Yesterday myself, Trebor and Popcorn went to EGX 2015 hosted at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England. You could say EGX is essentially the the UK's equivalent of E3, except its open to the general public and not just people in the media. After checking in and getting our wrist bands the first thing we did was head over over to the Xbox stand to play some Halo 5: We had to wait around 45 mins, however the staff were really friendly and talking to us and others as we waited. We got to play a full 25-30 minute game of Halo 5 which made it more than worth the wait. 24 Xbox One Devkits were all setup in one big game Warzone with 12 people on each team. If you have ever played Unreal Tournament 2004 Warzone could be best described as is a good mix of the assault / onslaught games modes on UT. I can see games of that lasting a long time on Xbox Live, it was difficult for either team to make any progress towards winning, however a lot of fun at the same time. I think once people have played a bit and are at different skill levels it would be easier for one team to push ahead as you can win in various different ways. It was certainly nice playing in a balanced games of Halo though, something i find rarely happens on Xbox Live. I think its safe to say Halo 5 multiplayer is going to be big! After that we attended a talk / demonstration of the new Hitman (2016) game, I found it quite interesting to hear the developers insights in to the game and it was nice to sit down for 20 minutes by this point. After we had some food we had a go on Starwars Battlefront, which will be released in November 2015. I'm not sure if i'd buy the game, however it was fun enough to play a "hoard" style multiplayer mode. Essentially you and another player head to defeat waves of enemies, which increased in difficulty. This was simply a local game played split screen on a PlayStation 4. Having never played on a PlayStation 4 before I have to say the controller seemed a nice improvement over the PS3's controller. The props for Starwars in that area were pretty good too! Next we went over to the bright and colorful looking Nintendo stand, I must credit Nintendo on their stand at EGX, it looked really good and the staff genuinely appeared to be the most happy people in the world. I walked in and a girl comes over and gives me a paper Mario hat to wear, looking around the majority of the people at the stand all have Mario hats which was something a bit different. Then another staff member starts talking to me about Super Mario Maker and invited me over to a Wii U to have a go on it. He went off to greet other people but kept coming back to give me tips and talk about Mario related stuff. I can certainly see the Nintendo stand been very family friendly at the weekend when i'm sure loads of younger kids would be there. Again with Super Mario Maker I easily got a good half an hour on a Wii-U to play about with that. Microsoft did a bit of a talk / giveaway hosted by @AceyBongos, they gave away loads of merchandise and had the art director (cant remember his exact name / title) from 343 talk a bit about Halo 5 and the Xbox One. Trebor won an Xbox towel, which he apparently going to use every day! Rise of the Tomb Raider was also really good to play, essentially if you enjoyed "Tomb Raider" released in 2013 its more of the same. The EGX demo of the game was probably around 20-25 minutes long depending on how quickly you were able to solve the puzzles. I was impressed that no one kicked you out, you were essentially left alone to play at your own leisure. EGX also had an area with just about every retro console in you could think of. I was impressed to see an Amiga 1200 with Treasure Island Dizzy on, which I had to sit-down and play for a bit as the younger me totally loved the Dizzy series. (Off topic, however Dizzy - Prince of the Yolkfolk had been re-made for Android) The retro area was generally quieter and more relaxed compared to the rest of EGX so it was nice just to spend a bit of time there. Sega consoles in the retro area from the Master System to the Dreamcast, playing each Sonic game released over the years: The same was also done with Nintendo consoles for Mario and Mario Kart. The retro area had some old shoot-em-up games too along with some other consoles i'd never even seen in person before. I had my Nintendo 3DS in my bag with me and managed to streetpass a lot of people, I imagine a lot of other people had the same idea as i did see quite a few people with 3DS's out when waiting to play a game. If you need the EON ticket for Pokemon, or another streetpass unlockable you would probably easily obtain it at EGX. Around 30 people potentially got the EON ticket from me anyway! To conclude it would be impossible to see everything at EGX in just a day, however I feel I got to see everything I wanted to without been rushed, getting way more time than I expected to play the games I wanted to. I did honestly think i'd get 5 mins max on each game, however that wasn't the case at all. I'd say EGX is certainly worth attending if you can go, at £20 a person it's certainly great value for money. I have no other gaming convention experience to compare EGX to, however all I can say is I had a great time and i'd certainly go again. Below is a gallery containing some other photos I took at EGX 2015:
That must've been an interesting event. Judging from the photos, it feels more easy-going and less 'hasty' looking than E3. At least I see some walking space inbetween the people! that retro corner would've been my favorite place to be, playing on those CRT screens must feel nostalgic! My experience with gaming events isn't that good. The biggest one in NL is FirstLook which was kind of cramped back when I attended it years ago for world's 2nd Duke Nukem Forever demo booth. I didn't like waiting for 4 hours+ to play a game that I could play in a mere months anyway, but it was nice experiencing such an event with other passionate gamers for once.
It was pretty easy going to be honest, you could walk about without any real issues, everything was nicely spaced out. The retro area was nice and spacious too, I should have took some more photos of that, the amount of retro consoles there was very impressive. The longest we waited for anything was probably Halo 5, even then that was less than an hour and for around 25-30 mins of play time it wasn't an issue at all. Like you mentioned I went there fully expecting to have to wait 4 hours to play a game for a couple of minutes, it could well have been like that at the weekend. We all took a day off work on the Thursday to go, which was the first day of the event. Our thinking was most people would probably take the Friday off work, or go at the weekend when students were off. The atmosphere was really good, you could tell everyone there loved games and it's probably the only time you see adults walking about and playing on handheld consoles such as the 3DS.