Last Wednesday (9th of December), Melbourne’s THQ offices held a media event in their offices. They gave me free beer and pizza, and let me see their latest games and the coolest office decorations of all the game developer offices I have visited.

THQ spreading Christmas cheer… and chainswords.

But it wasn’t all beer, pizza and life-size space marines. We had to have some fun too (Oh yes, Liam was there also), Tatsunoko vs Capcom was set up on a number of wiis, and getting to experience Frank West, Zero and Viewtiful Joe was awesome (my knowledge of Tatsunoko is nil, hence conversation on it’s characters.) I managed to hold my own against some of the Level 3 crew with a 50% victory rate over two games. I’m not sure if this was an error with the set-up or because we were playing an early build, but for some reason the screen would black out for a second or two whenever Ryu used his super, but this added a better element of surprise to whether the attack would succeed, and was by no means a game breaker. The wii-mote on the other hand, to a non-wii owner like myself, made playing quite a task and I’ll stick to this being the cause of my loss, considering later success at victory on a Gamecube controller.

Batsu (Rival Schools) giving a school yard beat down.

At 7:30 we all gathered round the big projector and saw a presentation of Metro 2033 an upcoming post-apocalyptic action-adventure based on the novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky. The state we got to see it in was interesting but to short to make a real judgment on. The voice-work for this very very early build was all done by a single voice-actor, which combined with the Russian accent created a zombie humour to rival Shaun of the Dead. A single PC was left in the corner showing off Metro 2033 after the presentation, but it was much to busy for me to get in for a real look, perhaps more will be available closer to release.

The highlight of the night for me though was a beautiful soon to be released game entitled, Darksider, my newly most anticipated game of next month was a near-perfect combination of RPG and adventure game. The story was a little difficult to follow but I did only get an hour or so in and using the expert knowledge of the Bible I attained at catholic school, I was able to determine what was going on. You play as “War” one of the four horsemen whose ride signifies the dawn of the apocalypse, but you have answered the call early, whilst the armies of Hell descend upon Earth well before the seventh seal is broken. Alone you are no match for the “Destroyer” who leads Hells army and you are sent to meet your creators and answer why you have ridden out so early. A century passes and the human race has been destroyed by the “Destroyer” (ironically) and you have to bargain your way back to Earth to fight through the armies of Hell to discover and punish those responsible for breaking the ancient code, or something. This is where the night came to a close, but all was not lost. A future repeat performance was alluded to and the greatest reminder of what I should be willing for was spoken of, that item of my most purest desire was of course the third part of my favourite THQ franchise and reason I got into current generation gaming, Saints Row 3. No date, no hints, nothing really but just the name was enough for me.