When I saw the trailer that debuted online last month — the one where Wolverine turned into a symbiote — I needed a mop for the puddle of drool around my desk. Once I gathered my senses, I had to ask myself one very basic question: the last few Spiderman games published by Activision have featured heavily recycled gameplay with a new coat of “most recent film” painted on. How could this one really be any different? At X08 I got to find out.

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I don’t know if you can call it an annual tradition, but since it’s my second X0-event and my second year in a row with this post, let’s at least call it 2 for 2.

Sitting on the other side of the blogging fence it might be hard to grasp how fundamentally important the presence of other bloggers are at events like this. Getting to meet and greet with faces new and old is a big part of the experience, and this year was no exception. I just wanted to give a shout out to a few of my comrades in arms who made the day a much more enjoyable experience for me.

Mike, Steve, Stefan, Pierce and Ashley from This Week in Geek — better known as “my Twiggers.” Former staff Writer Faith/Christina of The Girl Gamer and her man candy Mike from Attack This. And yes — even stinky old Xav De Matos from some no-nothing site we’ve never even heard of called Joystiq. Everyone was there and everyone was great. Everyone except Brent the Closet Geek (dude — just come over and say hi next time. I’m always willing to stop shoveling food in my mouth long enough to say hello — I promise.)

This year was a special treat for one other reason: the addition of a BBPS community member to the roster of attendees. Reader Utopaline made the trek up to Toronto with me and was a big help as my right hand man all day. Big thanks to you sir!

Thanks again to all our friends in the blogging community for making X08 one of the best times I’ve had all year. The power may have stayed on this time around, but who needs a blackout when you have friends?

Squirreled away in my bag of X08 goodies was a teensy tinsy t-shirt for a little game called Monster Lab. I’ve never heard of Monster Lab. It wasn’t at X08. It’s not on the Eidos website. Monster Lab, it appeared, was something of a mystery.

I decided to dig a little deeper with the help of my good friend Google and discovered that Monster Lab is a new title shipping for the Wii, PS2 and DS. So why the fuck was this in my swag bag from a Microsoft-hosted event?

If I was a betting man I’d say that this might be an indication of a Live Arcade port. Either that or the Eidos team that packed the Tomb Raider Underworld shirts in had a shitload of small Monster Lab ones to get rid of. Regardless, as you can see, my daughter has a new shirt to sleep in. Thanks Eidos! Now I have a well dressed daughter and a fuckload of confusion.

While touring the grand halls of X08, I had a chance to sit down with Jordan Hodge, PR Coordinator for Guitar Hero publisher Red Octane. Jordan and I had a pretty lengthy chit chat about all things Guitar Hero. Here’s the highlights;

Q: Since joining the Activision family, we’ve seen a lot more Guitar Hero than we have before. Are you at all worried about the brand getting diluted?

A: Everybody is like “well there’s so much” but then the other half of the people are saying “I don’t have enough, I want more. I want more than weekly DLC on Rock Band.” I loved Aerosmith and I’m glad I was able to get these 40 songs for basically a discounted rate. I want every piece of music available and I want the opportunity to buy that. If Aerosmith isn’t your thing, if Metallica isn’t you’re thing, you don’t have to buy it.

Q: Fair enough, everybody likes options. But wouldn’t producing all these titles stretch the development team a little thin?

A: It’s growing very quickly (the development team). there are a lot of people that have their hands in the Guitar Hero franchise. Neversoft isn’t the only developer to work on (Guitar Hero). Vicarious Visions does the Wii version and they’ve been doing some really cool stuff there.

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There are a few things that are going to warrant posts of their own, but a lot of what happened at X08 doesn’t need a whole lot of discussion. Here’s the quick and dirty on how the day went;

