Although I’m not often in the habit of writing sequels, after 12 months fate seems to have returned me to London’s Earl Court for EGX London (formerly known as Eurogamer Expo) to experience the sights, sounds and delightfully shorter-than-expected queuing behind this year’s video gaming feast. If Los Angeles’ E3 is Show & Tell, London’s EGX is playtime! And I guess GamesCom is like a happy free period in Cologne, Germany. And Tokyo Games Show is like a favourite lesson in Japan, maybe? And then there’s the Game Developers Conference, and Comic-Con…even Paris have a game festiva-…But anyway, here’s a suspiciously lengthy recount (really glad I didn’t commit to tweeting this again) on my short time at EGX. And believe me, it was short. Note to future self, even though you happened to have an hour or two to spare last year, do not opt for the mid-afternoon entry. You’ll make a personal promise to come back to the indie developer/student games design projects after you’ve seen other stuff. Plot spoiler, you didn’t.
Once again, I started at Nintendo’s area. Less because of a predisposed affinity with Nintendo, more due to the 30ft tall Pac-Man & Mega Man posters visible right at the entrance. Like a moth to an 8-bit flame, I was hovering around a queue, on pause to play Masahiro Sakurai’s latest offering to the fighting genre, Super Smash Bros. for 3DS. There was buzz that the Nintendo (Treehouse? Unleashed? Super Smash Staff?) team were running a competition where, at the top of the hour, they’d take the winners of 4 separate Smash Bros. 3DS matches up to a stage to play the Wii U version of the game in front of a crowd of screaming Nintendo lovers and bewildered parents. Having endlessly played the demo and watched enough Twitch streams Charles Xavier couldn’t get Villager’s merciless stare out of my mind, I thought I could give the contest a go. So I left Smash Bros. to better time my spot in the queue.
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