Topic: Nicholas's EB Expo Experience

[Traveller]

Nintendo and many other companies were on hand showing off the latest games.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/feature/28120

This year EB Games announced that they would be holding a video game convention on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. There are many large conventions for various fandoms in Australia, but this is the first event of its kind showcasing upcoming and unreleased games.

The event had three sessions over the 15th and 16th of October. Two daytime time slots and one night, with a VIP after party on the Sunday night. I was able to attend both of the day sessions along with Andrew, our other NWR Australian Correspondent.

Large Crowds!

Firstly, when we arrived at the convention centre on the Saturday morning. Once we had made our way to the main lobby area, we were greeted with a giant amount of people. It was hard to distinguish exactly what was a line and what wasn’t, not to mention what each line was for. After asking a couple of EB staff members, we located a small booth set up to deal with both all the online orders, as well as handling the media tickets. It was a struggle, but we finally pushed through and to claim our passes.

After flashing our passes to skip the line, it was time to head in and start looking around. Getting to the Nintendo booth was fairly easy, the main convention hall was set out with enough space to easily manoeuvre through both the crowds and the various displays and booths. Sadly, Nintendo’s presence at the show was not as big as say Ubisoft, EA or Microsoft, which all had large floorspaces with big displays promoting their titles. Nintendo was sort of tucked away in a corner, and was hardly bigger than what they had at the Connection Tours, it was also dimly lit in their main Zelda and 3DS demo area, as well as very cramped with all the people that were constantly in there.

Nintendo is directly in front.

The games that Nintendo were showing were not very different from the Connection Tours. They had added a few titles into the mix such as Professor Layton and the Last Specter, Kirby Mass Attack, and Tetris, which is known as Tetris Axis in America. Layton and Tetris only had one copy of each to play, while Kirby faired better with about four units. They also had added a couple more Wii titles that have already been released such as Wii Party , Wii Play: Motion and Xenoblade. All up Nintendo had about 20 titles available to play, with some of those being Virtual Console games, such as Mario Kart 64 and various Legend of Zelda and Mario titles.

It would have been nice for a couple more new demos for this event, but Nintendo did bring out quite a few heavy hitters like Super Mario 3D Land,  Mario Kart 7 and Zelda: Skyward Sword. But seeing as though I had seen/played most of the titles in the previous weeks Connection Tour, it was a little disappointing only having a few extra games, all of which have already been released else where in the world.

Cramped Zelda & 3DS Area

I did get to  play Kirby’s Return to Dreamland with three other players at the event. The game had been at the Connection Tour, but I did not actually play it myself there. Kirby hasn’t really been on my radar, and I had been brushing it off as just another Kirby game. I was surprised when I played it, and found it to be really fun. Having three other players makes it a frenetic side-scroller, with it sometimes feeling more like a Super Smash Bros level. The graphics look great and playing around with the different power ups is really fun. I feel the game is more fun than the multiplayer options in Super Mario Bros Wii, mainly because of the easier level design and structure, which makes it less frustrating.

On the third party front, their was a very limited amount of Nintendo things. Only Activision and Sega had any Wii units available to play, and neither had any 3DS units. Sega was showing the new Mario and Sonic at the Olympics, and Activision had the new Spyro game, Skylanders.

There was also an EB Games store booth in the middle of the convention hall. It was very full pretty much constantly until later on the second day when the stock was running dry. In the store it was possible to buy various games and merchandise. Their was no Nintendo games to actually buy in the store, but you could pre-order some of the new titles. Nintendo’s presence was mainly in the plush toys, hats, keychains, candy sort of capacity. I bought an NES belt buckle as well as a cool Mario cap for my girlfriend.

My girlfriend Tahlia showing off the cap.

Next year the event is expanding to Sydney as well. I hope that Nintendo has more of a presence outside of their own corner and really is able to stretch out and hopefully show off the Wii U. Nintendo did indeed have some great titles on show this year, but having the Connection Tours beforehand kind of put a damper on the excitement for those that had already attended them.