Recount of the gaming trade show in London

Unlike Japan and the US, Europe does not have a large, official games show. This is mostly due to the decline of the ETS (or was it ECS... I can't even remember the name now) show, and the fact that no show has yet to take it's place as the show for the EU.
One of those that are trying is the Game Stars Alive show. This year, I went along to see what was there.
Transport looked like it would be a pain when looking online, but that only went to show that the internet still sucks at route-finding. With only a little research, it was actually quite easy to just go to London, navigate the various stations and jump on the next train that was going our way. The only thing we actually had to plan was the train to and from Waterloo, which only left every hour or two.

The busy show floor

Once there, we found the event was a little smaller than we would have expected (give it a break, it's only a few years old), however it still covered a massive room

Me playing one of the demos

The first thing that caught my eye was the Prince of Persia 2, so here comes a quick impression: The developers seemed to have moved away a little from the platforming and puzzling (although those elements are still there), and tried to bring a few Devil May Cry / Ninja Gaiden ideas in. The end result is a hack and slash battle system which played very well - lots of cool things you could do quite easily. I noticed a couple of annoyances with the camera at the very start when it's direction is fixed, however it looked like that was just for that point - later on, you could change it as usual.

Paper Mario - the graphics are amazing, and animate so well

We went for the Nintendo booth next. Despite there not being much new here - mostly E3 demos, with a few other things - and no DS either, this was still probably the best stand in my opinion. Nintendo had a ton of games for display, most of which were exclusives whereas all the other stands overlapped in places. E3 demos were still nice seeing as there was no way that I could go to E3, and I didn't really care much for the DS anyway.
Paper Mario was there, and boy did that game look nice. The gameplay looked similar to it's predecessor, which is probably a good thing considering how great that was.
My brother had a quick go of the new Zelda GBA game - it looked good, if you like the GBA Zeldas then you'll like this too.
Had a quick go on Pikmin 2, although not very long - the game has been released now, after all. I'd rather wait until I got the time to play it and then buy it.
Me and my brother tried Metroid Prime 2. The vs mode was fun, however the actual game seemed to be just more of the same to us.

I pose with Samus - a great picture

We continued to look around. There was a big Konami and EA section (with not much interesting there), an EA golf game complete with a small golf course next to it, and a Tony Hawks game with a skating park set up next to it.

Vodafone had a formula one car set up in their area (no idea why...)

Further looking around also uncovered booths for Future publishing and the Sun newspaper. Future I can understand, they do games mags, but why the Sun..? Also, Neither Sony themselves or Sega had shown up, which was a let down considering how good the Nintendo booth was.

It wasn't just games - peripherals were there too. This one let you play beat-um-ups by actually kicking and punching in the air.

As far as the famous booth babes went, there were a couple around, however they didn't manage to draw too much attention. Of more interest were the people dressed up as various games characters, and posing for pictures. Finally, the largest booth in the show, we visited the xbox booth.

Unlike the others, which were usually surrounded by walls with games, the walls ran throughout most of the xbox

The main interest in the xbox booth was probably Halo 2. Unfortunately, there was a queue. A long queue. The rest of the convention had managed to have queues no longer than one person in length, sometimes even no queues at all, which was quite impressive. Even to pick up our tickets and get into the place was very quick.

The queue for Halo 2

Alas, there was a very long queue for Halo 2. Thinking it would take about 40 minutes, we start to queue up.

At the other end of the queue, at last!

Two and a half hours later - two and a bloody half hours later - we finally got to the other side. Did I mention that we had to stand the whole time? This was a hundred times longer than any other queue there. During the time, I had read halfway through my book that I had brought along to keep me sane. And then the kick in the pants - we only get 5 minutes playing time. This was the main attraction, but I'd say it was seriously bungled - nice going Microsoft.
Anyway, onto Halo 2 itself. We got to play one map - Zanzibar - against another side. I probably didn't do that much for our side - I kept getting the jump button mixed up with the grenade button as the default controls have them the other way round than I am used to, and I killed as many people as I was killed myself, giving me a grand score of 0 - but we did manage to defend our flag and win the match (I think...). More importantly, I got to try out how the game played.
The controls and the feel of the game are identical to Halo 1. Most of the weapons are the same, or similar but with various upgrades. However, there were a ton of new additions and improvements. The duel wield system - where instead of throwing grenades your secondary fire switches to your second weapon - some new weapons - for example, a small machine gun that can be duel wielded, or used on it's own with a 2x zoom - and just a general load of improvements. It looks very good - can't wait for this one.

Me and my new friends ^_^

Oh, and I got to pose with a couple of Master Chiefs on the way out too =)

A couple of imperial storm-troopers say a friendly hello to my brother.

Oh, and then there was Star Wars Battlefront, which came with storm-troopers.
I was initially not very excited about it (I have a habit of ignoring Star Wars games), so I'd been playing no attention to this, but then I found out that it was made by the same people as Battlefields 1942. (I don't play this game much, I play PSO instead, but my brother does a lot and so I can see that it is very good.) And any last lingering doubts disappeared as I played the game. Just as good as Battlefields, only with Star Wars, Ewoks, Chicken walkers, speeder bikes, and the like.

Anyway, that's everything we saw. Hope we can go back next year, apart from the wait for Halo (and no Sega or Sony), it was all very good.