An insiders guide to Gamescom 2015

It's August, which means Gamescom is upon us. The classier, more stereotypically organised alternative to the bombast of E3, it nevertheless has its own rules, shenanigans, and general stupidity to watch out for. Here's the insider's guide.

Overcoming 'The Fear'

Gamescom may take place two whole months after E3, but ask any games journalist, exhibitor, PR, developer, or other shitmuncher and they'll tell you it may as well be two seconds. Like 'Nam, during the summer months it seems you're either there, or thinking about being there. All through the planning of Gamescom, where you chase equally terrified people for appointments in a mutually destructive professional hate-wank, you are Martin Sheen, naked, crying, punching mirrors, generally wondering if a fall out of your office window will kill you, or whether two or three is required, and is that even feasible?

What I'm saying is that a lot of games people get The Fear about Gamescom, due to its proximity to E3 and that show's propensity to be a complete waste of everyone's time. As Cologne draws closer, however, The Fear subsides into excitement. Gamescom is smarter, better organised, and simply not as crass as E3, and – crucially – there are more games there, and they're in a better state to play/see.

The flight

Gloriously, Germany is only just over the road from the UK, as you will know if you've read a book (right) or ever left Britain (yeah, right). This means that the flight over, generally, is drama-free. There's none of the cabin fever of spending 11 whole hours with people you'd rather kill, or the sudden, monumental panic of realising you're in a pressurised tube careering across infinite blue death via the medium of explosions.

On the other hand, there's a high chance you'll be flying RyanAir, or EasyJet, or ScumFly, or whatever diastro-carrier you've got to ride to get there. Given that these planes are so small that if you ask for an upgrade you'll be flying it, there's little chance of getting a chat in on the 90-minute or so flight.

No, the place to run into games journalists is before the flight. Head to one of the weird bar/restaurants in any of the major airports at around 7AM, filled as they are with identical, troll-haired 17 year olds off on their first lads holiday to Hellorca and middle-aged men drinking strong lager and making tired jokes about 'international waters' or 'already being on holiday', and you'll see clumps of games people.

To a person they will look knackered, their minds capsized through the stress of airports, packing, and a frankly unworkable appointment list. This is where they are at their weakest: given the delirium of time, they'll be blabbing all sorts of crazed secrets, from behind-closed-doors meetings to announcements to whether they're leaving to start a Patreon where they review dogs. Want the scoop? Head to the bar.

Overcoming language barriers

How's your German? Did you spend your GCSE years sniggering through your lessons, making vague allusions to 'the Nazis', wondering what the fuck a masculine genitive was? Worse, were you learning French, you scum?

Unlike E3, where the Americans (nominally) speak the same language and can at least somewhat understand you before asking if you're Australian, attending Gamescom without at least a basic grasp of the language is an experience more entertaining than anything EA will have lined up. At any moment you'll see journos, mainly the British, outside at the food trucks, pointing at signs and mouthing, meekly, 'curry....vurst? D...anke?' before handing over 10 euros and shrugging. That the Germans speak better English than literally every English person that has ever lived is academic: many visitors will (rightly) still try and converse in German, before Simply Giving Up.

This charade takes up roughly 70% of every non-German-speaking journo's time, and is both hilarious and quietly dispiriting at the same time.

Cologne

Credit: © Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de

Cologne is a wonderful city. Bisected by the Rhine, it has a beautiful cathedral which both dominates the place and yet somehow manages to loom awesomely into view when you least expect it, perhaps after rounding a corner on one of the cobbled streets after a few evening refreshments. Its excellent infrastructure will get you to the Koelnmesse (where Gamescom takes place) quickly and easily, and Cologne also has a vibrant cultural scene which often results in someone playing steel drums like you've wandered into an international version of Secret Cinema Presents: Commando.

The city is the polar opposite of LA: it has colours other than Dread Orange, the people are polite and don't all resemble crazed fitness apps made flesh, and it's not a sprawling mass of bone and steel. Cologne's hotels, however, aren't all up to the standard set by the city itself. Venture out into one of the many bars (or one in particular, which we'll get to momentarily) and you'll hear horror stories of large, famous publishers putting its writers up in nightmarish, starting-safehouse-in-a-GTA-game hotels or hostels, most of them out of town and at least some of them the location shoots for two or three low-budget horror movies.

