Except when it is! And especially when we get some BFBC2: Vietnam footage via the international eye of GameTrailers, a sinister eye which is currently floating silently at the shoulders of NYCC attendees and beaming back these pictures. That’s the New York Comic Convention, of course. They don’t just talk comics these days, no sir. And bless their juxtapositions of words and pictures, our undead editor Kieron Gillen is out there being stalked by X-Men fans as I write these soon-to-be-forgotten words. I bet he hasn’t played any Battlefield. He’s rubbish at FPS games. There. I said it.

Anyway, look at this! More footage of Vietnam, and more people being ended by tanks and helicopters. Ugh, I am going to end up playing a hundred hours of that without blinking. I should probably blink more often.
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[NYCC is getting ever more distant, so this is probably the last of the round-ups of games I played swiftly there. Unless I do a round-up post of the things I played hyper-quick or just watched. And… go!]

This is a Comicon. Clearly, I couldn’t help but play these two. With the two competitors for the MMO Superhero crown within twenty or so metres of one another, it makes a lot of sense to play one, then immediately head over to the other in a feat of superhuman videogames journalism. By which I mean, playing a game and saying what I think of it. I’m hardly Batman.
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[When I was at NYCC, I found some time to have a quick crack at the games on the floor. Quick. As in, 10-15 minutes tops. I’m writing up some of them, before it all fades, fades away.]

A bit of an odd couple this pair, but – were I forced to conjure a link – I’d pair them as tangential twins of modern development harking back to a previous age of PC Gaming. Dragon Age is Baldur’s Gate re-concieved after Bioware’s console dalliances with modern technology. Battlefield 1943 is Battlefield 1942, but with a technological reboot and some minor tweaking.
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[When I was at NYCC, I found some time to have a quick crack at a load of games on the floor. Quick cracks. I’m going to write up the ones that stick in the memory.]

If anyone on the development team is hanging around the Ubisoft booth, you’re glad that they’re not actually standing beside me and watching. It’s about 10 minutes before the doors of the con close, and the early-twenty-something guy on the controls have spent at least the last ten minutes circling aimlessly in the sky. Really trying has long since drained away. He’s destroyed two of the three drones which he’s been charged with shooting in, but the third is proving elusive. Occasionally a missile collides with him. Occasionally he dodges one. He seems to take down the last one down by some semi-random method, puts down the controls at the end of this abstract training sequence before the mission proper and steps away into the thinning crowd, cursing about the bloody camera.
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[I was at New York Comic Con last week. Between doing what I do at comic cons (i.e. drink), I found some time to have a quick crack at a load of games on the floor. Quick cracks. I’m going to write up the ones that stick in the memory.]

A kid in his early/mid teens – 14 tops – is watching me play for all my time with Prototype. As we walk away, he virtually gasps “I am so getting that”. I can only agree, and I’m not that surprised that he said so. Despite being an adult game, it’s the sort of adult game that not-too-strictly-adults are going to adore.
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Following on from this morning’s demonstration of Star Trek Online’s character creator, there’s finally more footage of Champions Online. Since Kieron brought you the definitive coverage of the game so far last July, it’s been pretty quiet. However, a very brief glimpse appeared at New York Comic Con, and it’s below.

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Could there be a more appropriate game to show at NYCC? These DC Universe developer walkthroughs contain a substantial mass of in-game material, including some villains doing their evil unpleasantness. Also some PvP in which a dude gets frozen into a block of ice and then bounced off a wall.

I’m quitely optimistic about this one – it doesn’t look particularly startling, but I’m hoping it will make a fun port of call for pervert-suit action. Quite whether it will be this, or Champions Online, which takes the next-generation super-crown, it’s hard to say.

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Prototype is back on course for release in June, and has had a big showing at NYCC. It’s perhaps a little less impressive than it was when we saw it a year ago, but hopefully all that extra time will pay off. The three-way biologic war on the streets of NYC still looks ludicrously violent. I think Gillen is going to unload some thoughts on this next week, having seen it at the show, so I’ll leave you to the walkthroughs.

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The New York Comic Convention (which is being attended by our own man-of-at-least-two-talents, Kieron Gillen) is in full swing, and this year it is being attended by many videogame companies. This means a minor deluge of videos from various sources, some of which I’ll post up here. First up: Battlefield 1943, with a developer narrating. Now isn’t this interesting: signs of that Battlefield Heroes parallel development breaking through here? Quite possibly, it does look rather bright and smooth and beautiful. Also far away from the painterly militarism of Battlefield 2. I can hear the howls of anti-console anguish from here.

Additionally, there’s this comment in the GameTrailers thread: “no blood? i wish u could see his body teared apart” Er hmm. (There is blood.)

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