Report from the Games Convention :: Day 1

Mathias Lux — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:28:34 +0000

Today in the morning I came back from Leipzig, where I visited the Games Convention (GC). I was there to find find potential industry partners and people interested in cooperation with the university. Unfortunately at the Games Convention (GC) you need to have an appointment to meet someone as most interesting people are fully booked. However at some places I was lucky. I talked to a very helpful product manager of RTL-Games, a very interested technical account manager of Emergent Game Technologies and a PR assistant of NCSOFT. Also the sales manager of Techland was open to a short talk. Most negative experience was Crytek, where on the one hand someone had time to talk to me, but on the other expressed that they were only interested if I either came from a really big college with a lot of students or I had a lot of money to give them. Perhaps I just spoke to the wrong person … or they need the money for their development gear as Cryengine is known to take a lot of resources. For many of the approached companies the right people had no time, but people at the reception gave me contact information or took my business card to think about my efforts. All in all I am pleased with the first day leaving aside Crytek and Koch Media.

And now for the fun part: I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky in the pre-release version and let it crash several times. The game looks just like the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – just a little better. I’m looking forward to the release. I played Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party (Ubisoft) with my butt on the Wii with the creative director of the game throwing snowballs at me. That was real fun I also watched some Spore (EA) and tested it myself for the DS. I played the new Street Fighter 4 game (Capcom) and lost 2:0 in button smashing to a stranger. I tried the new Need for Speed Undercover and I was impressed by the visual damage the car took in crashes. My Audi look kaputt after my 5 minutes test. However behavior of the car is not changed by crashes, just the look of it. Another new racing game is MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. It’s interesting how the developers combined monster trucks and motor bikes in the same game, racing at the same time. Obviously motor bikes are more fun than monster trucks.

A special experience was to play a preview of Sonic Unleashed (Sega) on a HDTV plasma screen. With such a resolution the speed of Sonic is actually fun. Age of Conan was also here with a kind of LARP battle camp with computers inside. Interesting part was the option to play Conan with three TFTs: I call this “3D cave for the poor”. It should transports the feeling of “being inside” better than with a single screen. The feeling is somewhat limited, but its actually there. At EA I tried the preview of the new Harry Potter for the Wii and battled one EA merchandising guy with my wand. It’s now in the same class of games everyone does for the Wii: Instead of button smashing its more like controller swinging. It’s interesting how fast a new input concept can look old.

The new Call of Duty game and Fallout 3 where completely overloaded although only trade visitors were allowed, so I didn’t get a glimpse of those. However those “most prominent” 3D ego shooters where not the critical mass of the GC. Most people played Guitar Hero World Tour (Activision) featuring a band of 4 people with singing, drums, bass and lead guitar. There was a huge lot of sets on at least 4 locations within the GC. Never seen so great many people fooling around with plastic instruments. All in all I was impressed by the big fuss everyone is making about their own games. Most publishers obviously have enough money for PR.

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Report from the Games Convention :: Day 1