Bring on the Gaming: Eurogamer 2012 - Thursday

 The opening day of Eurogamer arrived and upon entering the press queue I saw a sic Mario entourage in front of me. Maria, Wario, Luigi and Yoshi but Bowser was nowhere to be seen or perhaps he was already inside, waiting to pounce?

Straight away I was drawn to good old Sega’s booth and took the chance to play their new game ‘Hell Yeah’. The Sega rep described it as the ‘Bunny version of Sonic’ which had me sold, with the beautiful anime graphics and story resembling Koei’s Disgaea. Expect this game to be reviewed on Anime Picks soon! You’re a demon bunny papp’ed in an er...compromising position with a rubber ducky and demons don’t take humiliation very well so he goes to destroy everyone who had seen the photo.

To the right of Sega was Formula 1, which had a great set up with arcade style gaming chairs. I’m not brilliant at car games, but I wouldn't mind losing to strangers in style and those chairs really added to the game experience.

DOA 5 probably had the most game consoles, which was a good call as there were so many guys lining up to play with the ladies, in combat of course. It was very refreshing to see some female gamers showing guys they could play just as well too.

The developers of the Merlin game - literally based on the series - decided instead of taking the real gritty looking CGI approach they’d make it more anime’esque to make it more appealing to all the fans. See the interview with one of the developers here:

Eurogamer had all sorts of hidden gems for us to find, in the form of the Virgin booth, where you sit on couches to try out some hand held consoles. I started playing the game Super-Fluid. This game actually won the ‘Virgin Media 100 Day Game Project’. Super-Fluid has been developed to work across Android and Apple devices and will launch in October 2012. The puzzle-based platform game uses tilt-based controls for navigation through the levels as the character changes into three different states - solid, liquid and gas. Very cute and clever basically it’s kawaii science! Find out more information here: http://www.virgin.com/media-and-mobile/news/100-day-game-project-heads-to-eurogamer

If your waning from walking around the vast space in Olympia, it’s time to take a break at the Mountain Dew pit stop – refuel and carry on! If you were attentive enough, when wondering around in the over 18’s area you could watch professional makeup artists kitting out the ‘Resident Evil’ Zombie team! It was amazing seeing their faces being put together and if you were lucky enough you’d spot the ones giving out goodies, including branded t shirts and a super cool Resi wristband watch.

Other cool promotional gimmicks were from the ‘Hitman Asolution’ stall, luring figurine fans into their area, play the game and get a free hit man figure and these were super cute and hey, if you wondered around outside the over 18’s area you could have a free Hitman photo souvenir complete with red tie and rubber duck via photo booth boutique. They also uploaded the images to the website gallery: photoboothboutique.co.uk (select the appropriate date).

This is just a day one of our Eurogamer adventure, more to come in Friday’s diary update.