Well, it was interesting. I’m not sure it was quite in the E3-league of things, but there were some really great games. The Avatar game looks amazing in 3D. So amazing, in fact, that my faith in 3D things has been restored since seeing the Polar Express. Disappointingly, though, 2k seemed to be absent, rendering me unable to see any of their offerings (read: Bioshock 2).

From a game-critique perspective, it wasn’t hyper-enlightening. There was a large gearing towards game design in education, and there were some developer panels. But both these things were meant for students. This is great, don’t get me wrong. But the event wasn’t purely gaming-oriented experience. However, seeing some live progaming was quite awesome.

But that being said, gaming events aren’t always about the games themselves. I did get to meet Mario:

A US marine walked be through the harder parts of DragonAge: Origins:

And I left with a desire to play Warcraft II:

All in all, it was enjoyable, just not particularly enlightening. It is also good to see that Melbourne yields a burgeoning gaming community with countless active and engaged players and designers.

The lapse in quietness will end this weekend when we grace the eGames Expo in Melbourne, AU. We expect to see some cool stuff and, well, basically chill over the weekend.

While you’re waiting for that gold, here are some awesome things worth checking out:

• This article at the NY Times.
• This totally rad design blog called HI+LOW (particularly this post).
• This ‘design-y’ game called UNIQLO_GRID produced by emag, UNIQLO – It’s absolutely beautiful and satisfies the autistic within me. Oh, and it’s online and totally free. Do it.

It’s that time of year again. It has nothing to do with the warmer weather, increasing unease about bushfires or anything to do with the swarms of morons who will swarm your local city for the cricket. No, it’s time for the biggest games expo in Aus: the annual iDEP eGames Expo in Melbourne.

So what can we expect this year? Well, in terms of exhibitors, amongst a whole lotta gold, we’re most excited about the appearance of 2K Games, Ubisoft and the Xbox 360 team. Apart from that, we can anticipate the usual: developer presentations, gadget demos (sweeeet), competitions and egames. Oh, and I’m going to guess there will be some cosplay.

We’ll be trawling the event to find the coolest / most pro / cutting edge stuff. We will be writing-up what we see and do at the end of each day and we will live-blog throughout via Twitter. Feed this site to stay abreast of new announcements and other stuff pertaining to the event.

The event is running Friday October 30th – Sunday November 1st, yo. Tix are $33 for an adult to attend all three days.

In conjunction, there is the eGames Masters pro-gaming exhibition on October 10th is Brisbania and October 18th in Melbourne. This could be totally rad considering how starved we are in Aus RE e-sports.

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