I’ve not been to ECTS before; on the basis of this year’s show, I don’t think I’ll be bothering to go again (although I may not have a choice next year – we‘re probably showing product).
ECTS is the biggest video games and electronic entertainment show in Britain, and used to be of crucial importance to the games industry. These days, it plays very much second fiddle to much larger shows like E3 or the Tokyo Games Show. Very few publishers had actually bothered to spend out on big stands, with companies like Capcom, Sega and Activision preferring to have a blank door and a private meeting room (by appointment, and for media, only) rather than openly touting their wares. The biggest stands were held by UbiSoft (whose FarCry won game of the show, presumably on the basis that it was the only game on show, as opposed to any actual gameplay merits), the entire Korean games industry (no, seriously), and Nokia (and yes, the N-Gage really is as bad as you thought it was going to be – at first glance, the stand looked busy – until you realised all the people playing on the test units were actually wearing N-Gage t-shirts themselves). There was a Half Life 2 movie on show, but it was exactly the same as the one nearly everone in the world downloaded shortly after E3. The chances are, if you could be bothered to look, there may have been one or two other things worth seeing, but frankly the general showing was so pisspoor, it was utterly demoralising and we ended up just sitting in the developer’s lounge, drinking free coffee and reading the many free magazines thrust upon us.
However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom – on the Thursday night (despite the national grid’s attempt to ruin my evening by closing the whole tube and preventing me from meeting up with a friend I hadn’t seen for a long time) we made our way to the pub my employers had hired out, and made the best of the free bar they had there, and Doug and Mike had meetings with several large hardware and software companies and we should now have some graphics cards and other loveliness headed our way.
In other news, I just picked up “Vehicles and Animals” by Athlete and it’s really jolly good.