[Arwin]

Hi guys,

I'm going there tomorrow. Anything you guys want me to have a look at? I'll definitely be checking out Vita and Move stuff (since last year there were no lines for this), but of course there's a tonne of other things as well. I'll be bringing back 80mins of HD video (and some pictures), and if you have any requests, I'll see what I can do.

[assurdum]

Assassin's Creed Revelations &... well I haven't in mind nothing for now. Pretty interesting about AC:R because in the last trailers I have the suspect of FXAA over the msaa/qaa standard; I could easily wrong but it appears more smooth & more vsync compared the last, maybe the gain of RAM have helped a lot. But it's just my conjecture.

[bigtabs]

Ah, you git. The missus and I wanted to go but it's a 5 hour drive just to get there, I imagine the BF3 queues will be ginormous - and we don't have a babysitter who can do an entire day.

See how OP the Jets are in BF3 of course! I'm interested in the infantry AA stuff.. and, well basically everything.

[Arwin]

Yeah I doubt I will be queueing for BF3 to be honest, but maybe I'll take a picture of the queue when I come across it.

It's just over 1 hr drive for me, but no idea how long it will take to park. But me and a friend will be driving together in our Prius so we will be comfortable (AC) and not wear out the clutch. Just have to remember to bring lots of water.

Otherwise next time I'll try the train from
Aachen ...

[sebbbi]

We have people going there to demostrate Trials Evolution. There should be four machines dedicated to it (it you want to try it yourself). I could not go personally, since we have so much coding left to do to make the game ready...

It has FXAA as well, if you want to see how it looks in motion (60 fps) on Xbox.

[Arwin]

Cool, I enjoyed Trails a lot, even if the difficulty spiked up too fast for me to keep interested for a very long time. I'll definitely check it out.

EDIT: the new 16GB card gives me 92 minutes of 'Full HD' (actually 1920x1080ix50) video. That should do nicely.

[Shifty Geezer]

Is there any point in using FullHD? my camcorder offers 28Mbps 1080p50 (why not 1080p60?! What a stupid limitation for the Euro market when all TVs support 60fps!) and yet the difference between that and medium quality (16Mbps I think) 1080i50 is negligable in most cases. Considering YouTube hosting will ruin the quality anyhow, maybe it'd be better to go with more content? Even for things like technical analysis, let's say pixel counting a game, I question whether a handheld camera will offer enough quality, and couldn't you use the photomode for such a job?

Of course, 90 minutes is still lots of content, so on the flipside if that's more than you care to take, no point in not going FullHD!

[patsu]

Take a video of the Vita OS ! ^_^
... and check out the non-games.

*If* you have time, would appreciate some comments on the following games:

Vita:
* Resistance
* LBP
* SoundShapes

PS3:
* Dark Souls
* Starhawk
* Twisted Metal
* FF XIII-2

Not sure if they are in Gamescom though. ^_^

[Shifty Geezer]

I can only find lists of exhibitors, and not titles.

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Is there any point in using FullHD? my camcorder offers 28Mbps 1080p50 (why not 1080p60?! What a stupid limitation for the Euro market when all TVs support 60fps!) and yet the difference between that and medium quality (16Mbps I think) 1080i50 is negligable in most cases. Considering YouTube hosting will ruin the quality anyhow, maybe it'd be better to go with more content? Even for things like technical analysis, let's say pixel counting a game, I question whether a handheld camera will offer enough quality, and couldn't you use the photomode for such a job?

Of course, 90 minutes is still lots of content, so on the flipside if that's more than you care to take, no point in not going FullHD!

Yes, fair point. But I'm using a WX10, which is a regular camera (with surprisingly high quality video), and like I said it's already i50. It uses 22Mbps I think and that looks good enough for me! And yes, youtube hosting does ruin things a bunch as it is pulled down to something like 6Mbps I think, but I get to keep and watch the originals.

And I agree on the framerate bit. It almost makes you want to import these things from the US.

But yeah, I do reckon 90 minutes should be plenty so I don't think I need to limit myself further in the

[KKRT]

Diablo 3, Prey 2, Bordelands 2, oh and definitely Torchlight 2, because this one wont be covered extensively by media [unfortunately ;\]

[RenegadeRocks]

Hey and ask them when Rayman Origins is coming out ! Ita absolutely beautiful and extremely charming ! Gaming seems to be missing this simple fun charm these days .

[Arwin]

Ok, I'm back!

Unfortunately because of stupid German violence laws (well not stupid, but they could have been handled better) all 16 and 18 plus games were in closed boxes. This meant that there was a large queue in front of each box, and unless you wanted to queue up it just took too long to go and see them.

