Oh dear god yes campers, It’s that time again that I blather on about things which are yet to come in terms of gaming antics. This time, we visited the EGX Rezzed 2016 event, being held at the time of writing at the Tobacco Docks.

Last year I wrote about such wonders as Bloodborne, which mainly just vexed me, and has since continued to vex me. Tembo The Badass elephant was something to really look forward to. That was, until the release day where Sega or the developers released the wrong build onto Steam and we covered that in a YouTube video. There were many other good things to come out of such a packed and varied venue, that this year’s event was looked forward to even more.

Oh how the balls became saggier with time. Err… what? To explain, just sit back and read Part 1 of the overview from Rezzed and a look at some of the titles on offer.

Rezzed be a ghost town….

So them balls? Why mention saggy balls at all? Is this a Pot Noodle advert?

Nope, it only comes from the overall experience we had when attending EGX Rezzed 2016 on the Thursday. On the face of it, everyone had ran out of money to even bother turning up. It seems that perhaps interest was on the wane or maybe people didn’t have as much to show, but honestly the space occupied by EGX this year was around half of what it was before. Adding insult to injury, the venue’s hospitality had been massively reduced. Not only reduced, with prices hiked up to an average of £10 too.

Look at them, the filthy gamers….hate them, hate them all!

It seems to just plainly cash in on the gaming public who would be coming to see what games to burn their hard earned cash on. Which actually would be odd to say, considering that there were far fewer vendors around even to take advantage of the general buzz to sell whatever they happened to have.

Why was this? Where had everyone ran off to?

I guess only the EGX organisers can answer that, if they wanted to. Perhaps the Thursday was a set-up day and actually the bigger presence by all was meant for the weekend. If this was the case, surely it would have been better to not have anyone attend? But given the selection on display at all on the Thursday, one can only wonder how many punters would conclude the same. If this were to continue, then it honestly would be better for all, to look for other events to attend.

Hooray for free marketing stuff!

That being said, there were nowhere near as many queues for the games, save for Dark Souls 3 and the VR booths. Thus it was a lot easier to get around and enjoy some real quality time with the titles, with no rush to finish at any time. We also got a ridiculous amount of free gaming tat, of which we say to all the developers and PR people, thank you very much!

An additional Mucho kudos shout-out must go to the Carmageddon chaps who had t-shirts bigger than medium too. So for the first time ever, I managed to score something I would actually be able to wear from these things! That being said, it was very much worthwhile for some other reasons, some of which will surprise you.

Quantum Break

Before delving further into this, for once I’m happy to write something more positive about Microsoft’s offerings this year. Despite being confined to a smaller room with their games and consoles, they did bring a lot to show, even if sadly most games were confined to a single console for trying. I suspect this was more on the position there were in within the venue as opposed to anything else. The staff in the area too were incredibly upbeat about the game, they were in fact very positive really and quite talkative too. All in all, no issues with what they had done at all.

Suffice it to say that Quantum Break will make up the majority of the rest of the post, so join us for part two when we cover more offerings. Given it was the big release of the week, it had to be looked at in more detail.

It’s that thing we saw!

This does lead us onto the most interesting part of the day to, come to think of it.

It’s shocking to be able to write about the PC version of Quantum Break at all really, given it was released only on the Windows Store this week for £50, only for those to say it was a lackluster port at best.

But all credit to Microsoft, they not only brought out the game on Xboxes to play but also high end Windows 10 PCs as well. Ok, it was still with the Xbox One Controller sitting close to a large Samsung TV but hands on with the port is a lot more than anyone would have expected. One can only hope this happens again in future and hopefully, we will have the option of different control methods for playing the games too.

Fortune was on our side as one of the Windows PCs had an issue with running the game. So they replaced it with an Xbox One right next to us, which gave a golden opportunity to compare side by side on the same type of TVs what the differences were. And there were a few to say the least.

As a bystander standing away from the screens, you wouldn’t tell too much of a difference, however up close and personal, that was a different matter. The amount of image blurriness couldn’t be mistaken, with texture pop-in occurring every so often. The lighting also was a bit suspect, and there was indeed bad stuttering. What version are we talking about?

The PC version of course!

FREEZE! Oh….you’re in a time bubble…. never mind….

The Xbox One version was actually running smoothly with less grainy effects and a clearer picture, whereas the PC did suffer from some issues. Granted there was motion blur on the Xbox One version too, but even the blurring was clearer on the Xbox One version.

We also had a look at the resolution of the PC version by looking at the graphics options, and saw that it had been set to 720p. Bumping that up to 1080p yielded an alarming bug, in that the options text field names filled the entire screen with giant letters, which of course caused concern for the Xbox staff! Was it a crash per chance?

Bizarrely the game self corrected after a bit, and we were still in 1080p afterwards, so back to the game we went. The game was a bit clearer after the resolution change but still not to the level of the Xbox One. It was at this point where the two main characters were going into a chamber with an time ball thingy, that we saw the stuttering occur the most.

Given the specs of the PCs (we asked the set-up chap what they were) were on the high end, with Intel i7s, GTX 980 TIs and 16GB of RAM running the game from a SSD, this was a great surprise. It just points to a lot of technical issues, probably still pertaining to the fact that the game was deployed as a Universal Windows App. You know that crap we not only wrote about but even sang about during the past week.

Given a number of the same complaints were had with Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, it does indeed now fit the pattern we should expect to see with the new development platform going forward. And that is a shame, because I was really starting to enjoy the game.

Remedy have had a knack for doing different things in their games, and remarkably it was grabbing me once the slow part of the intro was passed and the bad corporate naughty guys were showing up, for some reason, trying to kill you from the word go. Actually change that word to Timelord….

Where’s the Doctor when you need him?

The show floor wasn’t really the place to take the time and flush out the story that had been put together, that would be for the fun of the front room away from onlookers. A shame given the impressive efforts on display, and the attention to detail, including a wonderful Alan Wake reference on a chalkboard seen during a sequence escaping from the aforementioned bad guys.

Even with a complete lack of skill when it comes to aiming with a joypad, the fun of getting the last chap in the section of a given level with crotch shots which gloriously played out in slow motion couldn’t be denied. I couldn’t help but be dragged kicking and laughing to the days of those slow motion moments of Max Payne, only this time using time bubbles to slow down enemies to spray them with bullets. Which also slowed down right before the bad guy, only to hit a moment later when the bubble dissipated.

It made me giddy with glee, which makes this all the more disappointing. It’s all the more obvious that the work was put into the Xbox One version, with a lot of optimisation and fixes missing from PC. The fact is, it seems Remedy were forced to release this as a UWP which has done nothing but hurt the release from a technical point of view.

It’s even more galling to see the two systems side by side, and see the less powerful platform perform much better with better image clarity, even if the motion blur is a bit too much there too. It’s really sad to see Remedy’s efforts suffer when clearly there was more to be explored. Which just adds to the kick in the teeth of being asked to pay £50 for a sub par product.

Dear god, the price still makes me wince….

Right now, if you’re going play Quantum Break play it on the Xbox One, as that is clearly where the work went into. Until some patches and some major fixes to the UWP platform start coming in from May onwards, you should just avoid this from the Windows Store.

They have a lot of work to do to justify the price point and, at the moment, Microsoft are not helping their own cause at all from this particular release on the PC platform. Remedy’s reputation too, may sadly get tarnished because of this and I can only feel that would be unfair to say the least.

More to come….

So after all that about just one game, what other treasures were there to be found? Join us next time for part two where we see a VCR, play a game where a cardboard box is the star and I utterly fail at anything that involves a puzzle.