MCM London Expo 2009: In which our hero plays some games and then writes about them

Last time I went to the the London Expo, I was quite disappointed with the lack of proper gaming content. This year, however, I was pleasantly surprised. Tekken 6, Borderlands, Bayonetta, and even Left 4 Dead 2 were all playable at the show- which of course meant that I played them as much as I could.

Obviously I wouldn’t be writing this if I wasn’t going to tell you about them, so don’t worry about that. You could read my impressions and watch a video of the games at the same time and pretend that you’re me. This is clearly something that you want to do, so hit the jump to read on.

I’ll spare the details about the show itself, as it rarely changes in atmosphere. Essentially, the show is a gathering of the internet. People dress as memes, animé characters, game characters, or wear sarcastic t-shirts in what I consider to be the seasonal ‘dance of the nerds’. I would have said it was like a mating ritual but we all know that no mating would ever take place. Anyway, now that I’m done insulting everyone who went, probably including myself, I’ll move on to the games.

When I arrived I headed straight for the Borderlands booth- despite the fact that the game has already been released on consoles, I’d never played it before that and was (and am, at the time of writing) waiting for the PC release. As an RPG it’s not ideal for booth play, but I was very impressed. Even though I wasn’t used to using a 360 pad for first-person shooters, I found myself playing for over an hour. Yeah, I was that guy, hogging the booth. I’m sorry, everyone who stood behind me waiting for me to finish.

Luckily the game was running in two-player co-op and there were plenty of other 360s around running the game. I found that playing the game this way was great for showing it off; due to the nature of the game you’re encouraged to talk about what’s going on with your co-op partner and share weapons with them. It’s a great way of making you emotionally involved in the game- and clearly it worked, since I was playing for so long without realising. I’m looking forward to playing the PC version.

I moved on to play Bayonetta, which was a perfectly serviceable brawler which already has a demo out that you can download and try out yourself. If you really want my opinion, I’ll just say that I got a bit bored of it after a little while of fighting the same enemies over and over. The game looks great, though. There’s a lot of detail in the environments and the boss battles are quite epic. Not Shadow of the Colossus epic, just a little bit epic.

I also played Tekken 6, which is every Tekken with slightly better graphics and more characters. I played as Paul (who was good in Tekken 3, the only one I played) and got beat up by someone playing as Law. I don’t think I could go back to Tekken after Street Fighter 4. I just don’t like the 3D mechanic. So my summary of Tekken 6 is this: It’s a Tekken game. What did you expect?

After wandering around a bit (and briefly watching the Avatar game in 3D, which hurt my eyes slightly) I threw away my instinct to avoid boredom and queued up for 45 minutes to play Left 4 Dead 2. It was being played in the same vault as Dead Space was last time (it even had pictures of Issac on the walls inside), on four 360s. They weren’t even connected together, it was just single-player. This combined with the fact that I find playing Valve games with a controller to be utterly awful meant that my opinion of the game went down a lot to just “this is brilliant.”

Despite not being able to aim because of the controller, I found it to be a very enjoyable experience. Cutting zombies in half with a machete is highly unlikely to get old any time soon. The demo comes out soon, so I’ll be doing a full preview in the future. I realise I’m being a big PC elitist when it comes to the controller but I honestly found the burst-fire rifle to be fairly useless as I couldn’t reliably pull off headshots with it. Anyway, I’ll save that for the preview.

That’s about it, I’m afraid. The MCM expo is never huge for games, although this year, as I’ve said, I was impressed with the turnout. Next weekend, however, is the Eurogamer Expo, which I’m also attending. That expo is completely focused on games, and so I’ll hopefully have a bit more to say about that. So, to summarise the MCM Expo 2009, here is a haiku. The use of haiku represents the underlying internet and Japanophile culture present at the Expo.

The dance of the nerds
Has Left 4 Dead 2 this year
It was good, I think