When we got in we hesitated some, and then decided to queue up for what we then thought was a long 20 minute line for Vita games. Turned out however that while we were in that line and after our hands on (which was a generous 20 minutes) the queue had grown quite a bit!

So in the end I've only mostly got footage of non-'violent' games (many of those games are still pretty violent if you ask me). But fortunately for me I have a larger than average interest in these games.

What surprised me was that several of the games announced, for instance by Sony, were already playable. I learnt a few interesting things, such as that the guys behind the tech used in Move Fitness are the guys behind The Fight: Lights Out, and I totally didn't expect it when a guy who started chatting with me about a guy who was doing the boxing part in Move Fitness who seemed to know what he was doing, turned out to be the guy actually working on the body tracking tech, and he had a lot of interesting stuff to share.

Also played some Forza 4 and a bunch of other stuff.

More later - I have 10GB to copy from my memory card, and it takes a long time! (2hrs)

[bigtabs]

People queuing in Germany! I should've gone just to see that!

[Arwin]

Our ground floor was just flooded with an inch or two of water from front to back ... We've gotten rid of most of the water now, but damage has been done and we can expect a fair bit of work.

Here's a first vid though:

[Onkl Bjorni]

Originally Posted by Arwin

Also played some Forza 4 and a bunch of other stuff.

Would love to hear your thoughts on Forza 4. It's one of my most anticipated games this year and what has been shown up till now looks really good.

[patsu]

Awww... back already ?

I was going to ask if you can check out the Vita web browser make and version. If it's still NetFront, the latter version uses WebKit. Nevermind then.

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by Bfigved

Would love to hear your thoughts on Forza 4. It's one of my most anticipated games this year and what has been shown up till now looks really good.

The new track looked really good, though not that exciting to drive imho, but better than most original tracks. The Kinect car exploration bit is very sweetly done, though I did see some people get impatient with it at times (I have a nice video of that too) - but it is fun, great for car lovers, and looks very pretty.

The handling is nice, but perhaps it is that I only tried the Subaru and using the controller, but the driving seemed extremely forgiving. You could go wide in a turn, sure, but otherwise it was incredibly hard to lose the car at all, and drifts where a breeze to control. I think the assists may have gotten stronger rather than weaker and the game gotten more accessible than ever. This is good or bad only depending on your personal taste. Can't say much more on it - I watched two two-lap races and played one myself. But it looks like a good step-up from Forza 3.

@patsu: I'm sure that was completely off-bounds. I got to play smart-as, and look at most games except Uncharted and Resistance. I watched my friend play Wipeout and that looked pretty stunning, and had a solid framerate to boot (unlike ModNation racers). F1 2011 looked very good also, also very smooth framerate. Smart-as was a very basic brain training type affair (though harder), but it did show off some of the near features quite well (compare yourself with PSPs in the neighbourhood, in the same city, same country, or the world, or friends I think (not sure about that last one).

I also saw Joe Danger 2. Looked very nice. Not as much removed from the original as I thought, but good fun:



Which reminds me that I didn't come across Trials HD 2. Shame, would have loved to try it.

EDIT: Pictures are being dumped here as we speak:

https://picasaweb.google.com/1039977.../GamesCom2011#

And a DanceStar Party movie is currently uploading. This game was out there to play in huge quantities, lots of booths, and they were all being played.

[Shifty Geezer]

Did you get to try Vita's back trackpad?

[Billy Idol]

Just came back from Gamescom myself and thought I post in Arwins thread!!

As last year, Sony booth was full of win!! I could play the following games (to Arwin...it was really worth, waiting the line for the Sony booth, there are always like 5+ different games to play inside the booth!!)

- I played Starhawk: graphics looks ok, I noticed a rather clean image quality, probably also due to some postprocessing going on...the rest was nothing to write about...it ran stable in my experience...but nothing special! Gameplay seemd to be fun, the third person shooter part is as you can expect and was rather solid, I also used the construction stuff (simple to use!) and used a starhawk to fly around and did some ground battle. Overall a very solid game it seems to me. But, it did not convinved me 100%...I'm not sure if it is worth buying for me...probably depends on the single player part...which I could not test!

- I played UC3 multiplayer. Was a rather similar exeprience than UC2...what was weird, they even used a map already available in UC2 (the one on the roofs of the skyscraper, here they are under construction...)...graphics are same as in the UC3 beta, my impression was that the image was quite clear with low amount of jaggies..rather clean...otherwise I had the feeling that shadows are a sharper compared to UC2, but overall it seems to me that graphics are about the same as UC2.
the improvements in the mulitplayer mode seems to be good and valid (spawn on buddy, show an icon when you are approaching a strong weapon on the map, ...). sad that no single player demo was available!

