Welcome to NEXT08, Belgium's game & technology expo in Brussels. Kabbila, the member of MMOsite's writer club, took the effort to check it out for you and report back to MMOsite.com. Just enjoy it!
Let's start with what we didn't find on this expo: MMO news. We got lured in by big banners of World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, but we got not get any new info about them. We searched the whole place for a developer to interview about the upcoming expansions, but it seems like Blizzard and Codemasters where only represented in name, not in person.
What did we find then ? Lots of people, lots of random geeks, lots of console games, lots of activities, lots of babes (who were willing to pose with us for MMOsite.com), and last but not least: Lara Croft in person, posing it out for you.
The expo was flooded with people, but we went in early enough to check things out. The expo was a mixture of gaming and technology (TV screens,...), so we only paid attention to half the scene. The games where mostly consoles, and I'll give a brief overview of what kind of games where promoted:
Call of Duty 5, Quantum of Solace, Gears of war 2 (hell yea!), Resistance 2 (meh), Wii Fit & other Wii stuff, Little big planet, Street fighter 4, Mirrors edge, Lots of stuff by EA, Prince of Persia, Farcry 2, Guitar Hero world tour (with a live stage), MotorStorm 2, and many more.
There were some random CoD4 & Trackmania contests, but apart from that it was clearly an expo, not a LAN. A nice thing about expo's is that they bring promotion girls, who distracted us from fruitless developer hunting. We took the time to take some pictures with them, but most attention went to Lara Croft. The official Tomb Raider model was on the move during the expo, giving Photo shoots now and then. She was followed around by a swarm of people like a Queen Bee, so we left her alone. Until she started posing near us, and we were able to make some pictures of this babe.
To sum up, NEXT08 was a nice expo, but with a heavy focus on console games, and--in contrast with the technology part--no official representatives where able to provide us with new info. On the other hand it offered you a chance to try out the brand new and upcoming (offline games) games, and buy or preorder most of the articles presented.
Next page are some photoes of Lara Croft cosplay:
