Games Convention 2004

Introduction

It was Saturday 21th August 2004, a sunny day in Germany, and our trip started at 8 o'clock in the morning. It took us from Nürnberg to Leipzip, a trip of nearly three hours, and the first sign of the convention had been the line of cars on the Autobahn - uffz! It took us over 30 minutes to travel the last 300 meters from Autobahm exit to convention entrance - the very first prove of the hordes of people we should face today. But it was a sunny day and we had been in a good mood so it was bearable. Some money later we had been in and some red arm badges later we had been verified to be over 18. At that moment we had to take a deep breath and dive into what was called "the 50.000 visitors of Saturday"...

(a word of warning: I apologize for the inferior quality of the photos. Might be due to the horrible lightning conditions there (dark with flashing lights) or maybe due to my lousy skills as a photographer or maybe even due to the fact that my parents recently soaked our digicam with Ouzo, a fine liquor from Greece. Beg`ya`pardon)

Söldner: Secret Wars

Out of some tradition from Games Convention 2003 we first headed towards the booth of Wings Simulations - a good decision. We could skip the "have to wait 45 minutes in a sticky tube" line to hall 5 on the left side, we could avoid the "have to wait 45 minutes in a sticky tube" line to hall 4 on the right side, we could walk past the "have to wait 30 minutes on some stairs" line to hall 3 but had been able to simply wander the free ways into hall number 2. Wonder why... hall 2 contained "GC family", the family software corner, the kids software corner, the learning software corner, the anti-piracy organisations corner, the police department for software crimes corner, the "some strange artists at a teenager gaming convention" corner - and the game Söldner. The "oasis of quietness" it was called, the hall 2. Everything else just was hell 3, hell 4 and hell 5.

Wings Simulations had been part of a booth hosted by G.A.M.E., a German gaming software developers alliance. When we approached there we noticed one of the four gaming PCs to host Söldner (I don't know what hardware they used but it looked way better than on my ATi 9800 Pro...) and some seconds later we spotted Teut Weidemann, lead designer of the game, talking to some other fans at the moment. When we came near him he looked at us, raised an eyebrow and said "hey, I know you, you are hexe, and you are... ... ..." "I am 'the boyfriend of hexe'" I interrupted his brain time. After shaking hands we waited till he finished his conversations with the other people and bluntly enjoyed the feeling to be welcomed with names and handshakes from the big boss of the company making one of our favourite computer games.

While we then had started a very kind conversation with Teut, including the mentioning of my name *cough*, a teenager showed up and was introduced to us by Teut as Andimann, the working force behind the Söldner fan website SecretWarsNet. He did recognize us from last year's GC, obviously he played at the demo PCs at the same time as we did, but we couldn't remember his face, sorry Andimann! Unfortunately he had disappeared before we were able to talk to him later.

Somewhen during our conversation I startet my original plan: from the official Söldner release LAN party called "reLANed 3" we had a leftover copy of Söldner (every attendee there got one for free but we already bought ours at release date of course) and I politely asked whether it's possible to sign it for us so we could donate it to WOLFGaming.net for giving it away as a winner's price for some fan contest. Of course he could. But before I was able to pull out my still sealed copy he said "no, wait" and pulled out one himself. Ooookey, not that I would deny that. It needed hexe's fingernails to get it open but then he signed it, excusing for his horrible handwriting - he admits to be used to keyboards, not pens.

In that second Plex showed up, the community manager of Wings, and while Teut said "hey Plex, those people are-" Plex already greeted us with handshakes saying "hi hexe, hi T.T.H.". Teut again: "you know them?" "yes, we already did meet several times by now". Yeah, we did really enjoy the feeling to be known by some guys at Wings.

Teut handed over the game to Plex asking him to sign it. So he did, additionally wrote "for hexe and T.T.H." on it and gave it back again. Teut starring at it, saying "well, that way it can't be a price at WOLFGaming anymore... I told you to sign it, not to write a story on it!". Some sighing seconds later Teut pulled out another copy, opening it, handing it over to Plex, giving him the "I'm the boss, do exactly as I told you" look. Afterwards he interrupted the Söldner playing Sven alias Festus (yup, not just "some guy" had been playing at the demo PC but one of the coders themselves...) to even sign the games and then told us to wait a little for Udett so he can make his signature, too.

