Feature: A Leipzig Experience – Part 1

If there’s one word we would use to describe our experience at the Leipzig Gaming Convention this year, it’s “madness”. After an exhausting thirteen-hour flight from London to Munich through to Leipzig, Ready-Up Staff Writer Zoey and I arrived at the Leipziger Messe Fairgrounds… to be greeted by a 20-foot statue of a rose and a giant baby head. With industry forces such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft relocating to rival trade-show Gamescom in Cologne, this year the convention shifted its focus towards independent titles, casual browser games and lesser-known RPGs from Korea.

We started the show by exploring “Fantasy Hall” – one of the two gigantic main halls booked for the event – and within the first hour, we not only encountered six MMOs we’d never heard of (more on that next week), but several booth babes, a giant dog and an inflatable canoe as well. Indeed, with seemingly no restrictions on the type of promotions that publishers could utilise, the show floor had some bizarre stuff going on; go-karting and games of American football were common sights. I think my personal favourite was the human bowling ball event, where participants enter a giant copper wire frame and attempt to knock down over-sized bowling-pins. Zoey, on the other hand, was probably more impressed by the lines of German cheerleaders dancing nearby!

We also spent a considerable amount of time over the three days exploring the waters of casual gaming. I often had a hard time pulling Zoey out of the Online4Family booth, which pulled together free, family-friendly online games from all over the ‘net, such as Demolition City and Taz Dance Fever. Meanwhile, I spoke to a representative from GameTwist about their titles, which include card games, board games and others of the same ilk. One game which impressed me was Final Blow, an addictive old-school shooter which shakes things up by switching the play perspective from horizontal to vertical and back again on the fly. Needless to say, the show floor was a heaven for these smaller publishers and developers.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t any presence from the larger companies in the industry. Acer turned up in spades; not only did they provide a horde of gaming-class PCs for the World Cyber Games competition, but they also hosted the always-busy public gaming area, where attendees could sit down to a game of Track Mania Forever or Warcraft III. Samsung had a booth with the intention of showing off new handsets, but most – myself included – were drawn to the massive mobile-phone laid across the show floor. Samsung had set up a novel competition for attendees: the fastest time for entering “World Cyber Games” on the multi-tap T9-keypad would win a bunch of goodies. I tried my luck but frankly kind of sucked, much to Zoey’s amusement (in my defense, I normally use a Blackberry with a full keyboard).

When the crowds of the show became too much and we needed a break from our coverage, the Leipziger Messe provided perhaps the greatest rest area ever conceived for a convention: an artificial beach! That’s right, for whatever mad-cap reason (and hey, we’re not complaining!), the organisers behind Leipzig GC decided to place several hundred kilograms of sand, two-dozen deck-chairs and multiple hammocks outside the rear entrance to the event halls. Over the course of the three days we spent there, Zoey became quite enamored with the beach, suggesting we retire there at any opportunity. I, on the other-hand, being a fair-skinned Scottish lad, had great difficulty surviving in the German summer heat. The reasonably-priced bratwurst stall and the freebies being handed out by Speedlink certainly helped, however!

Did Leipzig turn out to be different than I had expected? Absolutely. Do I regret travelling a dozen hours to get there and spending countless euros on over-priced convention mineral water? Not a chance. Although we never got hands-on time with the next Call of Duty or Final Fantasy, we did get to experience a convention unlike anything we had attended before, and discover some indie gems at the same time to boot. We’ll have more detailed impressions of the show for you over the next week, including our time with online rhythm game Krazy Rain, what happens when you stick a high-end PC inside an Amiga 500 case and how we dealt with a massive crowd of odd but decidedly awesome cos-players. For now, we’re just trying to recover from it all!