NX306, me and Sir Loony headed to Germany at around 4am. We counted to get to Cologne at most at noon. Loony managed to sleep for the most part of the road trip so it was up to me to say something from time to time so NX wouldn't fall asleep.
So now a bit about Gamescom. In general the event was rather a failure because most of the games were targeted at casual gamers. Those you can never expect at such an event. There were mostly games for Nintendo Wii and music related games. There were few surprises like playable Final Fantasy XIV but otherwise it was rather poor. Even male players who came there to see pretty girls were disappointed. Probably the best looking girls were at KONAMI stands and the number was low. At Winter Olympics stand there were demo gilrs wearing Angel costumes but otherwise there wasn't much originality (most girls were dressed just in a t-shirt and shorts)
KONAMI
After a first stop at Vierpfeile (German dance game community) stand we headed to KONAMI stand. There we could try new Castlevania, Yu Gi Oh, Pop'n Rhythm, Rock Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, Hottest Party 2, PES and that's probably it. We wanted to try the new music games so we waited in line for Pop'n Rhythm. PNR is something like forced 5-button Pop'n Music for Nintendo Wii that is played with nunchuk and wiimote. Instead of hitting the buttons on a controller you move your hands holding the controllers in according directions (left, right, down or you kind of imaginary clap your hands). The game does not use keysounds but each button is linked with sounds of a certain instrument. So in all the songs you hear the very same instruments all over again (not that fun). The game lost its whole magic. All the little animations and stuff are just gone and Wii graphics replaced it.
Another game we played was Rock Revolution. It's also ridiculously easy as PNM for Wii was. There you can either play imaginary guitar or imaginary drums. The game is just awful and is also for Nintendo Wii. The last game in that corner was Karaoke Revolution for next-gen consoles. Nothing has really changed in the game but it was ported for next-gen consoles so that's probably a plus?
I also went to try the new DDR Hottest Party. It looks quite good but it is still aimed at casual players. You can set some mods this time but still the mods are set before you enter songwheel and cannot be changed without exiting that. The songlist was poor or at least there was nothing that would catch my eye/ear. The good thing though was that it wasn't so OFF as the earlier games we played at GamesCon. We also had the chance to see a trailer for DDR for next gen consoles. There's still a lot of work to do on it. It will have an octomove mode which is actually Technomotion mode. It will have downloadable content including themes and it should contain the best songs from DDR1st mix up to DDRX.
After this we were witnesses to Pop'n Rhythm demo and Meiji answering some questions about the game. I rather not talk about this as the guy made me pretty angry. The game is just awful! Not even if I think that it is better than Beat'n'Groovy.
After that I checked Yu Gi Oh which is still the same game even though it was on hand helds. Not sure how you can communicate with other players there but well^_^. It played the same. I actually miss the not-card game simulation games. Those were cool and the music was awesome.
Castlevania seems really good and even after Castlevania arcade it's quite a surprise.
Also I've seen Naoki pass by so I ran behind him and asked him if I could have a photo with him. The person translating from Japanese to English took a photo of me and Naoki. Naoki is a really nice person and he likes BEMANI games fans.
Harmonix
The next game I tried was Rock Band. I tried it to see if it still plays the same way (really bad way for me) or not. The new Rock Band title is dedicated to The Beatles and I actually like this. It's a completely different target group and probably that was the objective. We played a song I played the drums putting it accidentally on Hard but no one commented on that. It played quite nice. I did not notice anything new from the previous game though. What I can say is that Rock Band games had the setlist written on the stand itself and also had them printed out unlike at Activision stands where you were forced to play a song chosen by the staff. Playing on Rock Band drum controller felt much worse than playing on the default GH one though...
Activision
After this I also had to try Guitar Hero 5. I was actually surprised that there's a new GH game. I did not know that. Not that I would care. GH Metallica was also playable there and that one actually seems nice. What was more interesting at Activision stand though was DJ Hero. The game is NOT a Beatmania IIDX rip off. That's the first thing I realized. The second is that it plays really weird. You have three buttons on the turntable and you also need to be switching to further left or right track with some little thingy. You either do this or you press a button or you press a button and scratch. If you confirm the right note there's a track activated for a certain time till you miss and it plays the according sound track. The mixing is done via the weird thingy and scratching actually produces scratching sounds but it does not correspond the way you actually scratch. After this I realized that if there would be more tracks and buttons and more things that would allow you to change a track it might be a pretty good simulation game. It is something between Amplitude and Guitar Hero but rather dull at this point.
The next music related game I tried was Lips. It's a singing game that can be played localy or online. It was unplayable due to a really big lag. I did not know if it is audio or visual lag so I just continued on.
SquareEnix
What interested me at Gamescom was SquareEnix stand. I did not really expect much as usually they have nothing at their stands. This time I was surprised. A playable Final Fantasy XIV online game was there for us to try. I don't play online games but it was nice to see my character roam the "battleground" though. Graphics is nice and I prefer this kind of graphics over WoW/Diablo etc. I also played Kingdom Hearts (some numbers) on Nintendo DS. It wasn't good at all. It was rather dull and if it had some RPG story like aspects I did not really managed to get to them. The fighting system even though being the same than on PS2 just did not work well. Too bad...the game is bad.
