ECTS London EXCEL
em Review

There are times when living in the UK is great; the moderate temperatures, the lack of guns and the fact that there are no insects the size of tigers that can cause convulsions merely by looking at you. Then there are times when it just sucks - the weather, the lack of guns and the fact that there are just no decent conventions or trade shows. ECTS 2001 was a great example of this.

As I mentioned in part one, most of the large publishers were having their own parties. I can’t understand what prompted this. For a start ECTS is a chance to show their upcoming products to a vast spectrum of people in the trade and press. It’s a wonder who these publishers wanted to show their products to considering their private parties were also invite only. Presumably the only people invited were close family and friends who would already be well aware what was coming out.


The Adventure Begins
But anyway, enough bitching. It’s just a sorry state of affairs when Europe’s largest computer trade show doesn’t even attract the large companies. This made finding anything remotely interesting a tough task, but I gave it a shot and the following is what I found, some of it interesting, some of it just something to write about.



I needed some kind of pattern here, I could have just ambled anywhere I wanted, but that would only end up in my constantly coming across the Koch stand over and over again in a Spinal Tap at Cleveland type way. I’ll write these in the order I came across them.


Day 1 - Sunday
I’m not a journalist, but I do try, and considering I’d never covered anything like this before it was a learning experience. Having the press pass was definitely an advantage, as I seemed to get treated a little differently from the general public.

My first stop was Wanadoo software. I’d never heard of these guys before, but they had some fairly interesting games on show. The one that caught my eye was Curse: The Eye Of Isis. This looked to be an Alone In The Dark type of game with lots of shooting zombies in sewers. I think it was a PC game, which would explain the constant slow-down in certain areas.

My lack of journalistic skills started to dawn on me as one American journalist was busy asking all sorts of probing question to the Wanadoo spokesman. I was happy just watching the zombies getting blasted away. Wanadoo also sported several Game Boy Colors showing some appalling snow-cross game. I started to worry that there wouldn’t even be any GBAs on show at all.

UBI Soft was my next visit that seemed to attract a lot of attention, probably because it was the only widely known publisher to show up. Stand out games including Rayman M on the PS2 and Batman Vengence, an action adventure starring our favourite flying mouse also on the PS2. Batman looked promising, but I found myself having to wait around for 5 minutes for a cut scene to finish.




G-Surfers
I should point out here that I was getting pretty bored and disillusioned at the whole show, and I’d only been there for 10 minutes or so. Nevertheless I pressed on to the Midas software stand, the most alluring thing being the free Jelly Beans. They appeared to be rather chuffed of a new Wipeout rip-off they’d developed called G-Surfers.

The first thing I noticed was the poor frame rate of which I asked the spokeswoman about. Probably not the most polite thing to do, but by this point I was past caring. She proceeded to give me the whole speech about the game, not realising I wasn’t in the least bit interested. The game’s selling point is it’s track editor, this is pretty much their basis for selling the game as every level can be created by the player, every object you see and each land you play in can also be created by you.

The world is a copy of our own planet, even including (much to another spokesman’s delight) a small fishing island off the coast of Cornwall - ooh, how exciting. The track editor did seem very easy to use though, but the game appeared fairly unplayable. They were so proud of themselves though it seemed too cruel to tell them how crap it was.

I had a quick blast on one more Midas game, a cute car racer by the name of Penny Racers. This was quite fun and reminded me of Ridge Racer, but involved from what I could make out, toy cars - including one section of the course where you had to drive under water. Entertaining, but difficult to control. Then again, look at Gran Turismo.

Those were the big three publishers placed at the entrance to the hall. With those out the way I headed to the outer fringes of the exhibition to see what some of the smaller stands had to offer. With my whole retro console phase going on at the moment I was instantly drawn to the Telegames stand, mainly because of the Atari Lynx and Jaguar stuck to the wall and a large sign selling the Jaguar for £6.20 with a copy of Doom! I couldn’t quite believe my eyes and lunged at the spokeswoman like a, well…Jaguar. She gave me a price list, but it turns out these prices were for trade with a minimum order of £250! The bastards! Getting me all worked up like that. She did say though that if I call they might be able to sort out some deal. Yeah, of course you will. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on how I do with that.


I offered to wash the bugs off his windscreen and he told me to piss-off