom I’d like to meet again.

I’ve put together a video of random parts of the day, I’ll upload that later in the week and post it back here.

Tags: bloggers, eurogamer expo, Games, MMO, podcasts, pubs