HEXUS.gaming launches and MS 'rally' the Germans
June: HEXUS.gaming goes live!
Yes, we finally gave Nick his own channel, just to stop the git spamming the front page of HEXUS everyday. What you lot don’t know is that in a Skype call at 6pm GMT, which is about 4am Taiwan time, we ‘misheard’ him say “Wait until I get back” and though he said “Yeah, launch it baby!”… so we did.
Nick was overjoyed to come home, jetlagged again and find more work to do than a man from Work Street, Worksville, Worketyshire. It should also be noted that he took no less than nine flights in four days to detour to China for ACON5 and then come home in time for the site launch… which we did the day before he got here, just for the fun of it.
July: Chill, Winston…
Not very much happened in July… Other than Nick superbly managing to get a bit over ambitious with his writing and potentially libel a developer… Oh how we laughed…
August: Head North, then West
Nick was back on the road again in August with a trip first to Edinburgh to cover EIEF, which, to put it generously, was a bit crap. It was good to get to meet developers face to face with Mark Rein gobbing off in his usual entertaining style and NVIDIA’s Adam Foat did a great job getting us some time with the likes of Croteam and Strangelight.
We also managed to wangle a chat with David Braben on the condition that we didn’t mention anything about an Elite sequel… So with most of the questions for the interview now out the window we focused on his latest efforts before succumbing to temptation, wrestling him to the floor and beating him with a rubber hose to get some answers… Sadly his PR team pulled us off before we got anything more constructive than “It’s on the way… please stop hitting me… honestly, we’re working on it… owwww!”
Nick returned from Edinburgh to then get on a plane bound for Leipzig the very next morning to cover the big games show over there. Of course, everyone was showing off their Xbox 360 stuff as well as some other gems and Atari, EA and THQ were most notable for their hospitality, taking Nick in for a look at stuff you guys still won’t see for a while yet.
At the other end of the hospitality scale were the companies employing Dolf Lungren look-alikes to stand at the doors telling any non-German press ‘this is a German show for German people’… Yeah, thanks… We can see the united Europe is just thriving here, cheers.
Leipzig was notable for two things… First, just how much the Ubisoft crew can drink and not fall down with Nick being invited along for the last night party and being thoroughly put to shame over the Jagermeisters, the bloody fairy. And second, Microsoft must be applauded for building an amphitheatre to show off the Xbox 360, filling it with 300 of Germany’s Arian best and getting a black rapper to do the warm up… You can guess what happened when MC Stupid came out with the line “Everybody getcha hands in the air…” Trust us, it was a display of stiff armed salutes not seen since ’39…
