GAMEfest (UK)

A friend of mine informed me of an event called GAMEfest that's going to be at the NEC in Birmingham from the 16th to the 18th of September. It's open to anyone who's got a GAME loyalty card and tickets are only a tenner each. They'll have a whole host of new games to play, some for the first time in the UK. Games such as Modern Warfare 3, Gears of War 3, and Battlefield 3. I've never been to a games show before so I'm definitely going to this one.

I'm especially looking forward to getting my hands on Street Fighter X Tekken

http://events.game.co.uk/gamefest/exhibitors/

 

I don't live in Birmingham either, probably an hour and a half to two hours drive away. Where abouts do you reside? I can't not go if the tickets are a measly £10. I will definitely get pics and videos for show and tell when I get back.

@Phisix

I'm not sure on the details but I think you can just go in and tell them you've lost your card and they'll replace it on the spot (maybe for a very small fee).

 

You had me at Skyrim...

I just saw Tekken Tag Tournament 2 on that list, I crapped my pants with excitement until I relised that Tekken is shit now and they should have released this game about 6 years ago.

 

Well, me and my friend went on Saturday and had a blast. We'd never been to anything like it, it was awesome. We saw Forza 4 with Kinect where this guy was using a strange wireless steering wheel with green lights on top to drive the car (very Playstation MOVE), we played on the classic and modern versions of City Escape on Sonic Generations, it was great. There were a bunch of stands showcasing kinect with those dance games, not really our cup of tea. There was a huge inflatable padded cell in one corner where people would go to see previews of games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum. We saw a bunch of people playing Dark Souls but it looked too much like Dragon Age to warrant further attention. We played Need for Speed: The Run, the sense of speed in this game is epic! Also I've always preferred racing from point A to point B rather than doing laps so I enjoyed this game. I spent 15 minutes queuing for Street Fighter X Tekken only to find the machine that had freed up (allowing me into the little corral bit) was playing Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, I promptly put the controller down and stood behind the guys playing SFXT. I did get a go but it was using those damn arcade sticks which I'm crap with and I chose Kazuya with Yoshimitsu, I was pretyy much button bashing because I didn't know their moves let alone their Super Combos, once I buy it and play it properly I'll enjoy it more.

We spotted a Tekken Tag Tournament 2 machine so I fought against this guy on that, I unloaded a ten-string on him in the first round but he ended up beating me, nice chap. There was also a game called Tekken Hybrid on the PS3 which confused me, it looked just like Tekken Tag 2 except that you could only use Alisa, Devil Kazuya, Devil Jin, and Xiaoyu. Kazuya and Jin looked kind of like semi cyborg-ish and it was strange. There were two games we really wanted to play that weren't advertised but were actually at the event, the first was Soul Calibur V, yep, it was there, playable with 1 or 2 players, we played this game the most. It felt like it was half way between SC3 and SC4 which is a good thing, it's quicker than IV and the soul gauge has been replaced by something we assume is for unleashing super special moves but we didn't know how to use it. There were about half a dozen characters on show including Mitsurigi, Maxi, Siegfried, Astaroth, Phyrra, that new Taki wannabe and a couple of others. Good fun.

The other game we didn't expect to see there was Skyrim, literally the first thing we saw as we entered was the Bethesda block with the Skyrim trailer playing on a huge screen with an elder scroll in a glass cabinet, nice. In the end we chose not to go in because after 15 minutes of queuing we got to the sign that said "Queuing time from this point, 2 hours". I hate standing around doing nothing and queuing is the worst kind of that but we were willing to wait for a hands on with Skyrim, until a bunch of people came out saying it was shit and that they couldn't believe they "waited 2 hours just for that". When asked what it was they simply replied "a crappy ten minute video", so no gameplay. I wasn't willing to wait 2 hours to see a trailer that'll be out on youtube the next day.

And that kind of set the tone for the rest of the day, we decided that although we really wanted to play Gears 3 and MW3 we didn't think it was worth standing around for hours just to get a quick go on those games, especially when they'll be out fairly soon anyway, I didn't want to play them that badly.

There were also plenty of other games there, I played Street Fighter IV arcade edition (as Akuma of course) and got thouroughly wooped by this dude. I played on a 3DS for the first time with Mario Land 3D, Ocarina of Time 3D, Driver 3D (it was very shit). They also had a Zelda section but I had no interest in playing Skyward Sword.

All in all we had great fun and will be going back next year, we'll be more prepared next time now we know what to expect. I didn't take a camera with me so I had to make do with my Blackberry. I'll upload what few photos and videos I took soon, but be warned, the quality is so very shit. My mate took some photos and videos on his iphone so it should be marginally better quality, I just need to get them off him and I'll upload the lot in a couple of days.