-I played the Resistance 3 single player demo (I already saw a vid of this one)...you could even play it in 3D if you are crazy enough
I am not so much of a 3D fan, so I changed to 2D: gameplay was good, weapon wheel is again a nice touch, weapons are cool as ever and it made lots of fun playing...it seems that Resistance 3 is again a challenging game. Graphics...hm, I am not sure! Atmosphere is the best part imo! Thanks due to lots of post processing and effects, the low resolution was not so obvious, but if you looked for it...it is easily spoted (saw tooth edges all over around the place). Overall, the game left a positive memory in my brain

-Mega surprise: there was BF 3 Coop playable...imagen this: at the EA booth, you had to queue up for more than 3 hours to play PS3 coop!!! and in the Sony booth, there where 4 consoles available!! I nearly collabsed when I found this out (maybe also due to the reason that it was super hot in the back end of the Sony booth!) Overall the impressions are super great!! BF3 is a beast. First I was shocked about how good this game looks for a PS3 game!! Super clean and crisp image...very impressive. Only a very small amount of jaggies...if at all!! Lightning was good. Effects where great. Textures were ok (not as good as KZ3 textures imo, but still good!) Co-op action was super fun and seems to have lots of potential!! Gameplay and control was standard BF, thus it was really good. Overall I was not only impressived but shocked by the presentation of BF3 on PS3...

but, I also had the chance to test the PC Multiplayer version of the game (it only took 4.5hours to wait in the mega monster BF3 queue...if some of you guys call me crazy...I swear that I call you crazy as well! ) And as I was shocked by BF3 PS3...I collapsed because of BF 3 PC 64 mutliplayer conquest...easily the best game ever created by man...also by far the longest gamer queue...some guys waited more than 6hours to play this...burtal amount of interest for this game at gamescom!! What can I say: best graphics, best sound, super cool animations, best gameplay, best multiplayer, largest map ever...all combined with destruction+smart score system (even better than BF2 BC2!!)+jets

[Billy Idol]

I also played Mass Effect 3 on Xbox 360 and saw it running on PC: graphics on Xbox where a bit of a downer, especially in comparison to the PC version due to the massive amount of saw tooth edges...image quality wasn't so good...lots of aliasing, even with the post processing going on. Otherwise, the single player demo I played revealed that the game is rather the same as Mass Effect 2...which, is really ok because ME2 is one of my most favorite games ever!! Graphics and gameplay seemed the same as in ME2...on PC image quality was much better, but still...the graphics looked a little bit outdated in comparison to other actual titles...action was good, of course we have to wait for the story to see how everything ends!

One of the problems I experienced...it seems to me that Xbox titles who typically used a Samsung LCD TV had some issues with the TV calibration, whereas at Sony booth with all the Sony TVs contrast and gamma was much better calibrated?!?!

I also had the chance to test out RAGE on Xbox and saw a buddy of mine play the game on a PC. You played about 15min of the beginning of the game. First of all, I was a little bit dissapointed by the graphics! Which is kind of dissapointing it self, because last year at gamescom seeing a hands on demonstration of the Xbox360 game...I was blown away by the graphics!! I am not sure if the reason is the badly calibrated Samsung TVs...but again, the aliasing was noticable! The style of the graphics is cool, the gameplay and shooting felt really good, the animation of the enemies and the hit detection with different reactions was very satisfying. Part of the game I played was overall really cool, intersesting characters and weird stuff Textures seem to be super low res when up close...not sure, what the real benefit of Megatexture is...really not sure. Otherwise the image was crisp and sharp, lightning seems to be solid as well...overall, the game lost its graphcis crown for me, but still a very good title which I will def buy (but on PC, where the aliasing issues are...not an issue anymore , but even there...textures up close are rather low res)...a game with a special atmosphere imo!

Before getting hands on time for Mass Effect 3, EA forced us to watch a gameplay trailer of PREY 2 played on the Xbox360! And I have to say, that this is kind of the big surprise on this years gamescom!! I played the first part on Xbox...and guess what...the second part is completely different! And open world first person shooter set in a Mass Effect meets Blade runner world...where you are a bounty hunter...how cool is this
What surprised me: graphics where really really good! Great image quality, only very few aliasing, good textures, good effects, everything stable and very dense...great atmosphere, great gameplay, great setting...overall: at least great, probably better (game has not only FPS shooting, it has cool gadgets and it has kind of Brink parcour elements and chasing sequences and jumping and climbing...all in a Blade runner-esque real and living world...super interesting mix imo!)

