eGames 2009 expo Review

This weekend in Melbourne (Friday thru Sunday) is the eGames 2009 expo at the Royal Carlton Exhibition Hall. Last time I went to the eGames expo was in 2007 when it was at the Exhibition Centre in Southbank (Geoffs Shed), we went on the Sunday, which is when a lot of the finals were being held for Counter Strike, Dead or Alive 4 and Guitar Hero. It was quite good that year, we managed to pick up a nice amount of freebies and there were a lot of up and coming games being showcased.... Assassins Creed, Tabula Rasa, Fury, Mario Galaxy, Naruto to name a few. True it was quite crowded and there was a bit of a line up to play games, but it took us an afternoon to work through the exhibition and we were still not through everything but were so tired we couldn't walk further.

This year we went along, bought tickets beforehand for the Saturday, and planned to get there at 10am so we could get the maximum amount of play time. I was a little concerned that the Royal Exhibition hall in Carlton next to the Melbourne Museum woud be a bit small compared to the massive expanse that is Geoffs Shed. We were all thoroughly excited to go though so it was really disappointing to rock up and find that not only was there no Nintendo Stage show or big Nintendo presence, there was no Sony and other notable names like EA, Konami, Activision were missing also. The biggest presence was Ubisoft, an their both which contained Red Space, Assassins Creed 2, Avatar 3D and the Popstar dancefloor for the Wii game. All quite impressive, but after previous years you couldnt help but feel overly let down, all in all it took about 20 minutes to walk around the whole exhibition and take it in. Intel had a stand for the Masters Games events and Australian Gamer were there too albeit with a small booth and minus Matt and Yug, who apparently provided a lot of the floor show in previous years as well. The biggest disappointment was Microsoft. Their Display was a truck, with 4 screens of the same game playing... not good! Considering Microsoft are trying to launch so many new features, one would have thought their contribution would have been of the bigger stands there.

Of Course there were the usual Anime Booths and Madman Booths and Education Booths (Cheers to the Monash University booth for giving me a Frisbee and the info on doing a PostGrad degree on the cheap), the consumer electronics show was also kind of ho hum, containing everything from Jim's Antennas to Speaker Systems, Home Automation and Plasma TV's.

The Cosplay Action was also very limited. I got some good pictures and spoke to a few people (The Halo guy spent 8 months putting together his costume and it looked amazing) but was hoping for more. Thankyou to all the Cosplayer's who let me take their photos and obligingly posed.

I've looked and there arent too many reviews around of the event yesterday or today, there didn't seem to be much in the way of twitter streams either. Vooks have a review of Friday and PC World have an interview with the organisers, Peter Barlow. Maybe he can explain why the event was so small this year... my friends and I had lunch in the elephant and wheelbarrow after and discussed at length possible reasons why we might be so disappointed "Where we being overly harsh?" "Did they have a reason?" "Could the same amount of gameplay been had with 30 dollars of rentals from the local video store in an afternoon?" and we couldnt come to any real answers, other than, no, we're not going back next year. Shame. :(

31/10/2009

 Here's a Link to my Photos from the Day and Below is a YouTube compilation of the the Photos I took.

Please dont take my photos without linking back to this site or at least acknowledging that I took them,  they mightn't be much but they're my "not much."