The conversation continued for some time, about the game, about the patches, about the beta, about good selling countries and about bad selling countries - very informative that all. Nevertheless Teut had a meeting in 30 minutes and Plex advised him to leave now for that meeting, because no matter how short the way there was, they had all been crammed with hordes of teenagers. Teut did just as suggested and we said goodbye. Plex left us, too, to have a smoke outside, but not until telling us some more minutes of his plan how to get out of this labyrinth of hells- uhm, halls. But before he was able to leave Udett showed up, the producer of the game. Man, there must have been some cat severly devasting his hair cut, but next to his funky hair dress that guy is a walking fountain of good mood. We had been introduced to him by Plex and after mentioning the fact that we (Udett and hexe/me) already had some short email conversation at the beginning of this year he even remembered our names and that we came from Nürnberg. Did I mention "bluntly enjoyment" yet?! He was instructed by Plex to sign our two games and was hindered to simply keep my nice Edding pen only by the fact that his Simpsons T-shirt featured no pockets.

After Plex left for his well earned smoke we talked to Udett for some time. We had been told that Wings will get a new creative director called Chris, who came directly from EA and appereantly was some "VIP". As if fate wanted to have some fun today exactly that guy showed up and Udett yelled over half of the booth "HEY CHRIS, COME OVER HERE, I want to introduce you to some people, those are hexe and T.T.H., two person you just have to know". While we both once again had that special "enjoyment" feeling we were shaking hands with "Chris". That poor person had just arrived, still carrying some luggage, and had a very big thinking bubble above his head stating "WTF?!?". We were merciful and let him just walk away again, but said hello to his company, a guy called Lordi, a part-Wings, part-Krawall freelancer who we knew from reLANed 3.

Some chit-chat later we had met every somewhat-Wings-related person at that booth, had some very kind conversations with nearly all of them, had accuired two brand new and fully signed copies of Söldner: Secret Wars, had recieved an additional original soundtrack CD and finally had a very good feeling inside. I can conclude this very first chapter of my review only with very similiar words as I finished my last year's review about Söldner: whatever you may think of their game, love it or hate it, but do not judge about the people behind it before you have met them in person. They are a bunch of very, very kind people, being very interested in contact to the players of their game and they will listen to everyone stating his opinion in a polite manner. To Teut, Plex, Festus, Udett, Lordi and "Chris": thank you very much for that hearty welcome at your convention booth! It was a pleasure and honor to meet you (once again).

Concerning the signed copy of Söldner: Secret Wars (the "unpersonalized" one...) I just say: have an eye on WOLFGaming.net and Planet Soldner the next weeks because we'll try that you get the chance to grap that exclusive copy with all the important names written on it!

Out of this World

The second of the two interesting booths of hall 2 had been right next to Wings and belonged to softgames.de. Softgames.de is a presentation site for hobby game developers from Germany and so there had been several young teams showing their completed or nearly completed games - in the hope that the masses and at best a publisher would notice them.

The first game I want to tell off is called Out of this World. It's a "classic" isometric perspective RPG game in the style of Diablo and Sacred. But to be honest, at the very first view that little independently made game looked to me way better than Sacred. If you run around in Sacred you'll notice many lovely made details, but I always had the impression to run around in a "tiled" world, where everything is made of little squares - but not so in Out of this world. It's resolution might be limited to 800x600 only and it's all 2D only, but it looks so damn real. You're walking not through some "tiled" world but through a forrest, with trees, grasses, bushes, mushroom colonies, stones and dirt trails. When approaching a house the dense forrest cleared up and gave view on some wodden or stone houses, with chimneys, bewildered walls, forges, pitchforks leaning on the doorframe and weeds growing out of the cracks and chinks. Lovely made into the very last detail. What is truly amazing for a two person project. One coder, one graphic artist. Wow. Really-damn-big-WOW.

We had the pleasure to be introduced to the game by the graphic artist himself and he showed us every function and explorable area. Your hero (currently it's the one hero only, no character selection) is walking around, mouse movement just like in Sacred, or even WASD. You can equip armor and weapons, all of them nicely displayed at his body when leaving inventory. You can bash monsters with that weapons or you can cast magic on them - spell selection is similar to Diablo 2. I want to state at this point that OotW is not yet finsihed: there are no friendly NPCs yet, there are nearly all menues except inventory missing and there are not that many different weapons, armors and spells yet (gosh, I can't wait till that lovely made towns are filled with lovely made people!). At the convention you could run around, explore a little village and some swamp and forrest areas around it. There had been Werewolf like creatures and some of the o-so-familiar undead. But those undead looked just as lovely made es everything else in this game. We both had been impressed: it's not ready yet, but it's come quite far, and every fact and thing he showed us was so damn perfect that this game will be a blast when all the rest will be made the same way. I just can suggest everybody to have a look at this game and it's future. You can find more info at the website of Elite Soft. Maybe you could even convince them that cooperative multiplayer would be ultimate kick for such a great game...