• Had a few minutes hands on with Lips and was surprisingly underwhelmed. It felt like a poor man’s SingStar. Mind you it was clearly an early demo and a good deal of what will set Lips apart doesn’t exist yet, so take my opinion for what it’s worth. INiS has yet to disappoint so I’m still holding out hope.
• Spoke with Jason Ing, Product Manager for Live Arcade. Discussed their quality over quantity initiative that kicked off with the delisting discussion and has shown it’s merit with the Summer of Arcade. Also asked him about the Braid pricing fiasco. More on that to come.
• New dashboard was only fake showable. It was a flash demo and exactly what was shown at E3. They didn’t really have any answers to our dashboard questions, either: Will Avatars be optional or required? Can I play games like 1 vs. 100 without one? No news isn’t always good news, so assume you’re stuck with them.
• Capcom didn’t make the event, so no Dark Void or Street Fighter IV for me. Boo-urns.
• Gears of War 2 mulltiplayer was expectedly awesome. The maps we played around on were pretty solid, and the changes to gameplay were instantly noticeable and welcome. Two things I liked best? Crawling away behind cover when injured and button-mashing chainsaw duels.
• Highlights of the event were UNLEASHED! Specifically Sonic Unleashed and Star Wars: Force Unleashed. Get ready for the first good Sonic game in a long time people — this thing is SWEET. The day levels are fast and the gameplay is smooth. The transitions from 3D to 2D are downright seamless, and there’s no stopping and starting like previous games. At night it turns into a combo heavy action game as Sonic takes wolf form, and is equally as killer.
• Force Unleashed was probably the best looking game I’ve seen in terms of gameplay, environments and art design I’ve seen this year. They nail the Star Wars vibe while dishing out a fast-paced action title. If you asked me to pick my game of show, this would be it.
• Other strong showings in my book? Tomb Raider Underworld and Mortal Kombat vs. DC.
• Spoke with XNA team. Community Games are on track for this fall. When I asked about quality control (especially considering how much effort is being put into it with Live Arcade) he assured me that the peer review metrics for making it on Live will ensure that we’re only getting the cream of the crop.
• Met Jordan Dodge, the PR Coordinator for Red Octane. He’s been with them since before Guitar Hero, so we ended up talking the old school Red Octane Taiko peripherals. Maybe not a timely topic, but what can I say? They kicked ass. We also talked all things Guitar Hero and got a first look at World Tour’s Music Studio. More on this later — hopefully we can give you an interesting peek inside the franchise.
• Fallout 3 was playable and pretty, but I couldn’t get my hands on it. Damned other people wrecking my fun y having their own.
• Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was on the floor and playable already, much to my surprise. In a lot of ways it’s similar to previous Activision Spider-Man titles, but it’s added a slew of new gameplay elements that are going to make this one worth checking out. You can switch from the classic to the black costume with a click of the left stick, each with their own set of abilities. New combat elements are there too — in addition to the standard ground combat we now have wall-climbing combat and air combat. The air combat is some sweetly stylish shiznit, my friends. The level we played was a fight with the Vulture, and to keep fighting him you need to keep attacking with your web so you can hold on. It sounds like it might be a pain, but it’s smooth as silk. Spider silk, that is. (See what I did there?)
• Infinite Undiscovery will definitely warrant a closer look when it ships next week. It’s a Square game that looks more like Dark Cloud than Final Fantasy (and I mean that in a good way).

That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. I think that’s everything I tackled at the show, or at least everything that was worth mentioning. Expect a few posts to hit throughout the day that will go into a little more detail, and some hands on previews to hit sometime next week. If there’s anything on this list you want to hear more about let me know and I’ll make sure to dish whatever I’ve got.

Oh yeah, it’s me.

Just got back from X08 Canada. Not a lot of news, but we talked to a few solid people and got our hands on a few solid games. Cliffy popped in to talk Gears of War 2, although this photo is the only thing that really came out of my time with him (he was a busy dude and I honestly drew a blank on what to talk to him about). Expect full coverage of the rest of my antics tomorrow.

Not a bad week for photo ops, eh?

This Thursday, August 21st, Microsoft will be hosting it’s annual Canadian press event X08 Canada. I’ll be going to meet and greet with PR elite, and I’d love to go with your questions on the tip of my tongue. If there are any upcoming releases that you have questions about let me know in the comments of this post and I’ll do everything I can to get them answered.

I’m not just going on my own — no sir. I’ll be meeting up with former BBPS’er and current Xbox 360 Fanboy writer Xav de Matos, as well as regular reader and recent commenter on our site Utopaline. If by any chance any of you are going to be in attendance, let us know! We’d love to meet you face to face.

Now get making with those questions!