My buzzer rang at 4 am. I had to stand up early to get to Europe's biggest fair about computer and video games. The fair is located in Cologne which is about 300 kilometers away from my home. However, travelling with German railways was quite fast. A few hours and three train switches later I arrived at the fairground where the general mood already was great. I waited with tons of other people in front of hall nine for the official opening of the fair at 10 am.
After the opening of the fair I quickly went to Nintendo's booth in hall eight to get my hands on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword which will be released in 2011 worldwide. I waited exactly one hour to play the game for about five minutes. However, my waiting time was quite short compared to the one of the people who wanted to play the game five minutes later on one of the four consoles that were provided by Nintendo. They had to wait up to three hours. Yep, the waiting queue was that long. Link's latest adventure feeled exactly as expected. The motion control worked fine, but in my opinion, the look is horrible. I was not hyped before playing the demo and I am not hyped after playing the demo. After playing Zelda I looked around at Nintendo's booth. There were tons of people everywhere. I decided not to wait another hour to play Metroid: Other M since the game will be released in a couple of days in Germany and I already preordered it. However, my brother played it instead of Zelda early in the morning and said it feels very good. I waited to play Disney Epic Mickey but the guy in front of me did not stop to play the game which pissed me off a little bit if I'm honest. Since the demo seemed to be exactly the one from E3 which I already knew from several walkthrough videos I walked away. The game itself looked not spectacular but cool. Since it is from Warren Spector (the dude behind the legendary Deus Ex) nothing can go wrong with it - hopefully. My clock told me that it was 11.30 am and I was very thirsty and hungry. So I looked around for something to drink and eat and finally got half a pizza, apple cake and 0,4 liters of cola and fanta for a little bit too much money. The catering was really disappointing.
However, after the short break I went into hall six where I found the two biggest publishers of the biz, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. Take Two and Bethesda also were there. Diablo III, Mafia II, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Medal of Honor, Crysis 2, Dragon Age 2, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and a lot more - everything was playable if you were willed to wait at least one hour. I was not willed to wait that long to play games that most likely feel like their predecessors. However, my brother thought that he has to check out Crysis 2 and waited more than one hour for 15 minutes gameplay. Meanwhile, I went into hall seven to check out Sony's PlayStation Move.
I played several Move games. One was something like a fun racer with an office chair. The game itself is fun for three minutes and does not allow a real opinion about the quality of motion recognition of Move. After that, I played the Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest which feeled like a big meltdown. The controls were absolutely horrible. A little bit later I tested the pointer function of Move in The Shoot and basically nothing worked. The pointer was extremely sluggish and far away from the quality of the Wiimote pointer function. However, a game named Tumble surprised me in a positve sense. In this game you have to build a tower which worked pretty well and was a lot of fun. However, the gameplay is slow and not fast like in the other games I played. After getting my hands on PlayStation Move I'm very, very sceptical.
Hall seven had some other highlights like Def Jam Rapstar (don't know if the game is any good, but the show was very nice). However, later in the day I went to Microsoft's booth and got my hands on Windows Phone 7 (which nobody needs when iOS and Android are available) and Kinect. I waited one hour to play Kinect. While waiting, I hoped to be able to play Kinect Adventures but the Microsoft dude led me into the Sonic: Free Riders booth. In this moment I thought: Great, now I don't know if Kinect or Sonic is shit, probably both. But my Kinect session was hilarious and fun. The cam seemed to have some problems, especially with recognition of movements into the depth of the room but who cares? It was fun as hell to control one of Sonic's generic friends on some kind of a flying skateboard. Watching others playing games like Kinect Adventures I discovered some major lag. However, even if Kinect does not seem suitable for 'real' games it is a new and fun thing for more minigame / partygame-like things. And this is why it could be a commercial success. But do not expect too much, otherwise you will be disappointed.
After playing Kinect I walked again through every hall and played some games here and there. Super Scribblenauts impressed me, Wii Party was more fun than expected, Donkey Kong Returns will be a very cool jump'n'run game and Kirby's Epic Yarn is my most favourite game of the fair. Great look, great ideas, day 1. Last but not least, I got a signature from Charles Martinet who seems to be a very nice guy. I have nothing more to say. Check out my pics and my video from an amazing day!
So many people, huge lines, was fucking impossible to get any coherent view on whats going on. 
