Gamescom 2014 Palooza

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A bit later than expected, but here’s my report of my trip to this year’s gamescom, which takes place in Cologne, Germany. It the second time I went, and if you haven’t read my 2013 report yet, you can do so here.

This time we went on a Friday, which we hoped would be a slightly calmer day than the hectic Sunday of last year. After arriving slight past 10am, thanks traffic jam, we assumed most of the crowd must already be inside. On the way to the entrance, we wondered why so many weirdly dressed people were walking away from the closest entrance. Arriving at the entrance, we went to the back of the queue, which didn’t seem bad. Until we reached what we thought was the end, but actually the queue continued two streets down the corner. After finally reaching the back, we noticed the queue moved at a decent pace and after half an hour we were inside.

Upon entering the first hall, was it not for the World of Tanks booth, we thought we went mistakenly to a League of Legends convention. Two big screens showed pro’s playing LoL while a crowd sat down around it. There was an nVidia booth were they surprisingly played LoL, thirty PCs were set up so you could play LoL and even outside was a big screen featuring LoL, sponsored by Media Markt.

After our original shock subdued, we sprinted to the next corridor, in fear of getting contaminated. The corridor seemed surprisingly calm (calm by gamescom standards) which was a big plus. The next hall, also having enough breathing room, was home of Playstation, Blizzard and smaller publishers like CDP Red, Bandai Namco and the guys from Farming Simulator. There were plenty of cool games playable, but sadly all with long waiting lines. What stood out though were all the cool props. The LBP3 planet was absolutely gorgeous and high quality, I thought the tractor was funny and it surprised me to see a Yu-Gi-Oh replica.

The hall after that was mostly devoted to Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and Activision. Not much interesting was to be seen here, most of the stuff was behind closed doors due to age regulations. They did have Minecraft Xbox One Edition which looked like Minecraft. They did have some live gameplay for Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, which looked great but the German subs bothered me so we went on quickly.

Next up was Nintendo, which’s booth looked rather bland if you ask me. They didn’t have much interesting things to show, apart from Smash gameplay and Hyrule Warriors, but there were again long waiting lines for the latter and it comes out next month anyway. The rest of the hall was littered with smaller publishers and hardware companies. They did have Oculus Rift on display, which we wanted to try out but decided not to because of the two-hour line.

So on we want to the merchandising hall! This one was very big and had a lot of smaller indie games, of which we tried out a few. The merchandising booths had the usual stuff of many Zelda, Minecraft and Otaku items. The Square Enix shop sold posters where you had to prove you were 14 and over before being able to buy one. After checking out all the goodies and t-shirts, we strolled around all the booths for a few hours, just watching people play games.

Some of you also asked to comment on the food and the bathrooms. There were a lot of food stands, but it all was overpriced for greasy, unhealthy food and you had to queue for twenty minutes too. Examples of things you could get are a tiny box of noodles for €5.5, five measly spring rolls for €3.5, a 0.5 litre bottle of soda for €3.4 and brätwurst mit sauerkraut for an unknown price. Luckily I took my own sandwiches with me (I told you last year!) and a big bottle of Fanta, which saved me money to spend on merchandise. The bathrooms were also free of charge and were constantly being cleaned, although one stall was peed over so much I wonder if he managed to put some into the toilet at all.

Since we started getting tired and our money was burning in our pockets we went back to the merchandise hall. It was getting a bit crowdier but it was manageable thanks to the working ventilation. I picked up a Hyrule Historia which I’ve always wanted and a nice Zelda shirt with the same design as the Hyrule Historia cover. My friend picked up a Fault in our Stars t-shirt, which surprised me they even got stuff like that over there, since we didn’t see any Doctor Who stuff. Also: bonus points for gamescom banning the sales of swords, I found it gunny.

This is where it went a bit sour though. We called up our lovely private driver (it’s good to have family) and he said he was on his way and would be arriving in fifteen minutes. Stuck in a traffic jam, it quickly (more like slowly) became thirty minutes and after he noticed he couldn’t get near the entrance he had to drive an extra thirty minutes, and to make things worse it started to rain. Nearly struck by lightning, our driver had arrived and we went homewards. Wat normally should be a one and a half hour drive ended up in taking more than three hours, thanks to an accident on our own Belgian highway and an incompetent navigation device. But at least we got home.

