As Graham’s already covered the European leg of the preview tour I’ll pick up pretty much where he left off…

It was a quick pit-stop for me back in Scotland, a frantic day spent unpacking, washing everything and then packing it all up again before collecting Billy and heading to Edinburgh airport, onwards to Heathrow and then beyond to Toronto.

We were pretty lucky and managed to fly around the latest ash attack waves from Iceland and make the journey to Toronto with a bit of a diversion over Spain. My chosen entertainment on this trip was Breaking Bad Series 2 on iPod Touch, Zelda:Spirit Tracks on the DS and Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace.

I’ll refrain from moaning about STUPID CHOO CHOO ZELDA. Sigh.

Getting over to the venue for the Toronto event, the 22nd floor of a downtown residential building near the CN Tower, we had a quick scout about the place to find everything in excellent working order. It was a great venue, overlooking some big city vistas, tall residential blocks under construction with cranes reaching across the skyline. It was very Crackdown. My fear of heights started getting me all wobbly and Billy wasn’t exactly looking comfortable either. Our biggest fear, whether or not we’d get any Co-Op & PVP running, was proven a silly worry as all the nine stations were ready with a gamebuild and networked to PartnerNet just fine. It was really great to see and took a huge weight off our minds. As everyone knows, we’ve done a lot of demos and this is only the second time we’ve not had any network gremlins occuring. We had one panic that required a switch rebooted during setup but from then on it was flawless throughout the event.

Orb in Toronto

About thirty media outlets came flooding in late afternoon, together with about 15 community bloggers and specially invited guests. With three or four people per station it was busy throughout the night, the campaign, co-op and Rocket Tag all generated a great response, with plenty of laughs and whoops. Billy and myself were basically swamped through the whole event taking interviews so it was difficult spending any quality time with people playing the game but the vibe from everyone playing was overwhelmingly great.

The event closed down from about 22:30 and we were ushered around the corner to a Wayne Gretzky bar with the PR and Event team, along with some straggling community and press. Some pints and filthy shooters got a good seeing to. I went to bed and then after a couple of hours of not enough sleep I met Billy in the hotel lobby. Heroically, he’d stayed up drinking ready for our stupidly early flight to San Francisco.

I felt awful (shooters) Billy was asleep (drunk) when we landed in SF at nine in the morning. We hadn’t eaten and confused the hotel by getting there too early so we looked like two lost children. We wandered over to Union Square to a diner to get breakfast and I don’t think either of us stopped to breathe whilst scoffing that marvellous gift of pig and eggs. The next few hours were spent sleeping and generally recovering ahead of getting access to the SF venue in the evening. We tried to be all cultured and have a nose around the SF Museum of Modern Art but discovered it was $15 to gain entry so we didn’t bother. It’s easy to forget how great it is to have free musuem entry in the UK.

Meeting up with Peter we headed to the XYZ Bar in the W Hotel where the event was to take place.Things looked great so we decided to have a quick game of co-op to see how things were performing. Over two and a half hours later we were still playing and generally tooling about in co-op. We were so enthralled we’d missed last orders in the bar. I can’t think of a better way of describing how addictive Crackdown 2 can be. We had a lot of fun and we went off for a nightcap feeling really confident about the event the next day.

The San Fran event was split into two five hour session or thereabouts. Things started off quietly, it’s eery how quiet people are when they’re sat in front of a station with surround sound headphones clamping their skulls. As people settled into the campaign game we started seeing and hearing he usual cries of elation and frustration. As we were walking around the stations we came to recognise “the look” on player’s faces. It’s the look of nonchalant engagement followed by intense staring concentration. It’s a recognisable look. It’s the look of an addict. It’s the look of someone chasing a Renegade Orb.

Some of the first session players had started from scratch in co-op games, they were lagging behind everyone else in objectives as they were having a lot of fun with all the peripheral activities you get up to in co-op. Like kicking each other off buildings, seeing how far you can catapult each other using Mag Grenades in cars. You know it, it’s the usual dicking about.

We egged everyone along into co-op sessions and then the place started getting noisy. “What are you doing? Where are you? Shall we do this Lair?” would be the cry of one person into their Live headset. Then you’d hear “Nothing really” as a response and looking over the shoulder you could clearly see people completely distracted collecting Orbs, or killing Freaks, or trying to do a Tactical Location, or trying to do an AU, or a rooftop race, or etc. It’s very strange, all these activities people get up to yet they think they’re not doing anything. You only get that experience in Crackdown Co-Op. It’s a game of complete distraction.

After a good co-op session we moved onto PVP. Deathmatch to begin with and this is where it started getting loud. With 14 media players in the first session, Billy and Peter stood in to make up the numbers to 16. Everybody was taking this very seriously. Billy headed straight for the helicopter with rocket launchers and started dominating the game. I was a bit worried he’d taken it too far with new players until I realised that he was losing out to one of the press who was a clear natural at the game. Jose went on to win that match, beating Billy with some impressively quick skills. Then it was Rocket Tag and this doesn’t need any description. It was fast, violent and full of laughs as it always is.

Moving over to the afternoon and evening sessions we had requests for people to carry on playing from the first session. We were pretty busy but were able to let that happen which is a really good thing, we wanted people to play the game as much as possible and it was fantastic to see some people managing to get their Agents up to Level 3 and 4 across the board. Nobody managed a 5 that I saw but it must have been very close after the time they’d spent with the game. It seems a little pious to say this but everyone loved the game.

The evening session was pretty much a repeat of the first, everyone engaged with the game really quickly and things were a bit more vocal thanks to the bar opening. We had some brilliant games of Rocket Tag and I spent quite a while trying to satisfy some of the requests from 1UP readers for demonstrating what can happen in the game unexpectedly. Believe me, demonstrating the unexpected is a really difficult thing to do but I think we got some great direct feed capture out of that for people to see very shortly.

By the time we’d finished up the evening, we were too late for food so had to hunt down a late restaurant. Peter, Billy and myself were exhausted but elated. The whole event was perfect, everybody was raving about the game and were eager to play more. It was a real shame we had to call it a night and shut everything down as we could have happily carried on playing.

Can’t wait to see what people have to say about their hands on time now. The embargo lifts on Wednesday and we can expect a real frenzy of preview reports both online and in print.

Throughout the entire tour one thing we kept saying was that “the game speaks for itself” and it really does thanks to the hard work everyone has put into it. There’s nothing that can be said about Crackdown 2 that it doesn’t say for us, it’s just a really fun game that grabs people and makes them laugh joyously. So I’m calling that job done.

I’ll refrain from moaning about STUPID CHOO CHOO ZELDA. Sigh.

Throughout the entire tour one thing we kept saying was that “the game speaks for itself” and it really does thanks to the hard work everyone has put into it. There’s nothing that can be said about Crackdown 2 that it doesn’t say for us, it’s just a really fun game that grabs people and makes them laugh joyously. So I’m calling that job done.