Lol. I just got back from World Cyber Games Championships at a convention center down town. Well, they had competition but the main attraction today was a Warcraft 3 tournament, which I wasn't really interested in. But there were some cool things.
First of all, tons of shwag, not super awesome shwag, but it is fun shwag. Tons of pens, stickers, 3 Games for Windows blinking yo-yos, lanyards, 4 T-shirts, a deck of cards, and 3 copies of Day of Defeat: Source (!).
But anyway, I saw some total kick-ass Gears of War players from Italy playing, and some Korean dude squaring off with a Ukrainian guy in Warcraft 3. Then I got to play Portal for a couple minutes and play a very laggy Crysis for 10 minutes.
Crysis was like FarCry on super steroids, but the settings were clearly on max and it was a pain to play because of all the motion blur and the 15-20 fps. They even had a disclaimer under the screen: "Playing on Alpha code with unoptimized drivers. Drivers will be optimized by launch." But the graphics were bad-assed. You can pick up pretty much anything and you're characters hands show if holding it. The best parts was when I was using a tree to hide from a .50 cal which promptly was shredded in two. And another was when a baddie threw a grenade at me when I was next to a building, blowing half of it away- a total "Oh Snap!" moment. It was kind of funny because I was expecting it to happen. And lastly, I made a few guys watching me laugh when I found a chicken and picked it up and threw it at a soldier. :D
I also played Guitar Hero 3, but I didn't like the song I played, I couldn't hear my music, and I played like ****, the guitar felt mushy and you have to select your difficulty BEFORE you select a song! Rock Band was a bigger thing and I couldn't play it, you had to form a "group" before playing it on-stage.
Anyway, it wasn't as big as I had thought, there was only a dozen or so stands but a lot of demo units. Also, I was approached by a dude named Erik Chan, the leader of BP Games (
http://www.bottomlesspitgames.com/) and I bought a copy of Harmotion (
http://www.harmotion.com/frontpage.html) for $2. Sure, it's a free game, but I felt good supporting an Indie game studio. I haven't played it yet, but it looks fun. It's a multiplayer Shump, which sounds interesting.