I Smelled Like a Fog Machine After Last Night

Written by Paulmichael

: How’s it play on the PS3?

Last night was yet another event hosted in/near the Los Angeles area. This time, it was publisher D3 Interactive hosting a pre-launch event for Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. Overall, the night left me satisfied, very interested in the game, but perhaps most importantly I smelled like fog machine smoke for a good while afterwards. Read on to find out more and catch some photos of the event.

: They also had it running on 360s.

So the night started off for me at around 4:45 PM PST. I left my house and got on the freeway. Didn’t hit that infamous LA traffic until I got on the 170. Then things ground to a halt. Inch by inch I made my way past Hollywood Blvd and onto Sunset Blvd. I finally made my way to the Meltdown Comics store (which I forgot to snap a photo of, d’oh!), and parked behind the building. There was already quite a line, stretching outside the store and almost around the corner. I made it in the backroom and received a t-shirt for being one of the first 150 people there. There were all kinds of concession stands, including hot dogs, popcorn, soda, dippin’ dots, and probably more that I missed. The room was filled with people, artificial fog, thumping music with an actual DJ, and six LCD screens, two devoted to each main system that this game is coming out for – the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

: An interesting wall inside the backroom.

Now then, as for the game itself. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye. At its core, you have a match-three gem (or in this case hexes) mechanic. Thrown into the mix is a ton of strategy and even resource management. I played a few rounds on the consoles, and by the end of the night I had the concept down and had some fairly adequate strategies when playing against others. Do you go for blue hexes to power up your shields, or match some red ones to prepare for an attack move your next turn? Or do you just go straight at your enemy by matching up mine-shaped pieces? And then there’s the single player experience. I played that on the PC version, and it includes an overworld and multiple enemy types to engage in combat. For those who may want to know, I could not tell the 360 version apart from the PS3 version. They are identical. High, consistent framerates and solid control response on both systems, as would be expected in a game such as this. Controller mapping is identical as well – I moved right on over to the 360 version and the buttons were mapped out in the exact same manner.

: It was incredibly foggy!

Other than those six displays showcasing the game, there were also two women tethered to three DSs each, with the game running on them of course. They reminded me of booth babes at the former E3, and in talking with one of them I learned that she actually was. I tried that out for a while, and was better at the DS version than I was at the console versions for some reason, winning two games in a row! A contest was also held to give away a limited edition DS lite. The night was fun, and before I knew it it was 9:30 and I had to head back home. To finish off the night I arrived at my car a few seconds before the parking patrol showed up to ticket cars with expired parking meters! Anyway, there is a lot of depth to this game, yet from what I saw last night it is accessible to anyone and is a friendly-competitive title. Priced right, there should be no reason to pass it up! So now I leave you with some extra pictures from the event, enjoy!