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Why Robin Makes Batman Better Sure, you sat at your PCs, bleary-eyed, lapping up every goddamned inch of Leipzig coverage we crammed down your yaps. And for that, we thank you! But one thing you probably missed by not being there was a sense of the scale of the event. I should know, I missed it too, and am only coming around to its size by looking at the official numbers provided to us by the organisers. Over the four days 185,000 people wandered in to check out 503 exhibitors. 12,300 registered trade visitors were present, of which 43% were from outside Germany. Other super-fun stats include: 20% of visitors were women, 45% of visitors indicated they were “casual gamers”, 52% of attendees were over the age of 20 and the event was covered by over 3300 journalists from 46 countries. Who said numbers weren’t fun? They’re fun and then some.
You’ve read the list of nominees for “Best in Show” from the Leipzig Games Convention. You’ve thought it through, mulled over the lists, imagined in your head the winners, the losers, the stark contrast between ecstasy and agony. Wonder no more. Here are the winners. The Best in Show:
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SingStar is HUGE in Germany, like, Hasselhoff huge. Rock Band, Guitar Hero III? People show up, they play with the games, but SingStar draws crowds and, occasionally, a Goth who just wants to smile. Watch as this young man, whose life, I can only imagine, has been dedicated to stern looks and not smiling, finally breaks down and jams to a little YMCA… only to be caught on video. You can almost see his inner child dying at the end there when the smile freezes on his face.
Maybe mobile gaming isn’t that bad. The id Software port of its Orcs & Elves dungeon crawler, born on the mobile platform now on the Nintendo DS, may force me to reevaluate playing games on my mobile phone. After getting what I thought was a second string hands-on assignment from Crecente, I realised that I’m more into first person dungeon crawling RPGs than I had originally thought. Having experienced only a handful over my amateur gaming career—Shining In The Darkness, Phantasy Star, and a handful on Texas Instrument computers whose titles escape me—I realised that a straightforward dungeon hack might be just what I’m looking for next on the Nintendo DS.
Fountainhead Entertainment’s Orcs & Elves DS may not be much to look at—graphically, it’s not much better than id’s own Doom—it’s actually quite fun to play. Gameplay takes place on the top screen of the Nintendo DS with the bottom screen dedicated to the inventory or, at times, a top down map for when you get lost.
The Simpsons Game We sat down with EA’s The Simpsons Game at Games Convention, rumps firmly stuffed into the Fatboy beanbags at Microsoft’s Xbox 360 beach booth for a bit of split-screen multiplayer with Bart and Lisa. Our co-op adventure took us through a Lisa appropriate themed area, a redwood forest being slashed by a menacing lumber company, complete with foresters armed with back-mounted wood chipper guns.
I, as Bart (and Bartman), and Crecente, as Lisa, helped each other overcome obstacles and take down a mechanised lumber processing monster by using our special powers. Bart, armed with an electrified slingshot, took out most of the overall-clad bad guys (which happen to infinitely spawn from a port-a-potty, by the way). Lisa was given puzzle solving duties, using her Buddha palm powers to lift great tree trunks, arrange buzzsaws wedged in trees, and work out pipe puzzles with her all powerful mystical grip. Crecente looked like he was having an easy go of it, while I spent my time platforming, picking up bonus Krusty Koupons and wiping out angry workers.
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by Mark Wilson & Michael McWhertor Here it is everyone—our promised first look at Bungie’s highly anticipated Halo 3: The Ride that made its world debut this week in Leipzig. If you have any interest at all in Halo 3: The Ride, it’s a worthy watch.
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Most of us have beheld the beauty of Killzone 2′s first level already, but here’s the story narrated by the game’s developers. Keep your eye out for a few minutes in when they show the look of the game without any filters on their camera. The difference is incredible. Like, they’ve just made an argument for the colour brown in video games, incredible.
One of the big draw backs of Games Convention is that it is virtually impossible to get a direct flight here. To get to the Leipzig airport you pretty much have to fly to either Munich or Frankfurt. I flew into Frankfurt and then had a leisurely seven hour lay-over that I killed by blowing ungodly amounts of money on robotic roulette, reading and posting on the site.
When I finally hopped over to the gate for my flight to Leipzig I discovered a virtual whose who of game developers waiting to catch the same flight. Standing in the line were folks from the Call of Duty 4 development team; Dave Doak, Free Radical’s director; and Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi.
After sitting through a short and familiar presentation of Killzone 2 at the Games Convention last week I was finally given a chance to play the game.
Before handing over the controller, the developers explained that in the game you play as Sef, a legionnaire called in to help quell the resistance on the Helghast home world of Helghan as the regular army fights to topple the Helghast leader.
The pointed out the various filters used in the game to give the world a darker, more realistic look and talked a bit about the game’s new first-person lean and peek system which allows you to stick to walls and then pop-out to shoot, without ever leaving the first-person perspective.
This wasn’t as well-covered as other aspects of Leipzig (like sausage-eating), so we’ll give it a little post-GC shout-out here. As part of the Leipzig celebrations, a bunch of German gaming journalists (and one games collector) sat down, drank some beer, spoke, argued, wildly gesticulated, then came up with their list of the sixteen most important, seminal videogames of all time.
