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Report from the Games Convention :: Day 2

On the second day I had a meeting at the Emergent Technologies about their academic programme. They provide tutorials, videos as well as an academic license for their Gamebryo engine for courses in schools, colleges and universities. The documentation looks quite complete and the engine is supported on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and PC. Gamebryo is completely based on C++.

I also signug up for “games.markt”, a german magazine for the games branche. Most interesting thing about this magazine is the online database, which allows for querying for contacts in several different areas of the game industry.

The fun part however has changed a lot on Thursday. Hordes of teens and self defined pro gamers entered the convention. Even at 9 am the rate of arriving tramways and the mass of people they spat out was impressive. Although this gives the event the final touch, I was quite happy with my traders access, which allows me to enter the business center, where nobody gets pushed and one is not surrounded by yelling and jumping WoW geeks in their personalized guild shirts … Although these shirts present quite a handy feature. You can actually read a lot out of the combat names of a person printed on te shirts like “destroyer”, “panzerknacker” or “king lazy”. Still I strolled around the GC area and got a chance to try Sonic Unleashed for the DS (it’s not a jump & run game, that’s no good) and Wipeout HD for the PS3. The latter one is interesting because of the TV set needed. I played it on a 1080p capable plasma TV. The game has quite the same features as WipeOut Pure as far as I can tell but looks or course great in HD compared to a PSP screen.

I got what I wanted from GC. I learned a lot how the gaming industry sees itself and got some business contacts. I saw the impressive show the major labels set up for the GC and I enjoyed the possibility to test pre-releases of games. I could even talk to some developers who visited their own games at the stands. Will I visit next year’s game event in Cologne? If I have time I’ll probably do … at least just for fun.