Welcome back gentle readers, to the land of evil, savage brutality and an insane hunger for late night takeaways. In a surprise change of pace from mocking the world news, and lack of caring for the tennis after Andy Murray made everyone shout “Come on Tim”, we present once more, a glimpse into the world of video gaming.

A long time ago on Friday, in a far off seaside resort which is an hour from London by train, far from the confines of the Eurogamer Expo show, the chaps from aforementioned Eurogamer and RockPaperShotgun decided to hold an event dedicated to PC and indie games, perhaps as a test to see if there would be demand for something perhaps a little more specalist than what the Expo could provide, given the scale it had grown to over the past few years.

For some reason, it was called Rezzed.

Look Ma, it’s a big wibbly blue thing. What is it?

Brighton was the destination from Victoria, and upon arriving at the resort of dreams, it was obvious that the British summer had arrived, in that Noah’s ark came floating past while walking down the hill to the sea front. Which all lends itself to be ideal conditions for staying indoors and indeed playing some lovely games.

So many colours, it’s like I’m tripping balls.

The hall itself was far smaller than the affairs that the Eurogamer Expo was accustomed to, and in many ways it was a lot better as it was easier to get around, there was far less of a queue for any game to play which meant you had the run of the entire thing if you wanted and therefore could enjoy the delights than the various companies had brought to show off more than you would otherwise.

A good mix of triple A and indie titles meant that you had more than the usual offerings as well. Here is just a brief sample of what was on the show floor;

Borderlands 2

No, Borderlands does not refer to the DMZ in Korea.

Not to be confused with angry southerners patrolling the US border for them illegals (coming over here, doing the jobs we don’t want to do….), Borderlands 2 is the sequel to the game Borderlands (Surely that sentence alone deserves an award for most obvious statement of the year?) in which four different burely types go after a naughty man who is called Handsome Jack who is doing bad things to Pandora (though surely killing those blue things from Avatar can’t be considered bad? Ahh, different planet called Pandora).

Who is Handsome Jack you may ask? Well I did ask one of the dev team members from Gearbox and the rep from 2K Games, and the collective answer was: Handsome Jack is Handsome Jack. So all cleared up then.

The demo we got to view in both hands on via Xbox joypads due to the build allowing too many things to break if we used a keyboard, and via an excellent developer session from Gearbox themselves featuring a guy called Randy (Love that name), took place in a setting far removed from the deserts we saw the first time round, a big park filled with shiny corporate buildings, and lots of statues that your friend / spare parts supplier, Claptrap doesn’t like and that you’re to tear down those statues to free..err..someone from something. Probably.

You have to enlist the aid of some big thingy to go cut the things down and protect it while you get shot from people working from Beautiful Jack, who seems to get more and more creative with his language as time goes on and you’re more successful.

The fact there are a bazillion million killion gillion guns in the game is also a nice bonus, with so many combinations possible it may be impossible to ever know every single gun in the thing. The players have been changed, though having only played Zero so far, it’s hard to know how improved they all are over the four characters from the first game. Zero has a sword and he does stealth stuff to hurt bad guys. Jolly good!

Natural Selection 2

Look at me, please will someone acknowledge I exist?!?!

And indeed there were people taking interest in the game, as the First Person Murderer genre takes on the top-down Hitler-ness that is most strategy games in something which began as a mod for Half-Life back in the day and has since moved onto its own little platform, ready to take the world by storm if only people knew about it.

By their own admission, the dev team behind this interesting team-a-thon have no marketing budget, though one can assume that they are not giving blowjobs behind the bins just to get another license for a Windows Server. Therefore it falls to us peasants to spread the word on what this caper is all about.

Bugger hasn’t cleaned his teeth.

Natural Selection 2 takes place on a number of levels where aliens battle against Marines for some reason. You will have seen perhaps this type of scenario with other games, notably Aliens Vs. Predator and of course, Gearbox’s other shooter Aliens: Constipated Marine, which was also on the shop floor, in the multi-player form.

What made this different were the different classes invloved. Marines form squads to find and destroy alien hives, because they make a mess everywhere. Now the aliens from the other games, tend to be very hard to play in the other games mentioned and therefore you tend not to bother with them.

However in NS 2, you can choose from being a wall-running Skulk (what you start out as), or mutate into a pudgy Gorge, flying Lerk, a Fade (an assasin type class with a nice little rush ablity) or a big mother called an Onos that can smash through doors, people and Showaddywaddy LPs.

With the strategy element, things can be opened up more with tech-tree researching, defence placements and general larking about. Despite it being a beta at this stage, it’s very well polished and is well worth a look here and you could start playing it now if you stomp up the cash with the finished version being yours as well.

A word of warning, sometimes, the majority of the servers can be seemingly empty, as most people tend to crowd onto a few servers only. Time will tell if it does truly take off, and hopefully it will.

Far Crying out Load 3

OOOOOOOOOHHHH YEAH!

Remember her from the E3 demonstration where it appeared the lady could help but get paint all over her breasts and talk naughty at you until it was time to stand up in front of other dudes to declare war on some prat with bad hair?

Well, that exact same demo was what was on show at Rezzed, and to be honest, seeing the whole thing up close on a 27in monitor was only slightly more disturbing, with full HD boobies. MMMM…HD.

Though of course we had a few false starts, owing to the fact that for the first ten minutes, no-one knew what the keys were to play the game, therefore we all pitched in as technical support to press all the keys and tell the Ubisoft reps what they were!

Once we knew what was what, it was fairly easy to relive all the fun of shooting people with a bow, releasing a tiger from a cage and then getting stabbed. Which is not a sentence I get to write that often, not since the court case involving three penguins and a pencil. But remarkably after all the silliness that went down, the Unisoft rep did say, that not everything that happened was real, and perhaps the end game has more to offer than we realise.

Join us in Part deux where in a bizarre twist for Ooh Sometimes, we pull down our trousers and p*ss over a man’s idea.

We nicked some images from http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-05-photos-from-rezzed-the-pc-and-indie-games-show mainly as I forgot to take photos until after the show.