Thursday, August 30, 2007

Leipzig: Your Comments

Here are two e-mails from DQ readers who attended Leipzig last week.

First, from Florian Schwarzer:
I've got two minor points on Sony connected to the GC Leipzig.

First, I've got to say that the This is Living exhibition area was by far the most appealing of the three console manufacturers'. It included several setpieces from one 'living room' area to an 'attic', and in that environment, the toilet seats seemed like quite a nice joke.

Second, in the preceeding GCDC, there was a fascinating lecture by business agent Jeffrey Hilbert, who made an interesting point about cross-platform game production: Apparently, it's very difficult to port a game from the Xbox to anywhere else, while it's relatively easy to port a game natively based on the PS3 SKU. So, PS3 owners will likely not be cut out from multiplatform titles due to their console's small installed base.

I assume that "anywhere else" is specifically referencing consoles, since Microsoft does have tools developed to ease porting into Windows. I e-mailed Florian and asked him what he thought about the PS3 games he saw, and here's his response:
Not too much, frankly. The Games Conference as a whole felt quite inhospitable on Wednesday, so I didn't stay too long. Tried a little Ratchet & Clank, which plays extremely smoothly and has a very nice, if unspectacular look.

Eye of Judgement was constantly crowded. Seemed interesting, is all I can really say.

Uncharted looked very good (personally, I'd prefer its style to Heavenly Sword, making me a minority of one, I guess), but I didn't really get into the controls in my less than five minutes of playtime.

Here's another perspective from a regular e-mailer who works in the gaming industry and wishes to remain anonymous:
Since I was there and, as far as I can tell, you weren't.

Microsoft ABSOLUTELY KILLED IT. They had a huge ferris wheel, branded with Halo 3 and the Live button across the middle, with each pod being Halo 3 hands on. Slow rotation = reasonable play time. Huge areas inside, loads of games. Games worth playing.

Nintendo had the best signage (since there were no maps or signage for anything anywhere, pretty much) so you could actually find them if you wanted to.

I didn't see Sony's stand at all, though I didn't get much time to go looking for basically a stand with no games.

Sonic and Mario Olympics - easily going to become the biggest game on the Wii EVER. Oh man, I just can't wait for this game now. It's looking unstoppable.

Virtua Fighter 5 360 - online is AMAZING. Hardly any lag and totally playable.

I really like Olympics-based games (on the rare occasions when they don't suck), so hearing about Sega's game is good news.

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