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gamescom 2013; 21st to 25th of August, Cologne, Germany
Topic Started: Aug 20 2013, 09:52 AM (338 Views)
Dr. Best
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The title says most of it. The HD version of Occulus Rift will be there, Playstation 4 and XBox One will be there, nVidia Shield will be there, the Wii U will be there, lots of upcoming next-gen games will be there and I will be there.

Let me know if you intend to be there as well. I would not mind meeting some of you.
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Despellanion
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I would like to get my hands on a Oculus Rift and use it with Unity. I would be able to make something really immersive out of One Late Night.
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zelda4evr
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I searched and couldn't find where it is being hosted, where is gamescom taking place?

Posted Image
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Dr. Best
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Cologne, Germany.

My hometown.
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RonBurgundy
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Get any looks at some promising ones yet?
!!! DEFEND POP PUNK !!!
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ScottyAnimation
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@DrBest, if you ever meet Frank Ostrowski, please tell him thanks for making the ST useful (GFA BASIC) back in the 80s.
Thanks.
Don't get upset, it's just zeros and ones. -Scotty
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Dr. Best
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@ RonBurgundy
The gamescom has been quite nice so far. I was a little disappointed at how crowded it was on the exclusive day for trade visitors. I could not get to see everything I would have liked to see but I did see the most important things. This post is getting to be long, so I'll insert some headings:

Occulus Rift
The most impressive experience clearly has been the HD prototype of Oculus Rift. I had some problems getting a sharp view wearing my glasses underneath the Oculus Rift but I suppose this problem won't occur if you use the right lens inside the Oculus Rift and do not wear glasses.

They had two demos. One of them was a racing game where you could not interact. You could only look around inside the cockpit while autopilot drove. Being able to see the entire cockpit and to look outside any window by simply turning your head made this very immersive. The second demo was still better. You got to play Hawken, a game with Mechs. Again you could look around inside the cockpit of the mech but this time you could also control it. The mech happens to be able to fly and this has been the most intense experience for me. Seeing the ground fall away below you as you look down was amazing.

Except for the slightly unsharp image due to my glasses the hardware seemed pretty sophisticated. A higher resolution would be a nice to have, but it is already quite good in the HD prototype. There has been quite a bit of aliasing but I suppose antialiasing could reduce this to a point where it is not very objectionable. I did not notice a latency and did not suffer from simulator sickness but this might be due to the rather short session (five minutes I guess). The field of view is quite limited but not too limited.

All in all I think that the great interest in head mounted displays that has risen since the kickstarter campaign of Oculus VR is justified. Such hardware can clearly do more for a stronger immersion than most other technologies.

Next gen consoles and games
I did not bother to wait like 15 minutes for Mario Kart 8 so I only tried the Xbox One and the Playstation 4. The controllers of both consoles are really nice. I like the Xbox 360 controller and the Xbox One controller is indeed a little nicer. I did not like the previous Dual Shock controller but the new one is nice.

Graphics wise I ended up being slightly disappointed for the most part. Drive Club (PS4) did not look too good, Ryse (Xbox One) looked alright but I would have expected more. Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag also looked quite nice but not that superior to PC versions of previous titles in the series. By standing in line for a while I could have seen a live walkthrough of Killzone: Shadow Fall but since there was no way to play it by myself I didn't. Forza Motorsport (Xbox One) looked better than Drive Club (graphics wise that is) but not that amazing either. I guess it takes a while for the middleware and the studios to adapt. I'm quite optimistic that things will get better in this regard.

It is hard to judge the gameplay of these titles from the short hands on but at least it did not seem particularly innovative.

Besides these disappointments there also has been a positive surprise. I got to try Kinect 2.0 by playing Kinect Sports: Rivals and was surprised how well that works. I did not notice much latency or tracking errors. It transferred my real motions into in game motions smoothly and actually led to fun casual gameplay this way. Besides the fact that core gamers do not really care to use it, it certainly is a stunning piece of technology.

I also tried Nvidia Shield. It seems to be a decent piece of hardware but it is also quite a brick for a portable.

Other games
Wolfenstein reminded me a lot of Rage. Same style of graphics with the same drawbacks (in particular every texture is individual thanks to mega texturing but pretty blurry due to low resolution). I could not find anything novel about the gameplay.

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood (Xbox 360) and Peggle 2 (Xbox One) both have been fun to play. Battlefield 4 seems like a pretty good evolution from Battlefield 3. Batman: Arkham Origins seemed extremely similar to previous Batman: Arkham titles which is mostly a good thing. I also played The Last of Us for a while and it looked alright. Two indie titles that I liked quite a bit are Beatbuddy and Contrast.

gamescom
The gamescom is notably more crowded than in previous years. It will probably end up having more than 300000 visitors. And obviously there has been a good reason for this with all the new hardware coming up. A lot of it has not been quite ready at E3 so I think this year the gamescom may actually have been the more exciting trade fair.

It has been very much dominated by the big players. Diversity of the presented contents has suffered from this. From what I know the PS4 has been presented exclusively at the Sony booth so there were like 4 AAA titles and 6 indie titles to be tried.

@ ScottyAnimation
Probably won't happen. Germany is not that small, you know?
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Despellanion
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I see I'm not the only one having problems spelling "oculus" properly. Good! :D
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Dr. Best
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Despellanion
Aug 23 2013, 11:30 PM
I see I'm not the only one having problems spelling "oculus" properly. Good! :D
Damn it, I thought I had corrected it everywhere :D .
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