Comic-con was a while ago now, and to me it feels even longer because my whole trip to California felt like a big ordeal in and of itself. It’s kind of faded in my mind a bit but I’ll try to remember what I saw there and how the experience was. It was my first time there and I definitely got back, so I guess you can at least take away that I liked it.
I’d thought that getting in the convention center itself would be a big issue when I got in the gigantic line, which didn’t move for about fifteen minutes until they inexpicably let everyone through all at once to get badges. When I first got into the con, I got completely the wrong idea = I was on the second floor, which has all the panels, and thought “Hey the overcrowding isn’t that bad LAWL”and saw two panels.
First one was Will Wright’s Spore panel. He made a genius PowerPoint full of hilarity and truth, and then showed the game. I really enjoyed the panel and don’t have that much to say about it since this game has basically been talked to death and I can’t sell you on it if you don’t like it already. I just have to say that he sold me on it with the epic endgame content with billions of planets to explore and the creation aspects which seemed simple and elegant to use. I already liked Spore to begin with and it only got better. So if you’re a hater, well, I don’t want to talk to you, OK?
The second one was Activision with Stan Lee, which I liked because it was only the second one I saw (in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably the worst one I attended out of choice). It had some guys from Activision and Stan Lee, basically, with Victor Lucas of Electric Playground moderating. They talked about Web of Shadows, the new Spider-Man game, showing a trailer with no gameplay footage and not really telling us what the game would actually be even though I’ve heard about it from E3 already, and then they showed a trailer for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 which was from E3 and also looked like shit (well, the first game looked worse, so I have to admit it’s getting better…), showing nothing interesting or noteworthy. The highlight/lowlight was the Q&A where one crazy fan told Stan how his comics saved his life and prevented his suicide. I now know what Shawn Elliot means when he describes wahjah.
I was tired of sitting at that point so I decided to go to the show floor to find out about the LittleBigPlanet bags I’d seen people holding, and I realized just how big this event is. The show floor is gigantic and filled to the brim with people. It’s really amazing just to look at because you see all different types of people. You might expect it to be only manbabies but it really isn’t. There’s the cosplayers, manbabies, Old Wizened Nerds and Nerdesses, little kids with their parents, goths, and most of all there’s just normal people everywhere. It wasn’t a giant miasma of nerd smell. It wasn’t that great but it wasn’t disgusting as I was led to believe.
The rest of the day was show floor time, as was quite a bit of the second and last day I spent there. On the first, I spent my whole time just looking at everything on the show floor. I went around the whole thing and didn’t get hands on with any games there, as I left that for the second day. I saw LittleBigPlanet was playable, Mirror’s Edge was being demoed, Dead Space, Force Unleashed, all sorts of games. I played all of those (well, except Mirror’s Edge, which they didn’t let me play). LittleBigPlanet was awesome as expected. Simple, 2.5d platforming that is very easy to control and it’s old school like N+ in that it’s timed and you grab pickups to add to the clock. Costume design was simple, but they didn’t let us do the level creation - some of the producers did some of that and it looked as intuitive as the vids do. The different emotes are controlled with the sticks and tilt functions, and it worked fine for me with no learning curve needed. Mirror’s Edge, well, I saw as much as the videos show. It looks really hard, especially combat, since guys can kill you quick. Not like Assassin’s Creed where you can kill guys easily. Dead Space was also hard for me, as those Gears style shooters always are, but man are the weapons awesome. All have really interesting alt fires, too. I died pretty quick, but the EA guy was surprised how much I already knew about the game. As for other games, well, I played Saint’s Row 2 which is just what you’d expect it to be. Force Unleashed was a fun hack and slash but nothing special. I saw Rock Revolution which was not very good as you’d expect, Ghostbusters was great but I didn’t get to play, and… well, it’s all a blur now and I can’t remember.
Comic-con was capped off by the Totally Rad Show taping. You can see me in the episode. In the opening, the third time they show the audience, I’m the dude looking right at the camera. It was great. I was saving at seat for my sister, and I wanted to be in the front, so I got there very early, two panels ahead of time. It was a panel about a web show called Making Fiends. It was kind of charming but not particularly interesting to me. Then, they had a Star Wars Trivia thing which was tons of fun to watch since I knew none of the answers and there were people with plastic lightsabers. Wahjah again. Anyway, I got back up to the front once they set the chairs up again, and then TRS started! The whole thing was very long but it felt like it went by instantly. And there was plenty of hilarity that didn’t make it into the episode, too, as I recall.
Then it was back to the hotel after a long two days. I had to miss the big panels on the next day because we’d only alotted two days in the schedule for Comic-con. I’d wanted to stay but I also didn’t want to ruin my family’s trip so I said that I was fatigued and didn’t want to go there for another day anyway. Well, next year, I’ll be there for all the days and I’ll be sure to coerce some others from the Player One Podcast Forums to go there too.
Posted by probune on August 8th, 2008 :: Filed under
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