Eurogamer Expo 2012

So I’m back from London and the Eurogamer Expo. I arrived on the opening Thursday at around noon, and there was still a queue to get inside even then. That didn’t take too long, thankfully. I went with a friend, and after getting through the doors, we took some time to look around, get our bearings and decide where to start. Although it was very busy, there was enough space to move and stand and check out the games being played, which was nice. But actually playing the games involved queuing up, sometimes for upwards of two hours. That wasn’t so fun.

Our first stop was at the Aliens: Colonial Marines booth. The queue wasn’t too bad, but it still required a forty minute wait to have a go at a five minute multiplayer demo. I came away quite positive from that. The videos I’d seen of Colonial Marines had all looked a little meh, but hands on, it played a lot better than it looked.

Having actually managed to get on a game, we were both ready for more, so we immediately headed over to the Nintendo booth to give ZombieU a try. Well, that was the plan. We queued for about an hour, which wasn’t too bad - we got to try out a tech demo with the WiiU controller while we waited and I was surprised at how light and comfortable it felt. But then we realised that the start of our queue was just the end of another queue, and we’d have another hour or so to wait before hitting the demo pods. We gave up, ducked out and headed back into the show.

 

We decided to go check out Dishonored (long, long queue) AC3 (long, long queue) and…yeah, they really should have sold official ‘I queued at Eurogamer’ merchandise. If I go again in the future, I’d definitely go better prepared. We tried to stop for some lunch, but the queues at the food places were as bad as the games. We ended up heading out and getting something outside.

My advice: arrive early, head straight for the most popular games first, and take food and drink with you. Even then, be ready to spend most of the day standing in line if you want to play stuff. I don’t mind waiting that much, I think I’m pretty patient, but some of the queues barely moved and the organisation wasn’t great from what I saw, particularly at the Nintendo booth. Overall though, we did have a good day out at Eurogamer. It’s a shame we didn’t come away with more free swag though.