ECTS - Roundup
Posted: September 04, 2001 @ 12:26AM - By: Fraz

As I previously reported, most of the big players in the games market stayed away from this year's ECTS. Nintendo weren't there, Sony didn't have anything that I saw, and all Microsoft had was two locked offices with a little DirectX flag outside them. Intel and AMD both sponsored stuff, but their presence in terms of giving information, even on existing products, was miniscule.

Of course, all these companies' products were still in use all across the show...

Kemco's stand had some interesting-looking GBA games (Phalanx, Mechsomethingorother), and some hella-good-looking GameCube games: Universal Studios - I don't know what else was in there, but people spent the whole time playing Back to the Future... after the worked out what the keys did (the instructions were in Japanese), and Batman - Dark Tomorrow (which only had a video playing on an overhead screen that appeared to show rendered footage, but looked like it had the potential to be good). Not enough to get a feel for the console's capabilities overall, but pretty impressive (to me at least, I must admit that I think consoles suck and don't follow news on them much).

A few games from the Xbox lineup were also on show, from TDK and Rage, but I certainly didn't see the console itself anywhere within the show.

PS2s were certainly in evidence throughout he show, with several publishers showing off their new games for the console, and 3rd party peripherals being demonstrated. I'm pretty certain I saw someone with one of the old pre-release testing PS2s, too, but to be honest, the PS2 didn't have anything particularly exciting (or new) on show this time around.

nVidia didn't seem to have anything new, but with the GeForce 3 still reasonably new, that's was pretty much what I expected. Aside from their weak bags that fall apart when loaded with freebies, and team shirts that looked annoyingly similar in colour to the one I was wearing, what I expected was what I got.

Likewise ATI, who were waving about press releases saying that the Radeon All In Wonder was the best thing since... best things were invented, when all it really is is an extension to a not-very-good range of All In Wonder cards.

Guillemot/Hercules/Thrustmaster had several stands, sponsored areas, and a couple of press conferences, but aside from a few unexciting extensions to their existing range (More memory on the graphics card! Yay! / New low-end OEM sound cards! Yay!), they had nothing to offer. Similar manufacturers were much the same.

At one end of ExCeL (the exhibition centre), was the 'ELSPA (European Leisure Software Publishers Association - think ESRB) Pavillion', which seemed to contain a bunch of normal exhibitors, and a small stand where ELSPA were trying to sell their books to unsuspecting visitors. Nothing of interest there, really.

Korean developers took up a surprising amount of floorspace, actually, and some of the stuff they were showing was quite interesting. A lot of it wasn't, of course, but I'll just ignore that.

GameBox (who have a logo irritatingly similar to that of Microsoft's Xbox) were showing off their 'dreamgun', a wireless lightgun that looked quite impressive, with some kind of hunting game, which looked boring as hell, but will probably shift millions of unit in the U.S. anyway.

Phantagram Interactive announced 'Duality', and had a rather whacked-out video on their stand that had kinda confusing scene changes. Parts of it reminded me of a removed Freespace cutscene (found on the Silent Threat CD), though, so that made it cool. No, I didn't mean the headz one. Idiot.

Something reasonably interesting that I hadn't heard of before (It wasn't secret, I just didn't have a clue it existed), was Terraplay, a platform-independent netcode system that prioritises packets for the purposes of speeding up games. When they saw my press badge, they dragged me over and excitedly explained it to me. It sounds pretty good, and being platform independent, it makes the idea of PCs, consoles, and wireless devices all interacting through one server a lot more possible. A page of reviews they handed me started with an opinion from Doug Dyer, General Manager at THQ Wireless, so it's possible (however small the chance) that we'll see something from Volition using this in the future.

Aside from the UK-specific (Everybody loves BT!), boring game and non game-related exhibitors, what remained was a few publishers happily showing off games that on the whole we already knew about (only major exception: World of WarCraft - Blizzard), and gleefully giving out tiny new pieces of information and screenshots to journalists who happily lapped it up like they were being granted with immortality.

There were also a lot of recruiters from job agencies trawling the aisles, and I'm pretty certain I start next month at about 7 different developers based in various countries.

Ah well. Let's just hope that everything at ECTS next year is as good as the bar.

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