Made my way to Earl’s Court for the ECTS mid morning, having pretty much a good idea of what exactly I wanted to see.
The usually crowd was present Atari, Konami, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Ubi-Soft. The Microsoft stand was for invitees only, nothing unusual there I’m guessing they had a crazy presence during the GDC Europe conference as well.
Nokia had gone to a lot of trouble to let you know that the N-Gage was being launched at the ECTS, the Nokia stand was one of the largest at the show having many demo units running 20 odd titles. I tried out the Tony Hawks game, which looked remarkably similar to the GBA version but not as detailed graphically. None of the units here setup to play multiplayer games, which is actually what Nokia pose as being the N-Gage’s strenghts. Still no pricing or provider information available for the UK.
At the Ubi-Soft stand I got the chance to play XIII which is a cell-shaded story based action game. With Zelda Nintendo have set the bar for games that use this style of graphics, so XIII definately looks very good. Not to sure of the plot as yet but definately worth investigating once it comes out, is going to be a big multi-platform release will probably go for the PC version.
Half Life 2 was definately one of the highlights of the show, I queued up for 45 minutes to see the 20 minute presentation, I was totally blown away by what I saw. The usual action aspects of the game where present, however the interaction with the objects looks like it has been improved ten fold. This was demonstrated by crunching wooden crates, and throwing steel barrels. (BTW: there was no sign of Condition Zero anywhere, but then I guess it not really big news anyway.)
Konami had the Snake-Eater preview movie running at the stand as well as having a playable demo of Twin Snakes on the GameCube. They had a few out cute looking titles that where still in Japanese as well as a Zone of Enders sequel, which looked okay. Tough I liked the original, I thought it was to story driven and the actual playability was a little mechanical. So as far as Konami are concerned the big thing was Twin Snakes, I look forward to playing MGS with the MGS2 engine, not revolutionary by any means but definately worth playing.
The last thing I saw at the show was the Nintendo stand which was located outside the hall, they where having a head to head competition on Mario Kart : Double Dash which looks very good unfortunately not out till November. Another long time favourite has been updated for the GameCube, F-Zero GX which is out at the end of October was on show, again can’t wait for this either. The new Pokemon titles on the GBA where also there in full force.
I wanted to go to the Playstation Experience as well but the queues where very crazy, both sided off Earl’s Court 1 had queues which went pretty much all the way round to the back where the second hall is. I know what I missed, Soul Caliber 2 which was going to be one of the highlights, though I think I did spot a GameCube on the Nintendo stand running the GC version, however it didn’t quite register at the time.
One disappointment at the ECTS was that there where no Macs or Mac games for that matter. Apple should be looking to push OS X as a gaming platform as well. It does not help Apple by not having presence at large shows like ECTS. On top of that it would have been a good place to appeal to developers to consider supporting OS X as well.
