Blog was written over the course of a 12 hour journey, 2 different airplanes, 26,000 vertical feet, and in 9 different states. Awww yeah. After a nightmarish formatting error on GS, I've decided to let you deal with the awkward spacing that is provided by GS.

Let me begin by stating that I am currently 26,000 feet above New England, on a US Airways flight to visit my father in Williamsburg, Virginia. It's a tiny airplane, 2 seats on each side, and many of the people around me are from my home town. I learned this as we were discussing the different exploits of our now world famous marching band. I'll leave it to you to figure out where I'm from :)

Now that the flight attendant has brought me my ginger ale I can begin

I was largely impressed with the vast majority of what I was able to demo at the expo center. In fact, almost all of what I wanted to try I was able to do so on the very first day. Right off the bat, 4 am on Friday morning, I picked up my two friends, one of which was pictured in the previous link, John, and another, Sean. We drove to the T station near my aunt's house where we would be staying in Belmont, MA, on the train, destined for South Station, where we would be catching a bus for the 10 minute walk to the Boston expo center. What we didn't know at the time is that waiting for and riding the silver line bus to the expo center takes longer and goes farther than just walking to the convention center.

Once the doors opened to the convention center, shortly after 8 am, we were herded like cattle into a huge room where we were cued up until 10 am. For those of you counting, that means I had been awake for 6 hours. For those of you in college, that means it was dinner time.

But, once they unleashed the flood it was every man, woman, child, and costumed crusader for themselves. Actually, day one my buddies and I met a couple who were there on their honeymoon. He had a full-body hoodie (crazy, right? And it gets crazier) of Boba Fett (Holy Balls); she was dressed in a surprisingly-accurate costume of Princess Laia from the Return of the Jedi.

I have no real plans to go in any order in what I was able to demo because, frankly, I was blown away by everything I saw. There's just no way I can remember the exact order of how everything went. I'm going to start with the games I did not get to play personally but either I watched people play them due to incredibly long lines or my buddies played them.

Crysis 2 (single-player, 3D)

Not really sure why they wanted this in 3D. I have the multi-player demo on my desktop and there's really no need to put the Crysis series in 3D. Single-player campaign has you running through the streets of some generic US city (probably New York), fighting off the alien swarms. If you played Crysis and enjoyed it, you'll probably like this one.

Mortal Kombat

I didn't get a chance to play this myself but I watched several matches. MK has now gone to the 3rd dimension and with 3D glasses you can watch your favorite MK fighter get decapitated by Reptile in glorious 1080p and in 3D because you all know Reptile is the best character in the whole series. Bloody and brutal fatalities, Baraka is back, and the fact that it's already banned in several countries means we're in for a treat.

Portal 2

There was a video shown to those willing to brave the 3 hour wait for the booth; and, as I was 150 miles away playing a 4 hour concert at a jazz festival at the time my buddies were in line, I was unable to see it. They told me it introduced two new characters, the CEO and a new robot, and contained typical Portal humor. I saw some gameplay of it but anyone who wants this game already has seen it so not too much to report on. I did already buy it. Actually, Sean wanted me to pay for my PAX ticket with the purchase of Portal 2 for him so I got the 2 pack and received 2 free copies of Portal. That brings my Portal 1 counter up to 3 :D

Serious Sam Indie

I didn't get to play these, but I had fun watching them. Really hard to describe if you don't know the series. The one I saw was a platformer where you play as one of the headless bombermen and you "mario" your way to Serious Sam by means of traditional platformer ****

Arcana Heart 3

Very, very briefly saw this one. If you know the AH series, you've already seen more on this than me. Traditional AH game with awkwardly young anime girls with way too little covering them. Makes for an awkward game to play with people you don't know.

Right, now for the ones I did get to try out.

Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D/ 3DS

My one 3DS experience was a double-edged sword. The good: the visuals on the 3DS are incredible. I would have never expected such a small device to be able to provide such cool visuals. The 3D effect still blows my mind. My jaw dropped the first time I saw it, in fact, I honestly have no idea on how to describe how the hell it works. It looked like there were two screens on the top screen.

The bad...there were several things I didn't like about either the game or the console. For one, the console is too damn small. The shoulder buttons are tiny. The GBA:SP had larger buttons. The console is super thin and I felt like I was going to snap it in half. The analog stick is just awkward to use, though it was likely due to the console being strapped to a pylon of concrete so nobody would steal the $250 piece of beautiful.

The game had it's flaws, too. It's more than likely that these issues were just because it was the demo version, though, but I feel like addressing them anyway. For my play, I chose HUNK from Chris, Claire, HUNK, and Krauser, and I chose the Pueblo level from RE4 (the other choice was the equivalent level in RE5). The first criticism is a bit nit-picky because I'm a die-hard RE fan, destined to empty my wallet for any new game made by Capcom with zombies in it, but in the Pueblo level, THERE SHOULDN'T BE ANY CULTISTS. Why would the cultists be burning the body of the Policia that escorted you when all of the cultists stay in the castle with Salazar? ¿Queeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?

When you draw your weapon, the game zooms in to over your character's wrist, which takes away from all of what mainstream media calls "improvements" to the series by letting you free aim. The issue with this is that you can no longer see what is about to hit you from the side as your vision goes from 180 degrees to about 25. This also makes it difficult to aim for multiple targets because you can't see the entire area of spread of your weapons.

Another issue I had is that the action button is the same as the run button which is the same as the use button. You might be thinking, "why, dubel, would they map the same button to 3 different things?" which is a brilliant question; one which they addressed in the only way they knew how...

With a button that makes your goddamn character shake their goddamn head. Yes, you read this correctly. The Y button is mapped to run, 180 spin, pick up, context-sensitive action commands, and a few others. The X button is mapped to shaking your head. I'm hitting the X button right now...

Right after that last sentence they began landing procedures so as I write this I'm sitting in the boarding zone for my next flight in Philadelphia Airport. Any inconsistencies in the continuity of my writing should be written off as the product of my addled mind.

Another problem I have with the game, likely due to the fact that I got 100k+ points in every mercs level from all three mercs games (not 100k + in the original [the original being RE:3, which until now you didn't know had a mercs mode]) and memorized them all, is that (holy crap this was a long sentence), at least in the demo version of the Pueblo level, most of the areas were blocked off. I couldn't go into a single building. I tried to! Most of them were blocked off with obscure rubble that didn't look like it belonged at all. One door was blocked by a pile of rocks and, if you remember the first level of mercs in RE4, there weren't even stones large enough to bat away the villagers with, let alone block an entire doorway. Another had perfectly cut 2-by-4s, haphazardly strewn about blocking the entire doorway to a room. Even the long path leading to the next area that you could go up was blocked off. What the hell, Capcom? What the hell?

Aside from that, the game looked and handled pretty well and, aside from controls that were awkward even for a Resident Evil game, it was pretty good overall.

Continued in following posts