Well it was that time of year again campers where I wandered around the halls of the NEC in Birmingham to look at what’s upcoming in the gaming world to lose even more of my precious life too, only to regret the time wasted on my death bed! But for the very first time, I produced a badly edited together video of highlights from the show about what I tried and what I thought about various things, which you can see below;

But that wasn’t all, there was a few games which I managed to try after the recording of the video, which I would love to share some thoughts with you all now;

Sonic Mania

To make another game like this, seems to take Sega ages…..

Right after making the EGX video, a spot opened up for playing one of the two Sonic the Hedgehog games due for release in 2017. Sonic Mania is the attempt to rekindle the time when Sonic could do no wrong, and those were the days on the Mega Drive back in the 90s.

The graphics hark back to the 16-bit days and the music certainly sets the tone too. This demo had two levels featured, a revamped Green Hill Zone and a new zone which seems to take further the Casino Nights levels from previous Sonic games and instead make them akin to a TV / movie studio. In essence, this game plays incredibly well! To the point of wanting Sega to shut up and take my money now!

The fast pace of the movement, the level design, the music, the bosses too, they all come from people who loved the previous Sonic 2D games and wanted to create something new, but familiar. There was no slowdown, and the controls with the Xbox One controller were just fine. Everything quickly made sense, and this is certainly one to visit next year if you can. Whether or not the 3D Sonic game will be in the same position, remains to be seen.

The Orchid Nebula

This is coming along nicely, I must say

This game returns to Ooh Sometimes in terms of coverage, having been played at the PC Gamer Weekender earlier in the year. Based on a group of student’s work while studying game design, this second demo shows some good progress from the last time. The best I still can describe this at the moment, is another one of those walking simulators where somehow you’re stuck in an abandoned high-tech laboratory. Though it seems the story is slowly building to things not being as they seem, which certainly will serve to peak everyone’s interests.

Everything around you is pretty much all b*llocksed, probably because someone forgot to get that last packet of screws from the DIY shop and now it’s all fallen to pieces. You have one power: the ability to jump in time between the present and the past, when the laboratory was in a better state before it all went to s*it.

You also got a lovely robot buddy who was telling you all about what needed fixing and so it progressed as you solved a couple of puzzles to then exit the demo level. Because this was an early demo, there wasn’t a lot of detail in the place and some design aspects could do with improvements to keep the immersion, but hell it was running well and I wanted to keep going to the end.

This continues to show good promise and I look forward to how they’re going to expand things out, if also the developers will be able to spend more time on the game thanks to a grant to set up a studio properly. You can find out more about the game at https://www.facebook.com/TheOrchidNebula/

Tekken 7

Button mash your way to, well, defeat. Just like me!

Tekken 7 along with countless other fighter setups and competitions were on full display with various people hanging around, whooping when someone kicked the other person’s digital ass. Tekken 7 is also coming out on the PC so it was the first time that I was interested in looking at how well this would play out.

Well suffice it to say, I’m still utterly useless at fighting games, given that at no point do I know any of the combos required to execute the perfect kill or indeed just hit someone in the bloody face. The response times were good, the arenas pretty colourful and every single woman character had ginormous boobs which the tight fitting clothes were struggling to contain! It was just outright hilarious by how overly sexulised they were, and in essence, I just ended up playing female characters for that fact. Hell if I’m going to be terrible at a fighting game, I may as well enjoy the view!

Whether or not this is worth picking up, cannot really say as no idea what the training or Single Player portions will give us, but we should be wary if they pull the same stunt as what occurred with Street Fighter 5 earlier in the year where the game was released in a half finished state and it took months for all the content to show up.

The PS4 Pro

WOOOOOOO! New shiny shiny things we can’t afford!

And finally, despite showing this in the video, it was worth showing the PS4 Pro being shown via an automated demo for the first time in the UK since it’s reveal in New York a couple of weeks before. They used a large TV to show the differences with lighting etc, and yes the image was impressive. Will it worth the upgrade? Hard to say right now given the lack of ability to try it out right now.

And that’s about it for this year, everything covered on the day, has now been covered for your dining and dancing pleasure. Like most venues, the food was overpriced and you struggled to get anything for less than £5. There were also far less freebies than last year, save for a couple of keyrings and some popcorn being given out by 2K for Mafia 3.

We will finish off with a picture gallery of some silly things I managed to do during the day;

It was bound to happen sooner or later…..

At no point did I harm anyone with this foam scythe….. pinky promise!

I will never make it on this Ready, Steady, Cook show……