Gamescom 2013

So... I was at Gamescom 2013 - for work-purposes as I was there with the PR-department of a games-developer, rocking a stage in the consumer-area of the convention center. As I have just returned home last night after six days of hard work and slightly less hard parties, my thoughts on what I've seen and experienced are as of yet a bit unstructured but lest I start to forget, here come some snippets from my Gamescom-trip.

Please read on after the jump!



-There are not many scantily-clad booth-babes anymore as the games industry has generally matured a bit over the past decade. Right next to our booth though, a computer-case-outlet had its regular semi-strip-show, much to the agreement of hoi polloi. But it's alright, my colleague and I agreed that someone who has a heavily-modified tower-PC where the case alone costs more than a regular machine probably has no woman in their life and thus has no need to be all that mature.

-The business-only day on Wednesday was great for walking around and actually getting so see stuff, as opposed to waiting in line for two hours in order to see five minutes of badly-edited gameplay so we only did it on that day. Other days we had stage-shows to do every hour so there wasn't much room for looking around anyways.

-Murdered: Soul Suspect looks rather cool but the trailers I saw only ever talked about the story, not one bit about gameplay. For all I know, the game could be a QTE-laced shitfest with an amazing storyline or even an FPS with rather nice-looking cutscenes. I don't know if that level of information is a positive thing because it does make me weary on what the game will actually be like.

-Doing a solo-presentation of a game on a large stage for 30 minutes straight really gets to your voice. I should have brought something to soothe that but didn't so I am now facing the consequences by being rather raspy on my day off.

-I have a rather mixed view on Japanese-culture-nerds. While I do appreciate sexy cosplayers prancing around (and some of them, less Japanese-influenced, were even cosplaying as characters from our games, which was nice to see), I really cannot see how you can go and buy a pedobear-pillow, much less dress up as that thing. Also, what's with these freaking cuddle-girl-pillows? How can you be a guy who needs such a pillow yet be capable of enough unashamed human interaction to actually buy that thing in public? I don't know...

-The new Wolfenstein is something that somebody needs to make a trailer of using Primal Screams "Swastika Eyes" as music. As their booth was close to our stage, I am now as sick of their trailer as I am of the Elder Scrolls Online live-action trailer, as awesome and well-produced as that one was.

-That huge Titanfall-mecha with the moving eye/head-thingy needed to be climbable, dammit! The picture I took infront of it really doesn't show the size of the thing.

-When we travelled there, we expected to be the inexperienced underdogs of stage-shows. Turns out, larger companies are not any better at chosing the right person to hold a stage-show. Never let a dev do the work of a PR-guy unless they really know what they're doing. Or vice-versa, I guess.

-Suda 51 is fucking insane. Playing the madness that is the beginning of his new Killer is Dead (what the fuck does that mean anyways? It's just random shit that people spout out in the cutscenes!), I got all the way to the point where pornfetish-nurse appears in some French mansion (where I think I was supposed to assassinate someone), telling me that she was a certified blood-drawing nurse (and wielding a syringe as big as herself). That was the point where I took off the headphones, exclaimed "This ends here!" and left. Saw the man himself on stage later and he seemed more sane than I had expected. Looks can decieve after all.

-While high-end stuff like oculus-rift-based run/gun-action was interesting, I'm more of an indie-fan myself and it was cool that a booth of a bunch of indie-guys who had thrown in together to get their booth at the convention was right infront of our stage. Their booth just screamed indie too, with naked plywood- structures for their gaming-stations (one per game) that people were encouraged to write stuff on over the course of the convention. Nice guys too, we were friendly and good neighbours all around.

-The parties can be cool and can also be stupid. At the sony party, we felt that it was just a more noisy version of their regular booth so we left. Going through the empty convention center, we heard music from one of the now-deserted halls and followed our ears. We bumped into a party of the nerdiest of the nerds, the German Case Modding Championship and they were partying hard around their rather impressive collection of case-mods. Before I knew it, I was part of an automated Looping-Louie drinking game that would refill and rotate you shot-glasses whenever you lost. Being the most sobre person at the table I never did lose. Good times were had.

That's it for now, I may post another post about Gamescom 2013 should inspiration strike me and make me write more.