Lyris Lite :: Operation: Secrets & Lies (ECTS 2004)

Back in our final year of high school, me and my friend Adam had plenty of time to kill in Geography class. Adam has the novelty of being the only other person I know that actually owns a GameCube, so we talked about video games a lot when we should have been working on some piece-of-shit dissertation. The whole talk of games gave me the idea of flying down to London over the summer of 2004 and trying to get into ECTS, the European Computer Trade Show. This was only fuelled by the fact that most of the work in our Geography class entailed counting how many people walked by a local hamlet sothat we could enter the data into a computer and do some boring calculation on it.

ECTS used to be like THE European version of America's E3, but in recent years it's gone downhill. That didn't really matter to us back then because it was either a choice of school work or ECTS. And if we chose ECTS, we could talk more about video games anyway. It also meant that I'd get to visit the airport, and I like airports because they have lots of nice men and women from many lands. So we chose ECTS.

We wound up booking flights at the last minute and after hearing that ECTS 2004 was supposedly going to suck, I managed to acquire VIP tickets to Game Stars Live, all thanks to a nice guy I met on an otherwise not very nice internet games forum called Liam. This meant that my discount airline ticket was not going to go to waste. Go me!

Before we jetted out, Adam decided to gloat and advertise our little planned misadventure on a now-defunct gaming forum. The post went something like this.

This is me and my butler boarding our private jet.

Game Stars Live and ECTS were not the only events taking place in London at the time. In the same conference hall as Game Stars, a new event called EGN was also taking place. It doesn't take a genius to work out that having three seperate gaming events in the same city, at the same time, is a bit of a silly idea. Then when you consider that Game Stars Live and EGN are affiliated and are within a minutes' walking distance of each other, and the former of the events was designed with financial profit in mind (members of the public were later allowed to enter for the price of £12) - it begins to look like the whole organized mess was part of a plan to steal the show (literally) from ECTS and its organizer, United Business Media.

Like ECTS, EGN was reserved only for members of the gaming press (although we didn't bother getting tickets to this as we thought two shows was enough). This whole messy situation was unofficially dubbed into the convenient "London Games Week". So, me and Adam arrived in the merry city of London for its games week in the wee hours of the morning on September 1st, for the beginning of the show. After managing to find our way around (mainly Adam's doing), we managed to get aboard the Docklands Light Railway that was taking us to ExCeL, a fairly recently constructed conference hall on what I seem to recall being the outskirts of the city. We had a conversation on the rail carriage with the really friendly conductor guy who was in charge of operating the announcement system. He sounded unbelievably British which isn't at all surprising considering that we were in the capital city of the place, although sometimes I just had to smile and nod while I guessed what he was saying to us.

These poor saps (us included) actually believed the sign that said we'd be playing Halo 2 in 60 minutes.

When we got there (slightly late), we ran into the fancy looking glass building and into the cool air-conditioned lobby. The Game Stars Live people took our VIP tickets and let us walk by. Success! Getting in was being like a kid in a candy store. There was almost nobody else there despite the fact that we were late. We ran around like excited little headless chickens and leading the way, I looked for wherever Halo 2 might happened to have been. That's when we saw a big ugly line that had formed while we were frantically trying to find the railway. With that in mind, we decided to check out what the other exhibitors had for us to make dodgy camcorded movies of first, and come back just before the gates opened to the public.

The first thing we poked our noses into was Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Although I wasn't too thrilled to see the game running in Composite NTSC video (a no-no for getting the game to look its best, especially on flat panel TVs), it still looked pretty stunning. I didn't exactly lap up the earlier Prince game when I played it on the PC, and that's why I'm still not sure about this one. It was fun all right, but I doubt Ubi Soft are going to stray much from what was, let's face it, a pretty popular formula, just to appease the people like me who didn't get it.

After almost filling a memory card full of crappy movies, we stumbled over and found the booth of Electronic Arts, everyone's favorite purveyor of mediocre interactive entertainment. But, forget what I said - because we were greeted by the company's latest acquisition, and what an acquisition it is - the excellent Burnout series. Seeing videos of this had me dribbling enough already, but Burnout 3 is beyond brilliant. Some have expressed concern with the direction EA have taken the series in - adding supposedly shitty licensed music, and billboard adverts in-game for other EA racers - and I couldn't disagree, but I'm far more concerned with the fact that this doesn't appear to be destined for the GameCube any time soon. We got to play a two-player game of Burnout 3, but with everything still to see at the show, it was (perversely enough) hard to concentrate on actually playing the games.