Overall...absolute game of the show: Battlefield 3...best game ever!! I really cannot wait for this game (luckily, I already pre-order the limited edition!!)...there is really no challenger out there imo!

Surprise: PREY 2 shown on Xbox

What I missed: Gears of War 3 (a game I tested the beta and I will def buy...so no big drama)...and Skyrim, only a movie was shown...with still a 2+hours queue...

Other interesting stuff I did not have time: Bioshock infinite and this Lord of the Rings game (War in the north or something like this)...this year, there where just too much other people at gamescom

[joker454]

Originally Posted by Billy Idol

I also had the chance to test the PC Multiplayer version of the game (it only took 4.5hours to wait in the mega monster BF3 queue...if some of you guys call me crazy...I swear that I call you crazy as well! ) And as I was shocked by BF3 PS3...I collapsed because of BF 3 PC 64 mutliplayer conquest...easily the best game ever created by man...also by far the longest gamer queue...some guys waited more than 6hours to play this...burtal amount of interest for this game at gamescom!! What can I say: best graphics, best sound, super cool animations, best gameplay, best multiplayer, largest map ever...all combined with destruction+smart score system (even better than BF2 BC2!!)+jets

Do you know if PC BF3 had full 360 gamepad support?

[patsu]

Originally Posted by Billy Idol

- I played Starhawk: graphics looks ok, I noticed a rather clean image quality, probably also due to some postprocessing going on...the rest was nothing to write about...it ran stable in my experience...but nothing special! Gameplay seemd to be fun, the third person shooter part is as you can expect and was rather solid, I also used the construction stuff (simple to use!) and used a starhawk to fly around and did some ground battle. Overall a very solid game it seems to me. But, it did not convinved me 100%...I'm not sure if it is worth buying for me...probably depends on the single player part...which I could not test!

Ooooww... I am looking forward to this one. How many players were in the game ?

-Mega surprise: there was BF 3 Coop playable...imagen this: at the EA booth, you had to queue up for more than 3 hours to play PS3 coop!!! and in the Sony booth, there where 4 consoles available!! I nearly collabsed when I found this out (maybe also due to the reason that it was super hot in the back end of the Sony booth!) Overall the impressions are super great!! BF3 is a beast. First I was shocked about how good this game looks for a PS3 game!! Super clean and crisp image...very impressive. Only a very small amount of jaggies...if at all!! Lightning was good. Effects where great. Textures were ok (not as good as KZ3 textures imo, but still good!) Co-op action was super fun and seems to have lots of potential!! Gameplay and control was standard BF, thus it was really good. Overall I was not only impressived but shocked by the presentation of BF3 on PS3...

Yay ! Finally a worthy 3rd party game. Already decided to play with the Gaffers in the chatroom. Thanks for the impressions.

[bigtabs]

Originally Posted by joker454

Do you know if PC BF3 had full 360 gamepad support?

from our own BF3 thread...

Originally Posted by repi

Yes we do have gamepad support on PC, no autoaim. So only very brave people would dare to try and play it in MP


Oh and thanks guys for all the feedback and confirmations about settings!

[Cyan]

Do you know if people will be able to play Skyrim or are Bethesda going to show that video Billy Idol mentioned? I can't wait for this one.

Billy, thanks for your impressions on Rage. I am a fan of all Carmack.

Apparently Wipeout on the PSP Vita runs very smooth and looks great. It's a game that I usually found stunning, and it's the closest thing to F-Zero you can play on non Nintendo consoles. Too bad this kind of games are so scarce. I am loving Vita despite the too-busy interface -afaik, judging from some photos I saw-.

Thanks for sharing your impressions on Forza 4, Arwin. I am quite hyped about this game. The handling seems fine as usual -it would be interesting what assists were on when playing but Forza 3 realism seemed okay to me-, and things like the bumps on the road are more noticeable than they were in Forza 3. They added features like improving your attachment to a particular car or cars, which is something I wanted a long time ago.

Now that you mentioned Trials sequel -I am interested in this game to play with a friend and have some goodnaturedly competition-.... The same happened to me when playing the first iteration of Trials, a fun and up to par game, but in my opinion it had a very steep difficulty curve. It got to a point where I couldn't advance anymore, but some tracks were really amazing.

Concerning other games you mentioned in your posts, like Rez HD and some others, oddly enough I concur almost 100% with your opinions to the point that if it was like that for everything, one of us would be redundant.

Thanks for sharing guys.

p.s. if you get desperate waiting in a line, you can get in my cuddle puddle line, beeotches.