The Games I Didn’t/Couldn’t Play (FIFA 16/Action Henk)

If you read the main chunk of my overview of “Legends of Gaming Live” then you would know that a big-bear of mine at conventions and expos is not being able to take pictures or videos of games that are playable there. Sometimes it’s because the game is not yet released and heaven forfend would they want a press monkey like myself to take a detailed look at it and review the demo in detail. That’s what happened with “Assassin’s Creed Unity” at MCM London last year. After playing the demo I realised why they didn’t. It was shit and I called it. But at least that sort of stopping can be called ‘PR management’ or as I would call it ‘damage control’. The inexcusable kind of stopping is not letting me take pictures or videos of a game that is released with YouTubers raking in the ad money playing the game. At LoG, both of these circumstances happened so I can talk about both. One now, one later in another article.

The FIFA series of games are one of the most popular games in the UK. Bugger knows why. I don’t like football, or soccer as its called in places that have their own brand of football that doesn’t involve the feet unless you count the kicking of the ball and of the faces in ‘tackles’ with full body armour. Can at least just do it without the body armour and make the beating to death of the player interesting. If your going to break someones leg you can at least let us see the bone jutting out of the guys flesh instead of going to commercial every 30 seconds. Anyway, FIFA…

EA was showing off “FIFA 16” in its own fancy booth with fancy bars and lights and a dozen booth-hands staring at every guy with a camera who walked passed. I didn’t play it. Firstly because the queue was too long and secondly I played later in the day “PES16” and remembered why I don’t like football games so really couldn’t bring myself to play it. EA releases a new FIFA game as regular as the tides and to do so usually leaves no room for innovation. Or maybe its just FIFA being a corrupt and broken organisation that leaves no space for innovation while they count their kick-backs. Or maybe it just the fact that football is just amazingly boring and after a while just turns into a team based soap opera where each actor is paid a billion pounds to not say how many bodies are under the new FIFA stadium.

Me not playing FIFA is no great loss. As you might have been able to tell from that previous paragraph, I am not fan of either FIFA or football. This leads me to quite the disappointment when I wasn’t able to play “Action Henk”, a game published by Curve Digital who had quite the showing at the event and so has their own article to themselves. I’ve seen a lot ‘Henk’ stuff online and on YouTube but never played it myself so when I saw it I thought it would be my chance. The problem was there was quite the crowd waiting to play it and later in the day there was some sort of surge or power cut that messed up some of the games. I know it was some sort of building fault. I asked the Curve Digital guys there, had a nice chat to quite a few of them, and about the time their PC’s went funny was about the same time the entire PES 16 booth went down to black screens.

Their where a few more games there that I didn’t play. For example there was a “One Piece” fighting, brawling thing there as well. I didn’t play it because it looked like the sort of game were I would like the mechanics, in a Dynasty Warriors sort of way, but I don’t care about the “One Piece” anime so I wouldn’t care in the slightest about the characters, the plot and so most of the game.