The Problem With Lollipop Chainsaw at PAX East April 21, 2012

It’s time for a rare Saturday editorial guys. At PAX East 2012 I couldn’t help but become interested in seeing Lollipop Chainsaw. The developers really went all out, bringing a bus into the show floor, and it wasn’t just any bus, it was a living replica of the bus featured in the game! Here’s a behind the scenes video to show you what I’m talking about.

It really was a sweet idea and you could tell a lot of care was put into every single detail about it, and was assembled by people who were probably the best at what they did. But the problem with it wasn’t in its construction, it was in its design, in particular the problem was its size. As you could hear in the video, there were only four demo units inside the bus. Now this was likely due to reasons of comfort and safety, but that meant that only a maximum of four people could be demoing the game at any given time. The typical time frame for a live demo of a game is about thirty minutes. So that means, theoretically that if only four people could see the game every thirty minutes, a line filled with just several dozen people could take hours to clear. So not only were the lines long and took a while to move, when it did move it was only by a tiny amount. A large handful could cap off a line just a few hours after the show started for the day, and that’s exactly what happened on the days I was at PAX East. – Ed: I’m guessing at that timeframe based upon average time of every other game I’ve seen demoed live at events and memory of the line, I didn’t get a chance to see the game demoed but if anyone did could they please post how long the demo was.

The objective of these trade shows are to promote your games and generate buzz among as many people as possible before the game releases. I understand the desire to have lines to keep order in crowded events, but many developers just did not take into account the massive amount of people that had sold out PAX East for months prior to the event. Having booth setups to accommodate the large yet expected crowds is just practical and if planned properly very possible, and there were many publishers who had properly designed their booths to accommodate the sold out show.

This was all I was able to get of Lollipop Chainsaw at PAX East. Really wish I could’ve seen more. I’m a huge fan of Suda51 since the first No More Heroes and I can’t wait to play this game when it releases.

Lollipop Chainsaw is coming June 12th, 2012 to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.