There was news of this tour posted on Kikizo and other places on the net. It' s a tour of 360 demo pods around the UK. Today the tour came to Leeds, where I live! It runs till 6pm and I finished work at 5, thus about 45 mins of game playing.

Basically they' ve hired a room in a cinema and filled it with 360' s running on HD-TV' s. Microsoft must have some kind of deal with Samsung because they were all 26 inch or bigger. After getting a tag placed on your arm for some reason you are permitted one hour to go play. Where the hell to start?

The first thing you notice is how crisp the screens are. Even the ' spit and polished' Tony Hawks, GUN and Need for Speed manage to look clear, even if graphically a little poor. NFS especially suffering from being a crap game with poor graphics. Maybe I' m too used to Burnout but I felt like I was racing as much as a paint tried to dry really fast. It did have a nice ' overexposed' colour and was in daylight... a first for a NFS:U game I' m sure.

Fifa 2006 looked very nice from what I could see. Player models looked scarily Accurate with shadows on the pitch, HD lighting, realistic crowd. Very impressed.

Next I found Condemned. The first thing to notice was the graphics. Easily one of the best looking games about it impressed with it' s torch lit corridors, characters and generals et up. Monolith released another scary FPS in F.E.A.R but Condemned is more Silent Hill than Doom 3, grain effect and all. I only wondered round some corridors then was lead to a murder scene where I was instructed to use some nifty gadgets to figure out the murder.

I began itching for a certain racing game but Dead or Alive 4 caught my eye, like a girl in a slutty dress at a night club. Unfortunately it ws only a 2 player demo and me coming straight from work had no friends about. Ayane still managed to look wonderful in HD beating up a dummy Zack in ridiculous reflecting costume. The sooner this game comes out the better.

Project Gotham Racing 3 was next. Ohhh baby! Like having a friendly conversation with an old high school friend you haven' t seen in years I got to grips with the MSR uber sequel. I *had* to take a green coloured Jaguar round London first getting to grips with sliding roudn corners for Kudos. I don' t know if it was just the TV not set up right but it was a little jaggedy looking but despite that managed to appear beautiful. The sense of speed is there, camera blur effects if you look around, the lighting and interiors are as nice as you' ve all been told a few times before.

In the middle of the room were a few 32" TV' s with big white sofas. Feet aching and hands trembling from the excitement I' d already had I decided to take a sit and play Kameo. For a title converted from Cube to Xbox to 360 it' s looking surprisingly good. For the first time I can remember it jumped from pre-rendered cut scene to playable level seamlessly with the in game graphics almost managing to stay with the intro. It seems like a clever platformer with some good ideas. I' ll be spending some more time with this come launch. I did notice however the main character wearing a small skirt. I' d seen enough of the game to know this already and played on. The trigger buttons make Kameo fly about with her wings and OMG! You can see up her skirt! There' s a good few people in the room and I stop immediately to look around. Someone looks at me with a an expression to say " you perv!" . Onto the next game...

Oh look it' s Halo 2. The hell?

And now Perfect Dark Zero. Really, it looks very fancy. I watched the opening to the demo level set in a garage and kept thinking " Better than Doom 3? Possibly" . It was strange to see really quite generic console themes (hot girls, with guns in typically console near future environment) looking so wonderful. Unfortunately I didn' t agree with the controls. ' Classic PD' mode threw me so i stuck it to ' Standard' which should be labelled ' Halo' mode. Finally I could shoot stuff. And walk forwards... very... slowly. And get stuck at a door I didn' t have the time or patience to open.

The time was creeping towards 6pm and I decided to take a seat again. DoA4 was on this console and a random guy asked me for a fight. So for the last 10 mins I proceeded to flail through 4 fights with no skill bar minimum knowledge of Ayane' s move list.

The event was very fun and is open 9.30-6pm till Sunday. I' ll pop back tomorrow after work for a final bash.