Glider - collect`n kill

Another game of a hobby crew had been Glider - collect`n kill from REVOgames. According to them it's pretty finsihed and they are looking for some publisher to place it in the low budget segment for about 15 to 20 EUR. The game itself is very arcady: it's about some gliders, flying around outdoor and indoor, collecting weapons, powerups and "score ball" while the unfriendly guy from the next PC is trying to blow you into pieces. Yup, it's multiplayer, for internet or LAN. They said they dropped all the storyline just to focus on the main thing: massive steel carnage - midair.

It runs pretty fluid, in full Direct X9 glory, with lens flare effects and a bunch of other fancy visuals. It seems to play pretty "easy", intuitive steering. Of course you'll need skillz for major fragging. Only negative thing in my eyes was the very near fog. They know this fact but decided to limit viewing distance to let the game be playable even on pretty "slow" graphic hardware (concering todays standards). It includes several different multiplayer game modes, some classic (TDM), some new ones (the more score balls you collect the phater prey you are).

So if you like a fast, arcade game this is the one to look for. I wish those developers good luck, because they put together a very nice piece of code and graphics.

Tales of Tamar

The third and last (ex-)hobby game I will tell of is called Tales of Tamar. It's some play-by-email game with a very big client program, a mixture between Civilization and The Settlers of Catan, with ressource management and troop training in towns and hero and troop movement outside on a hexagonal world map. As far as I know they have only one game world and wars and alliances are the key to raise and fall. Goal of the game is to get emperor of the world, a state you'll only reach if you have enough (human player) followers. Besides the moves by email they operate a very big forum where you can talk outgame and ingame - the later fact they pointed out several times. This game is even already released, comes in a pretty box with three CDs and a handbook, does cost 55 EUR and for those bucks you will get one year of gametime including around 300 moves (while four moves are one ingame year) and all game client updates for free in that year. And they do organize Live Action Roleplay Conventions sometimes so you can meet your ingame friends and foes "in reality".

Dungeon Siege 2

Okeydokey, out of the silence, right into the hammering beats and flashing lights of hell number 4. One of the first highlights we noticed had been a playable demo of Dungen Siege 2, on big plasma TVs, as usual here. It was definitely a very, very unfinished demo, with debug output in the corners and an overall "here and there is something missing" look&feel. So I don't know how accurate my judgement is, but honestly, I was not impressed. Especially the landscape graphics did not look that much better than the first Dungeon Siege. Heroes had been a bit more detailled, but what was really way cooler had been the big, nasty enemies: there had been huge stone golems, evil demon knights and above all some demon riders on some demon... uhm, riding... eer, things...

When two heroes and their "I collect the loot" firey demonfamiliargolem entered some area a wild cutscene broke in and showed a crumblig wall, dust at the horizon and screaming riders coming towards them. That cutscene really kicked in, being very smoothly integrated inbetween the "ingame" and really shocked the viewers. A fight broke loose and the heroes had been trampled and smashed down quickly. Luckily the menu offered some "instant respawn" button, hihi. But on the other side the two unarmored, unarmed, slim lady heronesses did not fight against the demons. The gamer and the spectators had no clue and a "person who knows" was not in sight. So the only thing to do was to send the little familiar into battle (like a 50 cm creature bashing the big toe of Mr Stone Golem and biting the hairs of the demon riding thing tail).

Well, after a 20 respawns or such he surrendered due to boredom. He went away in some quiet area and looked through the menues. Every basic thing there, inventory, spellbook, oookey, but most surprising thing was the new spell and skill trees which looked like copy&pasted right from Diablo 2. I can only support that feature and I think such a skill tree is way better than this broken "I get better in what I do" and "I get more the more damage I inflict" system the first Dungeon Siege had. But after all that demo had been just a demo and a very unfinished one in my eyes. Maybe I give this game a second chance when it comes out.

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