All in all it was a nice experience, although I need further convincing to go again next year. The lines are just way too long to casually test out a game. If Zelda Wii U gets a demo though (and most certainly it will) I’ll take preparations for the long, long wait.

If you still have any questions about my experience, be sure to ask in the comments! I’m happy to comment on the various games I saw and my impressions of the booths themselves.

Happy commenting,
Daedardus

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728 thoughts on “Gamescom 2014 Palooza”

  12. I love reading all the news about upcoming games, but the thing is, I want so many and don’t have a lot of money XD. ORAS comes before everything else though. Any word on preorder bonuses for North America yet?

    Reply

  16. So far, School kind of sucks. My classes are filled with people I
    don’t talk to for the most part, an ex gf’s sister and a girl I almost
    dated. ._______________.
    I know that school has started for others on
    PJN, how’s your school year going so far, especially you freshmen in
    high school and those of you who are now rooming with others for
    college.

    In other news, I can’t wait to see what is going to be
    revealed. I wish it was announced that it would be a game so that we
    could narrow down the possibilities, although, not knowing actually
    makes this much more exciting.

    If it happens to be a game, I’m
    expecting Conquest 2, a new mystery dungeon or Gen 6.5. I would say
    Detective Pikachu or Pokken fighters but that’s already out of the
    picture seeing as they teased a “New” project.

    In terms of Gamescom, sounds like Dae had fun :3

    Reply

  17. my school life
    If they say is Pokemon is Stupid i dont talk to them
    if they can name every gun in COD i dont talk to them
    If they Considered Charizard to be a Dragon type No friendship
    basically i have no friends 😀

    Reply

  18. Earthen’s School Life
    (Sepia tone)
    ever since the 5th I started developing severe Migraines as a child that progressively got worse over the course of 7 years, All the Kids were unnecessarily loud and obnoxious causing these said headache to riddle me with horrible horrible pain and forever scarred me with a hate/fear of other people, causing me to seclude myself from everyone and everything. the antisocial fears and stress soon evolved into a form of major depression, i shunned everybody i didn’t trust (which was 95% of the schools) then something triggered some kind of severe traumatic emotional experience that i can’t even recall but still haunts me to this day
    Also nobody played Pokemon or Warcraft so basically hid in the library with my DS and Laptop every lunch

    Reply

  20. Great article Dae! I wish I could go to a gaming convention 🙁 There’s like nothing here in Minnesota, especially when it comes to Pokemon Leagues.

    P.S. Sooo is Chaos here? I’m ready for our tourney battle! (although im pretty sure I might lose… been on a losing streak so far)

    Reply

  22. A Chico without coffee shouldn’t be a Chico at all. My new motto. Anyways, sadly, I haven’t been able to use my 3ds in days. Can’t wait for the weekend.

    Reply

  25. Wow, you guys have quite the school lives! Mine is not as eventful… lol!

    ~ I actually began my school life at a Christian School where everyone was benevolent, generous, kind, etc. However, I despised their system of codes so I pleaded for my parents to send me to a public school. They accepted and I was sent to a random public school not far from home. At a young age, I discovered my passion and love for writing and because of this, my teachers began to take extra care in providing the necessary amount of lessons stemming from writing in hopes that I could one day achieve my dream of becoming an author. (Although I think my parents played their cards a little). In second grade, I began to get bullied by the older kids because I was TOO christian-like (as they called it). Thankfully, the bullying never reached a climax and I was able to break free from their grasp quite quickly. Apart from the bullying I had to endure, I was becoming more and more adept with public school life and began to work my heart out of my chest in hopes that I would become as intelligent as possible. At the end of the year, my efforts payed off and came the long awaited reward: A chance to enter a private school for gifted students. Although I had my doubts about beginning a new chapter at a private school… again, I found out that the kids and the teachers there all cared for one another and they didn’t have such crazy rules to abide by. Now, I’m beginning a new chapter in my life: entering Middle School! 😀

    Reply

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