Eager to see what else was on show, we found EA's new GoldenEye game. The original GoldenEye on the N64 is still a favorite with retro gamers, although in all honesty even at the time of release, its low frame rate stopped me from enjoying it. EA now hold the license and have so far been intent on milking it by producing average games featuring the likeness of Pierce Brosnan, but from playing this for a short period of time it didn't feel like anything too bad. Knowing EA and knowing fans of the original, it's probably not going to better Rare's effort, but I'm still going to pay close attention to this one to see how it turns out. (What we played was pretty unfinished - even the menu options showed through pieces of programming code.)

After crashing World of Warcraft, and briefly checking out The Sims 2 (as well as some booth babes), we headed on over to the over-18s area which was guarded by a swanky-looking security guy who asked me for some form of ID. Inside we found games far, far tamer than the red reflective windows outside would suggest - Mortal Kombat: Deception was one of them, as was Free Radical's new game, Second Sight. The version we played featured little to no violence whatsoever, so locking it away from a few of the younger visitors seems nothing more than a hysterical reaction to the "Manhunt" tabloid scandal.

Second Sight, coming soon from Free Radical.

Second Sight has the trademark Free Radical look of slightly cartoon-like, plasticy characters, which sounds like a put-down, but isn't actually intended that way. It seriously does look exactly like Timesplitters in third person, minus the psuedo-violence. A guy also in the booth showed me how to use the character's telekinesis to activate a button on the other side of the wall to open a door. It seems like another high quality game to sink into and is releasing very soon on all three consoles.

When they're not writing technologically nonsensical DVD reviews, IGN are in London, playing with camcorders! I hope the digital film print that comes out of their video camera doesn't have too much dot crawl on it, because to avoid dot crawl, you need to use your DVD player's telephone socket to send the video to the TV.

After this and playing a LAN game of some unreleased PC military sniper-rifleish combat game... you know the type... we decided it was time to line for Halo 2. Oh boy. This is (regrettably) going to be the unforgettable part of the show - the 2.5 hour wait we had to entail first. To make it more excrutiating, we had to stand all of the way and hold our sleep-deprived bodies upright, while at the same time contend with the annoyance of the same 5-minute gameplay video looping over and over on a large projection screen. If that wasn't annoying enough, the video featured the most irritating squeaky voiced janitor/programmer/Bungie goon that anyone has ever heard talking over it. "Oooooh, TAKE IT!" he squealed as he blew up a vehicle. It wasn't long before us and from what I could gather in my half-dead state, other people in the line, started making fun of the poor guy. To keep us entertained, three Master Chiefs paraded up and down a walkway on the show floor and posed for pictures. One of them even waved back at me, how cool is that? How many people can say Master Chief waved at them? (And probably thought "fuck off, kid" at the same time?)

Hello there young earthling! I hope you own an Xbox. You had better.

When we were finally let in, we were pretty dismayed at the fact that we'd still have to stand up while we played the game. This wasn't a problem though, because the whole epic feeling of getting to play the game, complete with the posh sounding pre-game reminder of this fact, made us more excited than exasperated. We played a Deathmatch (or "Slayer" type game) on the Zanzibar level - apparently designed originally for Capture the Flag gaming, which might explain why the game mechanics didn't feel 100% right. I have to say, Halo 2 has some way to go to avoid being a slight disappointment in my book. I'd expect the frame rate to be upgraded from that of the original game, but there was no improvement to be seen here. The aliasing (jaggies) problems that I found far less annoying were here too. That said, this was the build of the game left over from E3 in May, so it's probably already been improved upon since then.

Since I deleted the camera picture to make room for more video later, the fact that Adam won the 5-on-5 team deathmatch went undocumented. So there's no hard feelings that I passed up this amazing victory for a few megabytes of CF card space, here's a special commemorative image:

After that, we got some lunch at some cheap burger bar stand at ExCeL, poked around some more, then picked up all our collected goodies, NGage blow-up phalluses (seriously, that's what they looked like) and Nvidia keyrings, and called it a day. How would ECTS measure up the next day? Only time would tell!

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