At 5am on Sunday morning, ahbiao, his wife, Jeanie and myself started our journey (well actually not the actual journey because we went to eat breakfast at Syed first) to X06 Singapore... After travelling on the highway at ridiculous speeds and several stops for drinks and bah kut teh later, we finally reached Singapore at 11am... As there was an incident with the autopass, we were stuck at the Transport Authority till 1130am... We then proceeded to Raffles as that was venue of the event... and then we saw it... the tents that made up X06...
The white tents which looked alot smaller on the outside
First impressions that we got when we saw the tents ranged from, "Its... urm so... urm small" to "We came all this way for that???"... Thankfully, after some "negotiations" at the registration counter, we managed to claim our door gifts (I was told that we missed out on the door gifts because we didn't attend the closed door event)... When we finally got in, we were hyped but didn't see what all the fuss was about... They had game stations showcasing arcade games like Frogger, Geometry Wars, Digdug and Uno and some stations showcasing retails games like DOA4 and PDZ...
But that all changed when we moved into the next tent... Gamestations were showcasing Gears of War, Crackdown, Tony Hawk Project 8, Vampire Rain, Star Trek, Viva Pinata, Need for Speed Carbon, Gundam, DOA Xtreme 2, Bionicle Heroes and Superman!!! Due to GOW, the trip was worthwhile...
GOW has to be the most immersive title I've ever played... the cutscenes and gameplay are seamless, the character models believable and life-like, the story fast-paced and exciting and the action non-stop... even ahbiao's wife and Jeanie said "PWAH!!!"
ahbiao waiting patiently to play GOW
The other games I tried didn't really cut it except for Viva Pinata... Jeanie gave it a thumbs up as well, so we'll just have to pick it up once it comes out...
I thought that Need for Speed Carbon was a little flaky as the cars felt like they were floating in the air... and they all handle in more or less the same way... hopefully the retail version has better handling characteristics for each car...
Superman, DOA Xtreme 2 and Gundam just plained sucked...
Tony Hawk was good but its just a rehash of a tried and tested formula with better graphics...
Vampire Rain was good fun but the frame rate was just bad bad bad... and it looks worse than a ps2 game...
Bionicle, Star Trek and Crackdown showed promise but they don't seem to be games that I would play for more than 30 mins...
After playing the games, taking in some of the stage shows and trying to get some freebies from the EA Need for Speed Challenge, came the shopping... The last tent had some decent deals on the 360 and its games... notable mentions are new titles going for SGD 7.70 off its retail price of SGD 69.90, Xbox Live Vision + One game for SGD 84.90 and the Holiday bundle for SGD 699.00...
Managed to get Splinter Cell : Double Agent and Marvel Ultimate Alliance before we proceeded for a late lunch... Much of the discussion during lunch centered around GOW and the speediest methods of getting our hands on it when it comes out...
Lunch was quickly followed by shopping at Funan and some snacking in Raffles City... no good deals around town so we proceeded back to X06 to do some serious shopping... well actually ahbiao did the serious shopping... I just watched some idiot play Totemball on stage...
By the time we got everything sorted and stuffed into the car it was past 8pm... Due to the shitload of stuff in his car we had to hold our breath at Customs because if they say the couple thousand SGD worth of merchandise, we would have been bitch slapped with a blinking huge tax invoice...
Some turbo vrrOOOooM later, we were back slightly past midnight... Not bad for a Sunday, don't you think???
All my swag from X06
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