PAX09 For Realz This Time

Oh all right all right! Fine. I'll write a proper post.

Lets talk about games shall we? I only played one hands-on demo: Darksiders. It was pretty fun I guess. I walked away feeling like I had just played a next-gen God of War. You run around beating people with a sword and climbing things. The coolest part is that you can pick things up like people or cars. Grabbing enemies buy the neck and insta-killing them was pretty fun. So you're supposed to have a horse in the game but that wasn't in the demo. So... yeah, God of War.

Best demo I watched someone else play: Bayonetta. This one's been on my radar for about as long as Darksiders has. It's another third-person action hack-and-slash staring a... um, yeah the plot escapes me... she's a gun... witch? Whatever, she runs around killing stuff. The first guy I watched play the game was pretty good at it. I watched him take down two bosses. I think they were bosses; they were pretty epic. As she fought these huge monster things they destroyed the environment in ways that completely changed the battlefield. There were at least four "oh snap" moments in the 3 min of gameplay I witnessed. The shifting environment during the boss battles were half of them. The finishing moves used to kill the bosses were the other. Apparently the player's character has the ability to use her hair and clothes to turn giant beasties into piles of goo, and in a ludicrously spectacular manner. I'm not going to go into detail because you really have to just see it, but wow. Wow.

Also impressive was Brink. They had a big screen set up and a guy with an English accent was giving live demos every hour or so. The game takes place on this floating island and you play as a soldier from one of two opposing factions. Your goal is to complete missions, but the twist is that the missions are generated by the AI. Your character class can be switched around during the battle and your missions are assigned to you based on the class you are playing. You can choose which mission you want to do from a pop-up menu, so you're not stuck having to do one thing. I think this is especially cool because I hate getting stuck on one mission! To me this approach could streamline and maximize the fun factor. There is an RPG element with your character as well. It wasn't made clear to me exactly what you would be improving stat-wise, but he did go over a pretty robust visual customization system. As your character progresses he (or she?) will have access to more armor and regalia. Also cool is this action button they built in where your character can intuitively move around the environment, traversing obstacles, and just not getting stuck on stuff. It looks pretty slick in action, and I can imagine it will be pretty important because the environments I saw were tangled, jungle-like mazes of metal and debris.

So PAX was sweet. There were a lot of great games there but Bayonetta and Brink were the two that really caught my eye.