Tales from Armageddon

Trying to stay true to George's vision, Moose is waiting for Greedo to shoot first

So we made our way last weekend to check out Armageddon Expo in Melbourne. The exhibition centres around anime and comics culture, but also had plenty of side booths for cinema and gaming.

Tell the truth, by the time we’d made our way around the expo floor twice we were a little disappointed. While the place was chock full of people (including a good split of both good and bad cosplayers), it seemed as through we’d bought tickets to be let in to go shopping in a geek bazaar. While there was plenty of cool stuff on sale, the problem was that most of it was just that, on sale.

So after meandering our way through crowds of anime fans and perusing several stalls for any cool merch, I made my way over to the games areas to see what was on show.

Not a whole lot, as it turns out, but I made the best of what was on offer.

At the Capcom booth I managed to have a play of Tatsunoko Vs Capcom, a game I was naturally drawn to after discovering a little while ago that Frank West from Dead Rising was a playable character. Moose attempted to make fun of me for being so excited, which I quickly remedied by schooling him with Frank West’s shopping trolley attack.

Frank strikes a Pheonix Wright-esque pose

The game was a good quality fighter, although tell the truth I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the names of even a quarter of the Tatsunoko characters.   To be even more brutally honest, I just had to go and Google Tatsunoko to make sure I was spelling it correctly.  Never mind, button mashing crosses all culture barriers.  In typical team fighter style there was a good focus on two-player attacks, and I couldn’t help but love the fact that all damage dealt was counted in the billions.

Although Frank “He’s Covered Wars Y’know” West seems to look nothing like his Dead Rising sembelance, his attacks do attempt to capture the fantastic “anything is a weapon” style of the original game. Amongst his arsenal are a golf club, two by four and a range of different shopping trolleys. He even gets to use zombies as weapons, by spawning them behind his opponents or using them as projectiles. Lots of fun.

From there I ducked into the Mature Games section of the Capcom booth, which oddly enough seemed to be filled with 14 year old boys.  I suppose trying to enforce an 18 years or older policy in a country that doesn’t think there are gamers over 15 is a little ironic.  Anyhow, there I managed to have a quick try of Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles, and check out a gent demonstrating Darksiders. Now that I think about it, they should have renamed the Mature Games section: “Games with the word ‘Darkside’ in them”.

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles was quite fun, and seems to be involved in the same attempt to resurrect the on-rails shooter as Dead Space: Extraction is. I didn’t get long to play it as I was getting the hurry up from a booth attendant, but the game is essentially a VirtuaCop retelling of Resident Evil 2 and beyond. I understand why a lot of people dump on the genre, but there’s still quite a lot of enjoyment to be had from on-rails shooters. It made me a little bit nostaglic, reminding me of playing Resident Evil: Survivor on the PS1, only without the annoyance of an awkward movement system. Considering that your free to burn as much ammo as you like it’s not going to bring you back into the world of “survival horror”, but the game does make good use of the “kill it just in the nick of time” kind of suspense. Oh, and Capcom? Any game that continually reminds me to aim for the head is alright in my books.

Darksiders looked very pretty. It had quite a solid artistic style, but unfortunately the guy running the demo was more of a “paid $20 an hour to be here” booth attendant, as opposed to the “know absolutely anything about games” attendant.

I was also tempted to brave the queue to play the 3D version of James Cameron’s Avatar over at the Ubisoft booth, but the crowd sort of defeated me. I couldn’t even take a look at what the game’s visuals were like since you needed 3D glasses to see what was going on. Oh well.

The Microsoft booth wasn’t even trying. They’d basically set up two Xboxes, one with Wolverine: Origins and one with Soul Calibur IV, so not much to see there. I was highly amused on my way past the first time that one of the consoles’ AV cables were being replaced, at least they were providing the true Xbox experience I guess.

So there you have it. Overall the expo was a little disappointing, but I did get to try out a few upcoming games, which managed to brighten the experience up a little bit.