I also checked other games at the stand. There were few board games (like Carcasson) ported to Nintendo DS. I remembered playing Kolonisten Von Katan online when I saw those games on DS.
Tony Hawk
There was a pretty nice "museum for Tony Hawk games so you could learn about the skating history and most famous skaters. I don't really know much about anything like that but some photos and texts made me realize few things^^. It seems skaters really had a hard time with trying to conving the public that their activity is ok. For Xbox (I think) there's a new Tony Hawk game that uses a new peripheral. The skateboard peripheral looks pretty good and I think that it uses your balance much better than the WiiFit games (yeah, there is a new WiiFit game WiiFit+ or Family Trainer).
Some random games...+ Tekken 6
Somewhere at Gamescon there was also a simulation of surfing on the waves. This was much more realistic simulation (you actually playde on a real board) and people had real problems even standing on it. Poor demo girls who were catching the falling players. I really liked this one.
I went to Blizzard stand too later in the day. I wasn't really interested in waiting in a line for eternity to play StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3. But I watched the trailers and went to play World of Warcraft and playing the Wizard reminded me the Sorceress from Diablo 2. This was the most interesting place though for the players attending Gamescom.
At one of the Namco stands you could go stand in a line to play Tekken 6. At first I expected nothing new from the game and was surprised. The game evolved in the way that it has certain things that have serious impact on the game (like that some characters can kill in two blows under certain conditions). Playing single player mode actually reminded me of Guilty Gears. The characters when with little life are much stronger later in the game and some stages are actually pretty hard. The game is also much more colorful and the new female character is a pretty flying b*tch (that Boskonovitch armor is like WTH? It looks really weird ... how can she wear it?). The new male character is much more overpowered though. When I went there to play I was alone and someone joined me. I started winning quite soon and my opponent started swearing "kurwa". Later when I metLoony again he told me a similar story about a swearing Polish guy being beaten by him. Maybe it was the same guy?
There was also a Retro games corner where you could play the all good Sonics and Mario. A small game console/computer museum was there which was pretty nice (and yes, there was a Hello Kitty tamagochi).
Next to it were Nintendo Wii stands were you could play a new Mario multiplayer game. It was fun and actually it played better than Mario Party games for GameCube (um actually there's already one for Wii right?) and it was more accurate than the young Mario for Nintendo DS.
Also there was a big advertisement for Sonic vs Mario Winter Olympics. The game itself wasn't really about winter Olympics though. The game has a Winter theme with many mini games and not necessarily Winter Olympics disciplines.
There's not so many things that caught my eye but several funny things occured. When I went to get something to eat I met two groups of Czech people. Both of these groups were filming the new games and making interviews. They were pretty vulgar though so I did not really want to start a chat. After that I went over to Vierpfeile stand where the real fun began. There was Beatmania IIDX, OpenGroove and Guitar Hero 4. I asked if I can play IIDX and I was given permission. I played few songs than someone else and later it was my time once again. Someone came there and wanted to play but was told that I would go first and he was like "Yeah, but I'm not like getting flashing greats on [he looked at the screen] songs on Another". It was quite funny to hear that. I finished my song and let him play. He was actually not bad at all. At least (almost) no one in our country would be able to play 7s on normal.
When I was playing IIDX people were stopping by and couldn't believe what they saw. They wanted to try the game so I let them and explained a bit how the game is played. A lot of those people asked me to show them a song so I picked The Least 100 Sec on hyper most of the time. At one of the times I was playing like that I heard someone behind say pretty loudly "Ty krávo" followed by "Let's try this" in Czech. It was quite fun to hear another Czech people there. There was also one guy who came there and seemed to be interested in the game. I explained him that this is (quite) old Japanese game etc and he then he said "So I shouldn't say that's something like DJ Hero right?". I told him that it would be a really bad idea to say this aloud at this stand and we continued talking. Actually most of the people stopping by were really interested in IIDX and ignoring GH and DJ Hero. That made me feel a bit better. Too bad I had to explain many times that this is imported game and they need modded playstation or swp magic in order to play it.
Some people were surprised that I don't speak German but switched to English quite soon and without problems.
Also played some ITG and that's probably everything I can say about Gamescom.
After 6pm we left the expo and wanted to find a place where we could eat. Soon we found Subway and headed there. The air outside was impossible to breathe and the temperature (37 dgrs Celsius) was still pretty high. We hoped that inside it would be better but it was maybe even worse. We ordered our meal and started to chat. I have to say that Sir Loony was full of surprises. His quotes were sometimes even funnier than Srandista's. The way back to Czech Republic was quite fun thanks to of Sir Loony even though he fell asleep later on. We arrived at 4 am and were glad that we can go to sleep. Unfortunately NX nor me managed to sleep well.
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