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Read The Jones Report: Leipzig 2008: Day 1.
The Leipzig Law of Probability: No matter where you are on the Game Convention floor, you are probably never more than six feet away from a waffle and a cold beer.
Yes, the Germans do things right. Now this, people, is the proper way to throw a videogame convention.
The big, overblown booths? They're here. People dressed up as silly videogame characters for minimum wage? They're here. TVs bigger than M.C. Hammer's house? Fat guys hoarding swag? B.O.? Booth babes?
Here, here, here and here.
Human bowling: Creepy leather glove not necessary for this kind of bowling.
Plus there's
human bowling. (You climb inside a giant bowling ball, then you "roll" towards life-size pins. Warning: Never do Human Bowling if you are sorting out a hangover. You, and the nice people operating Human Bowling, will absolutely regret it.)
All this ... plus the aforementioned waffles and beer.
Remember how puny and small and pathetic E3 seemed last month? After spending a mere 24 hours at the Leipzig Games Convention, E3 only seems smaller, punier and more pathetic than it did before.
After the downward spiral of E3 over the past two years (three years if you count the infamous Booth Babe Ban year of 2006), being here is like getting to spend time with a loved one who's passed on into the next world. Yes, the old E3 didn't die; it's still alive and well in Germany. Maybe the ESA didn't kill E3 after all, but only relocated it via some kind of games convention witness protection program.
Now that I think about it, being in Leipzig is kind of like that sad Dennis Quaid movie, "Frequency," where the son gets to talk to his dead father again via ham radio. Man, that must be some ham radio; back when I still had T-Mobile as my carrier, I couldn't get a cell signal in midtown Manhattan.
Anyway, I'm grabbing swag, and I'm letting my B.O. fly, and I'm ogling booth babes -- yes,
even the Norton Antivirus booth has booth babes.
I'm partying like it's 2006, baby.
Who knows when the German-equivalent of the ESA will sober up and pull the plug on this operation, too? Because as pop supergroup Cinderella once sagely put it, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."
True that, Cinderella. True that.
Go to Day 3 of Scott Jones' Leipzig coverage, The Mr. Tom Awards.