The last few days have been pretty busy, and I’m finally getting time to sit down and write about it. You always know you’re a blogger when you’re running around enjoying the RL and you find yourself saying “I should blog about this!” and start thinking about how you want to write it. Don’t say you all haven’t done that before….
The craziness started with the San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. This was my second time going, and it seemed busier than last year. Comic-Con is a BIG deal here. I believe the latest number I heard was 160,000 people. That’s more than E3. That’s more than GDC and AGD combined I believe. It’s quite the exciting event. People come from all over for this, and dress up in various costumes. Some of the costumes are extremely well done. Some are pretty mediocre and not at all related or applicable. Lots of Renaissance Festival costumes that aren’t too exciting. The best costumes this year that I saw were:
1) A fantastic Joker. Every year there is a costume that everyone wears. This year it was Heath Ledger jokers, and they were EVERYWHERE. One Joker in particular was a professionally costumed graphic novel version, and was unbelievable. He had the act and personality down perfectly.
2) Bob’s Big Boy. Complete with a plate with a big hamburger on it.
3) A quartet of steampunks. These costumes were really well done, with light bulbs on them and everything.
There were tons of random anime characters, a couple Pikachus, lots of Final Fantasy characters, tons of people with yellow question marks over their heads. The costumes are neat.
EA had a section of their booth setup with Warhammer Online devs helping people play the game. I played WAR for probably a good 45 minutes to an hour. I was, well, not impressed. I’m not going to go into detail and review it, because for the people who are looking for another game like WoW with the added bells and whistles of other games on the market – you’ll probably love it. It was polished, it ran fine, the UI was fine. Granted I was only level 3, but nothing about the game made me want to purchase it. It was pretty uninspired feeling and just, meh. I did try several race/class combos in various areas of the world.
The games representation at Comic-Con seemed lower this year. Blizzard were not there this year making an appearance for WoW other than their manga and Upper Deck featuring the WoW TCG. (For the record, there were probably 100 people playing the WoW TCG there, even sitting on the floor.) NCSoft had a booth, SOE were demoing DC Universe Online (more about that later) and LittleBigPlanet had a gigantic display showing off the game. Spore was also being shown but I didn’t get a chance to check it out up close.
A few hours of walking the show floor was all I needed at Comic-Con. I was exhausted pretty quickly from navigating through all the people. It’s a fun time. I did buy some Sci-Fi-ish art from a really good vector artist, but other than that I didn’t spend too much. I behaved this year!
Today, Luke and I headed down to the SOE Block Party for a little while. There, I went to a demo of DC Universe Online that was really good. The game looks fantastic. It’s very twitchy, fast-paced, and the world looks immersive and fun. Combat looked really unique with the environment really affecting the combat, which was neat. It’s not really MY kind of game, but I can see it being successful for sure – especially with it being cross-platform and massively multiplayer. It’s pretty rad.
Secondly, Free Realms. There were computers set up with live gameplay walkthroughs, and the first thing I can say is “Holy shit.” The game looks amazing. The art style is really well done, it’s light, fun, colorful, and bright. I’ve heard a lot of WoW comparisons which is the cool thing to do when a game uses bright colors and lots of contrast, but the art direction is really quite different. The character models especially are completely different. The game is really nothing like WoW except for maybe the questgivers having question marks and exclamations – but what game doesn’t have those now? The UI is extremely well done, it looks very intuitive and has that Mac-like bubbly feel to it. It all looks like a game that kids of a wide age range will enjoy, and parents will love playing it with them. I know I want to play it for sure. Color me impressed with this game.
Between Free Realms, the Agency, and DC – things are really looking good for SOE. I haven’t seen much of the Agency lately, but what I’ve seen of DC and FR looks excellent.
In final news in a bit of a shopping spree today we picked up a couple neat things. The first is the WoW Adventure Game board game. It looks fun. We also got a few books – the first two in Ericson’s Malazan series and a graphic novel for Feist’s Magician book by Marvel. Between all the books, games, movies, and TV shows I have to partake in, I’m going to be a busy media fiend the next few months. =)
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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I remember when Free Realms was just concept art and a requirements spec.
Anyway, I saw you at the block party. Craig pointed you out to me, but I was just leaving. Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to say hello.
Ooooh! Feist’s Magician book by Marvel? Sweet!
How was it?
Actually haven’t read it yet, my boyfriend actually was the one who found/bought it. I’m letting him read it first =)
Well, I can certainly vouch for The Agency and say it’s coming along quite nicely and is getting to be pretty fun!