At E for All, the longest wait for any game was Metal Gear Solid 4 (Brawl had shorter play sessions and 4 players at each station). The hour-long wait was well worth it though as Konami did its best to give everyone a worthwhile experience, even if you weren’t very good at the game. Once the long wait was over, Ray and I (and 10 others) were escorted into a room with 12 stacks of sandbags, each with a set of headphones and a Sixaxis controller on it. These were our seats for a 10-15 minute gameplay demonstration given by a Konami employee. This demonstration showed us both the similarities in control with previous MGS titles as well as new features we would see in our time with the game (like the ‘Threat Ring’). Kudos to Konami for going the extra mile with the briefing before playing the demo. Honestly, an expo isn’t exactly the ideal place to enjoy a new video game, so familiarizing us with the game before our short 15 minutes of play definitely helped us enjoy our time more.
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I put this little image together in Photoshop pretty quickly to give everyone a better visual of where we’re at as far as character announcements go. Is it just me, or does this help show how there are a ton of characters being kept secret? (both new and old…)

Hidden away from obvious eyes behind the main Smash Bros. TV was another one showing at least 10 minutes of various Adventure mode clips, including both its gameplay and cutscenes. Those cutscenes are rad, and I managed to take some video of my favorite clip involving DK and Diddy Kong fighting off a few Bullet Bills. It’s short, but sweet. Take a look:

Upon walking into the Expo, we immediately noticed giant Smash Bros banners and posters hanging from the ceiling, including the strange snow-cone shaped ones which are advertising for the DS games directly below them.

The Smash Bros. Brawl area worked like this: people waited in line by sitting in a large set of bleachers while watching people play on the flat screen TV. After every match, 16 people would be moved to a four Smash Bros stations where they would battle it out for two minutes. Each winner from the four stations would move on to play a “championship round” on the big screen everyone in the bleachers is watching. Here are some images from when I was sitting there.

The unfortunate (yet hilarious) part of this setup were the two booth babes doing their best to give the “play-by-play” of the match on the big screen. They were very much into trying to entertain everyone, but they clearly did not really know the game. Saying the names of characters once selected, or counting off the last five seconds of the match were easy for them. But making small talk was not. They would try to get the crowd riled up by having us do the wave, or asking us questions such as “what’s your favorite final smash?” and “who owns this game on Gamecube?” At one point they wanted us to ask them a question. Really? Why would the experts ask the questions?

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Ray and I went to E for All on Friday and will spend the rest of this week sharing our impressions of the show, the games we played, the Video Games Live concert, and some pictures of it all. We’ll even talk about it in our podcast this week and maybe even our comic, so check back for updates throughout the week!

[Update] I’ve added a few more games to Ray’s list below that he missed.

Here’s a list of the games we were able to play below. Included in this list is obviously Brawl. I got a good solid eight minutes of gameplay in, and would have had two more had the power not gone out! I’ll talk more about Brawl in more detail whenever Tim gets done wasting our time and starts uploading some pictures.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS)
Civilization Revolution (Xbox360)
Dewy’s Adventure (Wii)
DK Barrell Blast (Wii)
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (DS)
Flash Focus (DS)
Guitar Hero III (PS3 / Xbox360 / Wii)
Link’s Crossbow Training (Wii)
Mario Party DS
Medal of Honor Heroes 2 (Wii)
Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3)
The Orange Box: Team Fortress 2 (Xbox360)
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (Wii)
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)

Ray and I are both completionists when it comes to videogames, so we are just dying to get all the ship parts in Phantom Hourglass. Looking at some of the forums out there, many of you are also looking to complete your collection, so let’s help each other out! Leave your Phantom Hourglass Friend Code in the comments below and we promise to add you. Here are our Friend Codes for y’all to add as well:
Tim: 120 371 687 656
Ray: 081 717 962 761

Well, after lots of work this weekend, we finally have our first episode of our weekly podcast (mp3 format too) up for your listening pleasure. We hope everyone will give it a chance as we are going to try and make it fun for everyone. We know there are a lot of podcasts out there that are just two guys talking about the same old stuff for an hour or more, so ours will be short (15-20 minutes usually), with quick segments to keep things flowing nicely. Anyway, we’d love your feedback. Let us know what you want to hear, what segments you like, what you don’t like, even tell us how much you hate our voices! We hope to keep improving it as we go along as we’ve (hopefully) done with the comic itself.

I plan on putting a lot of hard work into this weekly podcast so that you guys really enjoy it. Like Tim said, we’re trying very hard to not make common podcasting mistakes, and all I ask is that you subscribe and enjoy! Serious!
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 Episode 1: Apparition Timepiece: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Episode 1: Apparition Timepiece: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve almost collected everything on my second time through, so I figured it was time to finally write a review.