Interview by German games site with Gabe
Newell himself, regarding the release of
Left 4 Dead.

Wednesday, 20th of august 8:24: The phone rings; "In which bus are you?"
"Bus!? what bus we would meet at 10 am right? no!?"

After a small setback of an hour due to some nasty communication errors, we were finally on our way for the 6 hour drive to Leipzig, where we would first get some musical impressions at the "Video games live event" after which we would have a nice go at the "Games Convention (GC)" the next day.

At the concert it started nicely with an exclusive of being the first to hear the "Music of Crysis", and I must say although it was a classical concert it was a very impressive concert with lots of very popular tunes like mario.

Car which featured on the Rockstar stand,
promoting GTA 4.

They also had found this guy which played a quite impressive piece of Final fantasy, as well as this famous youtube performance (see embedded video at the bottom of this page) and yes he can really play it with a blindfold and can really play as fast as he does in this video. Anyway, if you ever get the chance to go to this event, you should really take as it is worth it.

After getting in the mood for the convention by the concert, on thursday the 21th of august we finally made it to the Leipziger Messe. And at 9 o'clock the doors finally opened. The biggest rush went to the halls where all the games were so we first focussed on the hardware halls.

The hardware halls featured lots of casemodding, overclocking and external devices like mice/keyboards, speakers and other stuff you might expect of hardware and computer accessories. There were no real spectacular things to note apart from AMD/nvidea/intel and various other companies showing off their gaming laptops and things.

Computer in the hardware hall, doing
Vantage benchmark. PC features a
skulltrail with qx9700 and 2 Geforce
GTX280 in SLI mode. all water cooled.

In the casemodding scene there was one pc which was quite nice, which featured a small scene out of Farcry 2. Basically is was a small clip with a small house made of sand, in which the computer parts were hidden. I still regret not have taken a picture of it as it was really cool.

After having finished the two hardware halls we had a look outside. Also here there were not alot of special stands. There was the DTM (Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters // German Touring Cars) race stand and very far away in a small corner there was this left 4 dead bus, at which we could play left 4 dead.

Valve was the only firm having a decent playing scheme. A group could play for 10 minutes and then got kicked out to let others play. About left 4 dead, I was first a bit sceptical about the gameplay and thought it was just a 'dumb' shooter in which you shoot zombies, like in the various counterstrike source Zombie modifications. After having played it I can say, it is really as good as they say.

Trackmania Nations on triple screen,
although the steer was standing there quite
fancy, control was via keyboard.

The AI director really keeps everything very intense, when you think you can take it slowly a new horde of zombies is getting up on you from behind. It were the shortest 10 minutes I have ever had in my life, because of the tension during gameplay.

Next up were the 2 game halls in which various new games were presented and were playable, here is a small list of the games which you could play, we were not able to play the most of them simply because of the tremendous long queues in front of them, and the nasty people who do not quit after having played for 15 mins, but usually after an hour or longer. Anyway, you could play:

• Far cry 2
• Battlefield Heroes
• Starcraft 2

Overclocking with nitrogen.
• WoW: Wrath of the lich king
• Crysis Warhead
• Red Alert 3 Multiplayer *
• Left 4 dead (at EA stand)
• H.A.W.X *
• And various others which I cannot remember.

I was really curious about The first 3 in this list, but due to the enormous lines in front of them, I haven't had a chance to get a crack at them.
Battlefield Heroes and Starcraft 2 looked really cool to play I have not seen much of WoW so I can't really tell much about it.

Stand of the DTM Race game,
on the Xbox 360.

Crysis warhead looked really promising to, and the new textures and such make it look even better then it was in Crysis. They now had machines which could actually run it in high detail rather then medium.

Red alert 3 was also a nice one and I'm really looking forward to this release. If you thought that C&C3: Tiberium wars was a nice game, you should certainly keep an eye out for Red Alert 3.

H.A.W.X is really the arcade flying game they said they would be. Don't expect a hardcore flight sim here, but a nice casual flight sim which I found quite fun to play at the convention.

Me - as a PC gamer - focusses a lot on PC games so basically I have no clue what the console world had to offer at the GC, as I have not payed attention to it. I think the above list covers the 'bigger' releases. But there was just to much to play, see and feel...

Bus featuring left 4 dead playing.

It was a nice convention to go to and you could play various new and upcomming titles which will appear later this year or next year.

Köln GC 2009.... prepare for our arrival.

- By DoubleJ