Australian Gamer Feature :: SupaNova 2006

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SupaNova 2006

INTRODUCTION : DAY 1 : DAY 2

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In keeping with the high standard of journalism that we have here, you might think we were extremely prepared for the two day SupaNova event, and were at the gate as soon as it opened. Unfortunately, I had gotten just a *little bit* pissed the night before, and managed to stumble out of bed around the time the convention started. Matt had slept in late as well (due to a late running Zul'Gurub guild instance run in World of Warcraft), and our friend Frith, who had agreed to take photos for us for the event, was stuck at his house in the northern suburbs with no car. So after pulling myself together, I went and picked up Frith, drove back and met up with Matt, then we all walked to the event and arrived just a bit before 11am, which was actually pretty impressive all things considered.

The weather was crisp and cool, and all together a perfect sunny Queensland day. There was a surprising line up for people who hadn't pre-purchased their tickets, luckily that wasn't us as we waltzed in (not literally waltzed) and were given a bunch of showbags and event guides on entry.

Upstairs in the Commerce building was totally packed, and it was here that we really started to notice the cosplay people. If you're not familiar with the term, it's a contraction of the English words 'costume' and 'play', and basically means to dress up as characters from your favourite characters from TV shows, movies, manga, anime or video games. Some of the cosplay was extremely impressive, some of it was extremely disturbing.

Although the main booths when we first entered belonged to Auran, where they basically just had a store set up, and Video Games Live (more on them later), the majority were filled with Comic book stands and stars, Sci-fi and Manga companies, Collectable toys and figures, Special Guest Star signing areas and a whole heap of other stuff. Matt managed to find the World of Warcraft booth fairly easily and befriend one of the female night elf statues rather quickly, while I admired the large X-Men poster of Pheonix that was to be given away at the end of the convention.

According to the guys at the Auran booth, most of the video game stuff was downstairs, including a preview of their new MMORPG game, Fury. So we set off to the lower level of the Commerce Building.

There was a really strong presence of Queensland game developers, and as a weird way to get people to look at them all, on entry we were handed a sheet of paper with empty squares on it. Apparently you had to visit all the Australian game booths and get a stamp from each, and then you could enter your stamped sheet into the draw to win a big prize. I'm not sure what the prize was. I didn't even get a sheet, I only found out about this later. I had just been getting my arm stamped at all the booths because I felt left out.

The Krome booth was first, and we ran into a good friend of ours who works there, Rob, who said we had to go see him compete in the guitar hero competition later that afternoon. He ran off and left us with Erica, who handles PR for Krome, and who was gracious enough to let us get our photo taken with the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger mascot from their games. I don't know who was in that suit, but they never said a word, and apparently had volunteered to sweat it out in there all day. We also found out that among the many games Krome is currently developing, the next Spyro game is among one of them, which seems highly appropriate.

Next stop was the Auran booth, where another good friend of ous, Andrew, was excited to show us the first video footage of their new MMORPG game, Fury. It's not what we expected. Although it was only a video showing the in-game graphics and gameplay, it looked like it would definitely be the kind of game to push your graphics cards to the max if you wanted. A lot of people were using the words World of Warcraft, and given that we'd heard it was a MMORPG the comparison was pretty much unavoidable. But really,it was actually nothing like WoW at all. There are no quests or gathering or vast expansive worlds to explore. All character development is done through battle, win or lose. It was much more of a Battlegrounds PvP style game, with some interesting twists. There were no classes. You choose your skills, abilities and magic before the game starts, so that any game you play you are never locked into the same character class. We are slightly concerned that there might be a fairly limited scope for fun compared to something like WoW, but we'll find out.

Hopefully we will get into the Beta testing for the game and let you know more, although they will be revealing the game in full at E3.

Next along the line was HalfBrick studios, a little known game developers based in Kelvin Grove, they mainly create games for the Gameboy Advance and DS at present. Shainiel, the CEO of HalfBrick, was there to tell us all about their upcoming game Barnyard (based on the upcoming movie), and about how they are brainstorming for upcoming DS games. They had a running demo of a game called Fuzz and Rocket on the GBA, which had a very 'Yoshis Island' look about it, and looked like a lot of fun.

A great bunch of guys, we agreed that we would have to come into their offices and do a feature on what goes on there behind the scenes. And we could come in on a Friday afternoon. And they would provide the beers. We'll hold them to that J

We skimmed past the Griffith Uni, THQ and Pandemic booths, but became stuck at a booth by a local development studio named FuzzyEyes. Their game: HotDogs HotGals, looks like the kind of game that's targeted towards a Japanese market. Amazingly our interests were not on the game with scantily clad busty women making hot dogs, but were with an upcoming game called Project Twilight, of which they only had a few concept art pictures on display. They were enough to make both myself and Matt agree that it looked really cool though, and to ask that FuzzyEyes keep us informed. We tried to nag them into giving more information but they were surprisingly tight lipped. Perhaps they were waiting for E3. There was a fair bit of that.

Just beyond them was Creative Assembly. Best Known for the 'Total War' series, and most recently Rome: Total War, Creative Assembly actually have their office directly below Matt's workplace, so he sees them all the time in the elevator. CA showed off much of their existing stuff very nicely, but also had some promo material up for Medieval II: Total War. We talked to one of the guys there, Dan Toose, for quite a while. If the name is familiar to you, Dan used to be editor of Hyper magazine, and has written for most of the big gaming magazines in Australia. Again, they were unwilling to talk too much about that before E3, but we got them to promise us some good info after that, and Matt threatened to bug them in the elevator.

The last booth was for QANTM College, which is pretty much THE place to go if you are looking to study something that will get you into the video game industry in Queensland. They had a lot to say about studying online and a bunch of videos showcasing students work. They have a bunch of upcoming open days where you can learn more about the courses they offer and some days where you can experience a day of studying there. The forms they had us fill out included what 'year' and 'school' we were currently attending, to which I put '2006' and 'of hard rock'. It was funny at the time.

At almost 2pm, we had to go and watch our mate Rob compete in a Programmers vs Artists Guitar Hero challenge on the main stage. Guitar Hero isn't available in Australia yet, but I can tell you that as soon as it hits, Matt will be buying it. It does look like a lot of fun as well but seems that it does take a lot of practice, as a few of the poor audience members who volunteered to compete found out rather quickly. Rob made it to the final round but was defeated according to the game points, but not in style points we reckon.

Just after that we went back to the THQ stand, which we'd been to previously, but actually got to spend a little time this time. Frith and Matt got down to some serious killing when they started playing a versus game of The Outfit, a 360 launch title that went surprisingly under the radar. The game was, in all honesty, a little below the level of graphics you would expect for a 360 game. Still, it was a surprising amount of fun. The relatively even balance of the of the game changed quite suddenly when Matt got hold of a tank and parked at Frith's spawn point, obliterating his squad over and over. Ahhh, good times.

It was around about this time that my hangover was REALLY starting to catch up with me, and being surrounded by stormtroopers, zombies, and cute girls in school outfits was not going down well for my state of mind. So at 3:30pm, we decided to call it a day, but not before we met up with our very own Jessica, the latest addition to the AustralianGamer.com team! It was great finally meeting each other in person, and it really solidified our decision to get her on board after talking to her. She completely understood my predicimant however, and we made a hasty exit from the RNA showgrounds and walked home.

My only regret from the day was missing the speech from Peter Jarrett from Gridwerx that was on at 4:30pm that day, talking about the process behind making a game. If anyone else attended that, please hit the user comments below and tell us how it went!

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