This time I has reinforcements with me :). Laguna.sam were with me. Luckily we decided to go on Friday, which turned out to be a good decision, because on Saturday the Gamescom was closed down for new visitors. With the reaching of 62,000 visitors at once in the boundaries, the maximum was reached.
But we had plenty of room. Well, at last in the PC and Nintendo hall. The hall with Sony was full. That was the forst thing I recognized. It wasn't Sony alone of course. Many console title publishers were inside, too. But it was clearly more populated. In the PC hall, the ESL area was the most crowded place there. The Nintendo & XBOX360-Hall lacked some magnets. Nintendo alone don't seem to be able to fill that hall alone. The other projects in there, except Sega, wasn't much appealing. So this was clearly to most deserted one. PC or console? This time it was clear. Win for the consoles, but PC remains strong. The most interesting stuff was shown there.
The stuff was somewhat disappointing. The 23412-part of game XYZ. *YAWN*
This is not what I want to see. It's boring. I want to see new stuff. Only few of that was to be seen. One spark of light was "Star Trek - Infinite Space" from Gameforge. It's a browser-game, but you wouldn't believe that, if you see it. It's not feeling like the usual stuff. And laguna.sam got abducted by Klingons after a photo shooting with them :).
All in all, it was fun. Much fun. But I missed something big and new. The new Wii was not in Cologne, no big, special announcements, everything looked like, business as usual. Cologne might be the biggest gaming fair, but as long as publishers don't come out with great new stuff, it's just a show without teeth. That's not the fault of the Gamescom, which had another new record in 2011. Congratulations. I'll be there next year, almost certainly.