EB Games Expo 2012 – EA Showcase

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During the EB Games Expo I was lucky enough to sample a wide variety of games from a number of publishers and developers. There were dozens of booths at the Expo, with the big hitters of the games industry showcasing their currently released and upcoming titles. EA‘s booth wasn’t as large as some of their competitors, but as anyone will tell you, size isn’t everything, and EA had an impressive line up at the Expo. With FIFA 13, Need for Speed Most Wanted and Crysis 3 on offer, there was no shortage of gamers keen to have some hands on time with the publisher’s major titles.

FIFA 13

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Since its launch, FIFA13 has been selling like proverbial hotcakes, and the FIFA area in the EA booth was packed with players and spectators alike. At the Expo, EA had a FIFA couch set up with 1 vs 1 challenge matches, games running non-stop during all three days of the Expo. The FIFA brand has wide market saturation, and has its own established fan base – those who known and love the brand have been supporting it for many years now, and FIFA 13 as the most recent iteration of the series is now enjoying very high popularity on online servers. If you are a fan you’ve likely already got it, and if you’re new to soccer games it may be the gateway game to experience a whole new genre of gaming.

FIFA 13 is out now for practically every format known.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted

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Also popular at the booth was Need for Speed: Most Wanted – EA’s most well known racing game. EA were showcasing both singleplayer and multiplayer gameplay. The singleplayer featured a checkpoint race followed by an escape the cops chase directly after, and impressively showed off the vehicle handling, car physics and open-world gameplay.

One of the main features of the game, aside from its incredibly vibrant graphics and slick vehicle handling, is that the game never takes you out of its open world experience. Car damage impacts handling, in addition to the sounds of the car – do enough damage to a car and not only will you see it reflected on the car itself, you’ll hear it in the sounds of the engine and feel it in the way the car handles and performs. Shortcuts are back in full force, providing players countless ways to shave a few seconds off their time or sneakily take the lead from less savvy racers. Criterion-influenced billboards also make an appearance, providing players with motivation to find and smash through all of them.

The ‘find it, drive it’ feature of Most Wanted is something new to the series, removing the usual grinding to unlock better cars requirement seen in other games of this type. In Most Wanted, if you see a new car you want, all you need to do is drive up to it, hit triangle (on PS3) or Y (on 360) and that car is now yours to do with as you wish. Customisation also features in the game, with performance mods unlocking as you achieve certain objectives – there is no visual customisaton, but you will notice a difference performance wise if you take the time to unlock mods.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted releases October 30 in North America, November 1 in Australia, and November 2 in Europe.

Crysis 3

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There were a steady stream of gamers awaiting hands-on time with Crysis 3 and without sounding like a bit of a fangirl, the game visually looks spectacular. The colours are vibrant, the environments are packed with detail – this is everything fans are expecting of a Crysis game in terms of how jaw droppingly, eyeball meltingly gorgeous the graphics are. The showstopper of the on-display demo was the crossbow weapon – if there’s a weapon that leaves you weak in the knees – this is it. You look like a badass holding it, and given you can choose between standard arrows, electric arrows, explosive tip arrows and explosive cloud arrows, you’ll feel like a badass using it. The demo itself clocked in at around 15 minutes of playtime, and showcased both the tech and weapons side to the title, in addition to highlighting the gorgeous environments on display.

Crysis 3 releases February 2013.


About the Author: Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Tash is a self-diagnosed gaming fanatic with a doctorate in Psychology. She's also a self-confessed Mass Effect fangirl and will likely talk your ears off if you ever get her started on the subject. A lover of all things RPG and adventure, she has more gamer related action figures and memorabilia than any 30 something year old professional has a right to own, and has spent more time than she’d like to admit to daydreaming about exactly what she would do should the Zombie Apocalypse actually happen.

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