Eurogamer Expo 2011 - Game Impressions

We played quite a lot of the games on show at the Eurogamer Expo, or at least a majority of the ones we were interested in. A lot of the games that were getting huge queues like Skyrim and all the first person shooters were not on our interest list (that's right, boo at this man) so excluding the PSVita we didn't have to queue up much. Here's what i thought of the games I checked out.

Sonic Generations - They had both Green Hill and City Escape to try out on both PS3 and 360. I was told these were quite old builds most likely from E3 which would explain why the PS3 version still had a bit of input lag and looked a bit fuzzier than the 360 version. Still, had good fun with it, especially City Escape act 2 with the batshit truck with saws chasing after you! Of course I am a wee bit bias when it comes to Sonic games mind, at least I have been since they started getting good again last year. I don't think Stacey was all that crazy on it (as someone who mainly only played the Mega Drive and Dreamcast Sonic games) but I think that was mainly due to the input lag of the PS3 version which is understandable. Hopefully that will all be fixed by launch which according to staff already has been.

This is very much a game for Sonic fans first and foremost, I'm not sure how people who haven't played the series for years will react to it, but as far as I'm concerned it's got Mega Drive style gameplay as well as Sonic Unleashed/Colours style gameplay which while somewhat simplistic is quite the roller-coaster ride.

This is gonna be a looong post, so more after the jump.

Eurogamer Expo 2011 - Summary

So the first half of the prize I won from Ubisoft and RaymanPC occured over the weekend: the trip to Eurogamer Expo in Earl's Court, London! We already had tickets pre-ordered a while back for the Saturday so we had those tickets changed into Thursday ones so we could be there a total of three days and meet up with a friend of Stacey's who was also celebrating her Birthday!

The place was huge and luckily not as overly packed as other expos we had been to, and we had no trouble getting onto the majority of games we wanted to try out. The most popular games by far were Battlefield 3 and Skyrim; a good thing we weren't interested in those then! Boo this man, they say.

Read the rest after the jump!

A winner is me. Blimey.

Ubisoft have been rather lovely to me lately. First they printed my rabbids art in the official fan club magazine, and now this!

The above art was my entry for a contest run by the Rayman Pirate Community, which is not a website for people that burn CD-Rs of Rayman games but rather the biggest Rayman fanbase on the net. I made this quite a few weeks back but i didn't want to reveal it until the results were in which were today and what do you know..I won! I was one of two top winners, the other being a friend of ours Hanna! I gotta say I'm pretty gobsmacked!


The top prize was a trip for two to the entirety of EuroGamer Expo which is on next week from Thursday to Sunday in Earls Court in London. This includes travel and a hotel! The prize also includes a copy of Rayman Origins and a goodie bag full of bits and bobs. Cor!

This was all done in Illustrator, excluding the character colour and some of the background colouring and effects which were done in Photoshop.

The crazy background took a lot of experimentation in both Photoshop and Illustrator and I'm really pleased with the result. Would you believe it started out as being based on the Ubisoft logo! Also I finally discovered how custom brushes in Illustrator works so the line art is much more natural looking than previous attempts in the program. All in all I really enjoyed working on this piece more than anything else I've done this year so far and I think aiming for a deadline and entering it into a contest helped a lot.

Update: Full details have been sent to me by Ubisoft, we're going to be there on Friday and Saturday.

QR Codes!

Well here's something I've wanted to try out in quite some time: QR codes! I've set this one up so I can get it printed on my new business card which I will start designing sometime soon in time for the MCM Expo in October.

So anyway here they are! They both link to the same page which has links to a majority of my web links, my e-mail and other things. One is just a smaller version with a shorter URL. I have yet to get a QR code reader on my phone but friends on Twitter tested them and said they worked so there you go!

Attending MCM London Expo in October!

Just to let you guys and girls know that me and Stacey will have a table at the MCM London Expo once again on October the 28th-30th. same Gaga time, same Gaga place! Well roughly, not sure what table we have excatly yet but I'll let you know as soon as I know!

We will have all the same wares we had last time along with a bunch of new prints and maybe more! For reference:


Large badges (Lucy lolly and make Tea Not war designs): £1
Small badges (10 designs in total): 50p or 12 for £5
Lucy Lolly DVD: £4
A4 prints: 70p or 5 for £3
7 X 5" prints: 50p each or 12 for £5
8 X 6" prints: 70p each or all 3 designs for £2
10 X 8" print (make tea not war): £1


The 8X6 prints include the Manga-Gaga 10th Anniversary print from last time as well as a few new ones including another piece that will debut at the Expo, which I haven't decided on yet.

Will also be doing on the spot commissions again, sketches for £3 and inked for £5. You can also 'order' art to be done after the expo and sent to you with these rates:

Sketch £3
Inked £5
Inked + Photoshop colour £10
Vectored (Illustrator) and Photoshop Colour £20

and if you want more than one character on a picture each character will cost you less.

I hope to see you there again or for the first time! :)