Update: Pictures below, video will have to wait until tomorrow though!
I’m back from the great city known as Cologne! What did I do there? Visiting Gamescom of course! Below you’ll find my general report from yesterday. Keep in mind the pictures and videos are on their way. I know I shouldn’t have lended a better camera than mine from someone I knew without asking for some connectivity cables. Thank Sony’s proprietary memory cards and connectors for that ;).
To get the bad news out of the way, I wasn’t able to find an Exeggutor in the XY demo. However, a commenter by the name of Ditto24 pointed to this video uploaded today, which confirms that Fairy does neutral damage against Psychic, seeing as Grass apparently takes neutral damage from Fairy (sorry WPM’s leaker). Dragonite does have multiscale though, seeing as my first Thunderbolt did only a third of his HP as damage, and the next one took him out.
But let us begin with the begin of my show, shall we? After a one hundred mile, one and a half hour drive, we arrived at the big city of Cologne. We immediately knew we were in the right place after seeing all the traffic. Show floor opened at 9.00 am, and we managed through the ticket gates ourselves at 9.15 am. The first hall contained two giant screens for two live League of Legends matches, alongside Wargaming.net’s World of Warplanes. Not my cup of tea, so we went on to search for the Nintendo booth.
The second hall contained Sony and Activision Blizzard. Extremely long waiting lines for anything PS4 related, and even things like Beyond: Two Souls led us to quickly skim through the hall. Activision were there with stuff like a new Diablo 3 expansion, COD: Ghosts and the bland looking Hearthstone game.
Arriving at the third hall, we immediately noticed this was EA and Microsoft’s domain. Ubisoft were there too, with another crazy line for Assassins creed 4. A giant mech stood tall, Titanfall’s trademark gameplay element. A Sims 4 booth was remarkably calm, and the footage I saw looked suspiciously like something I played years ago (aka Sims 3). The main draw of course was Battlefield 4 on PS4 (could be Xbox One though). They had the two queues each with a nice sign that said ‘You have to wait six hours from here’. Seeing as the show only was 20 minutes in and everyone stood at the 5 hour sign, we obviously skipped that on went on.
We came to realise we didn’t go to a gaming convention. This was more of a queueing convention, or a test-your-patience event. Was the Nintendo booth any different? Spoilers: no. Nintendo was there with every major game on Wii U and two 3DS games: Pokémon XY and Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and quite a few Wii U demo stations. All of the first party stuff had waiting lines averaging between one and two hours. Sadly, all the demo’s were the E3 version of which I already had seen lots of footage from, and we didn’t have the time to test them all.
We went on the see some more obscure games, like Building Simulator, which is made by the Farming Sim guys. Seems like it also inherited the ridiculously bad physics. There were lots of games playable that I already forgot about, and there were so many people I didn’t have a real chance to sit down with one and get blown away with it. After an expensive Cheeseburger (€5, I’ll bring my own sandwiches next time, thanks) we dared to stand in line for Pokémon XY. The Nintendo booth was such a disorganised mess, and we didn’t know if we were in the right line, but the couple cosplaying as a Pancham and Fennekin before us led us to believe we were. Pictures coming soon! Our feet started hurting badly, but finally, after a two-hour wait, we got called to play the game. And I have to say, the game looks amazingly good on the 3DS itself. All the pictures and footage online are a blurry mess, but on the 3DS, they look perfectly fine. After my ten minute play (of which footage is also coming soon), we were getting tired. Seeing as it already was 3 pm, and the show closed at 6 pm, there wasn’t much time left for another demo.
We checked out the merchandise booths and I bought a lovely Companion Cube from the Valve shop. It is absolutely adorable! We tried to get a Gamescom t-shirt on the way out, but the nice ones were all sold out, while we had to wait more than an hour for a less nice one. We just went outside and our feet thanked us for driving back home. We did have some great fun all in all, but my major gripe was that it was just way too crowded. Hopefully next year will have some precautions against the long waiting lines.
The pics will come likely tomorrow or Wednesday evening once I get my cable and once I get the chance to upload all the pictures and videos. I got an exam Wednesday morning, so that’s why this post is coming in first and the pictures get delayed a bit. I wouldn’t have the time to write all this in the coming days, and I know you guys wanted to hear about it as soon as you could. If you’ve got anything else to ask me, just shoot in the comments!
