Last night was X08 in Toronto. Held at CiRCA, the event showcased software by Microsoft Game Studios as well as fourteen third party developers.These included Ubisoft, EA, Disney Interactive Studios, and a whole bunch of others.

There were some great titles on display including all the anticipated blockbusters looming over this holiday season. Call of Duty 5: World at war was looking really stunning, The latest Rock Band and Guitar Hero installments were there with no real surprises in store, just as the EA lineup.

Project Origin (The Sequel to F.E.A.R.) was looking pretty good, with more variety than it’s predecessor, and the developers were quite keen to discuss and show off their games artificial intlegence system.

Mortal Kombat VS DC Universe was playable and looking beter than expected too. Force Unleashed of course was interesting, and they seem to have done a good job of marrying the old and new star wars aesthetics. We asked how the writing in the game compares to Knights of the Old Republic (arguably the best Star Wars themed game since TIE Fighter) but shockingly the Rep’ hadn’t even played that game before! Lets hope that’s not a sign of bad things coming.

The best supprise of the show was perhaps Pure by Disney Interactive Studios. It’s an ATV Racing (and stunt) game. It runs with sixteen players online, and the graphics are both fast and sharp – it really is a pretty game to watch and has earned a place on our radar this holiday season.

The new Sonic game looks surprisingly good though and is possibly the best Sonic game in the last two decades. We could go on and on about how good some of the games looked and how supprised we were by some of them. Even Duke Nukem was playable though of course, not forever.

Of course Gears of War was there – with it’s own dedicated lounge and Cliff Bleszinski lurking about to talk about it. We even got to play a round with him, and win. He also was able to confirm pretty definateively that there will be no playable demo of the game available. Not ever. Amazingly we learned that he even worked on Jazz Jackrabbit back in the day. That really excited us – the classic age of PC shareware games was something special to us. Come on Cliff, bring back Jazz!

Overall the night was an exciting and surprising glimpse at things to come in the next few months. We got to see many games we hadn’t even heard about, and got to flesh out our expectations for many of the others we were already looking forward to.

Lastly we want to tell you about what was perhaps the most interesting thing from the show. Vehicle, which had only been in development for one and a half weeks so far, by WayUpWayDown, University of Toronto Arts Centre, and the Toronto Subaru Club for this fall’s Nuit Blanche art festival. They have a really tight development window but the project looks interesting. It’s built on XNA – Microsoft’s open software (game) development platform, and bills itself as a ‘multi-car multi-world contemporary art collaboration’. This one deserves it’s own post though so we’ll bring you more information regarding it later on, closer to Nuit Blanche itself.

Photos courtesy of Jean-Luc David (flickr) – Thanks!