Friday, August 21, 2009

Spirit Tracks at Gamescom 2009




Ah, the Gamescom. In the last six years the German Games Convention took place in Leipzig. And although I lived in different places over the years (for example in Berlin), Leipzig was always about two hours away. Which made the trip more than worth it, even if I always was interested in a few games like Zelda only. I would have liked to check out the Spirit Tracks demo, but I don't have the time to go to Cologne. And the long trip really doesn't make it worth it, especially if you're only interested in ONE game.

However, people seem to complain about, that the demo at the Gamescom is the exact same one from the E3. Actually this has always been the case, we always got the E3 demo. And it's not a bad thing, since when does a regular gamer in Europe get the chance to go to E3? In 2004 I could lay my hands on the 4 level demo of The Minish Cap, it had this really cool modified version of Southern Hyrule Field, where you could check out the Kinstone quest. There were a lot of people there to fuse Kinstones with including Malon and Epona, who came over to your house to sell milk. That year we also got a playable version of Four Swords Adventures, but I don't remember, if it was a demo or the full game. 2005 was quite the highlight with the 4 level demo of Twilight Princess playable on 12 GameCubes, Nintendo had its own exhibition stand for the game and it really got me excited. And in 2006 we got the demo of Phantom Hourglass, which blew away all my doubts about the touchscreen controls in an instant. It also got full exclusive content, except for the Boss (Cyclok), but the part of the sea, the Island and the dungeon were exclusively made for the demo. I guess, this might also be the case for the Spirit Tracks demo, so you probably won't see the track fields and the dungeons from the demo in the full game, only the Boss.

So, basically there are no news. The only new detail, which I didn't notice before, is, that there can be enemy trains and you have to switch the tracks or else you collide with them. But I haven't found a video yet, which actually shows this, it was only mentioned in the new IGN article. I will edit this article, if more details come up, but I doubt so.


PS: According to Amazon Spirit Tracks will be released on December 4th in Europe. Of course there is no guarantee, that this will apply, there weren't any official release dates announced yet. But this release would be perfect for me and I hope the rest of the world doesn't get it a month or so in advance, because I hate those times, since I can't go ANYWHERE in the internet without getting spoiled. So, let the different release dates be as close together as possible.

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