Naturally, every city in the world has dreadful places to stay. Not that VideoGamer lays its head in these places, of course. The fine owners of this firm won't allow us to sleep anywhere like that. No, we stay the only place grand – and fitting – enough for a bunch of old white dudes: a retirement home.

This may sound weird, of course, and on the face of it, it fucking is. But this is Germany, not England, and we're not staying in one of Bannatyne's gaffs. Instead, the Hotel Dom is a live-in retirement complex, which does a fine line in renting out apartments to the soon-to-be-dead and the wished-they-were-dead, ie video game journalists. That's where we'll be staying this year, potential assassins.

A night out at the Corkonian (AKA 'The Irish pub', AKA where every fucker goes every night)

At E3 it's not uncommon for all your best-laid partying plans to go awry the minute you touch down at LAX. Not only are there about forty competing 'official' events – publisher parties, game reveal parties, hands-on gameplay parties, etc, but there's also the city itself to contend with: Hollywood, Santa Monica, Downtown, the fact you may actually be killed for your shoes before you get anywhere near your destination. The reality is LA itself requires a large investment of money, time, and patience simply to navigate, which means getting places is a needless ballache when you can sit in your room and watch baseball before flicking over to Fox News to see which demented version of reality is being peddled over there.

Cologne, on the other hand, only really has one place that people go each night, and that's the Corkonian. (Granted, on one of the nights many people will go to the annual Wargaming party, which is so acutely over-the-top, which has so much cash spent on it it feels like an interactive remake of Brewster's Millions disguised as an event.) Anyway, the Corkonian. An Irish-themed pub, it is beloved by video game journos because it reminds them of their idyllic upbringing in Ireland all those years ago they know that they can order beers in English and watch football and – key point here – not have to pretend they're real people.

The Corkonian is, objectively, fucking terrible. It is by definition expat as all balls, it is small and terribly laid out and always, always rammed with industry, each of which is tired and crazed with the need for booze after a hard day of playing or talking or writing about video games. It feels like the sort of place you'd avoid on a night out in the UK, filled as it naturally would be with ale-drinking fuckwits whose fists are the people caught on one side of the river bank in that Japanese puzzle and your face is the place they need to get to.

And yet, everyone still goes there. Stop by on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or a Thursday and you'll often be met with the sight of umpteen games journalists talking with one another, brand managers bleating about their upcoming dogshit titles, PR managers standing on stools before shouting the names of popular superheroes and ordering shots for literally everyone there, terrified junior publisher dogsbodies being 'looked after' by older staff who should know better, and everyone mingling and getting along. Well, for a time, anyway. By roughly 9 a good portion of the clientele will be mad on Jägerbombs and high strength German beer that they bought five pints of to avoid queuing again. By 10:30 there will have been at least one incident involving a spilt drink and a fiery local moaning that a pub explicitly designed to attract Brits has, yes, attracted Brits. By 12 most people will have regained their senses and sloped off back to their hotels, in anticipation of...

The show itself

If E3 is a consumerist nightmare, a theme park which lets in more toddlers, freeloaders, and fucking chancers than it does actual journalists, then Gamescom is exactly the same, albeit much more structured. At E3 everybody mixes on the show floor, no matter if you've won a GMA or still watch the VMAs. You're as likely to see Peter Moore walking around as you are Peter Parker, or people dressed as him. It's a zoo, but the animals can all talk and wear GoPros and get in your way while they take photos of a promo woman dressed as Cammy who looks like she's in severe pain.

Gamescom, on the other hand, has a dedicated press area alongside a boiling show floor of death. It's possible to avoid said show floor altogether: two years ago I didn't even set foot on it. (Sidenote: I once handed off a much sought-after Titanfall pass to a member of the team upon finding out I had to brave the show floor to play it. No game is worth crossing that for.)

Each developer has a booth tucked away in a dedicated 'business centre'. Granted, there are still games journalists there, but still: you can easily move between appointments, and the atmosphere is generally quite relaxed. Bonus: once you've got the wifi code from, say, EA, you can just loiter there rather than have to slope back to your own booth. There's a restaurant, concessions stands, and generally it feels less like a game show set in a primary school and more like somewhere you can actually work. Unless you're heading out among the normals, of course, in which case you'll have to get through this...

The hallways of doom

Credit: Nintendo Life

Fuck. That.