Today we bring you the impressions of our ECTS man Myrthos covering the first day of the show.

ECTS is not as big as last year, at least that's what I've been told, as this is my first time here. It was also not very crowded, but monday morning already showed that it would be difficult to get through.

I had some appointments made and one of them was to look at Valhalla Chronicles. Unfortunately they did not have a demo, but did have a nice intro movie. However they told me that the UK distributor Koch did have one running. Well they did have a demo indeed, but running it was not and they couldn't get it to work either so nothing new there.

I also saw Pool of Radiance at the UBI Soft booth. Highly anticipated, but somehow it couldn't grasp my attention really well. The character animations looked good even though they were always running (or standing still) and never seemed te be able to walk. The spell animations were really good, but on the other hand the backgrounds were very static with only an occasional fire burning somewhere. Somehow I found the graphics in Baldur's Gate II better. But what can you say after such a short demo?

Another appointment was with Buka, who were displaying Spells of Gold, at least they would have, if the demo was running, which it didn't on the PC they had there. Roman Gadas from Buka told me however that soon there would be a demo to download for everyone. I did see Paradise Cracked however, a tactical RPG, which emphasises the tactical part. It's
a turn-based game and it looked ok, even though it seemed in the short demo that the turn-based implementation took all the speed out of the game.

In Korea there must be an online game developer on every corner. At ECTS there were more than 15 displaying their online games. Most of them were 2D and resembled either Bloodpledge or Redmoon (also from Korea). But I was told that I was wrong and that I should spend some more time to find out how different they were. So now I have all kind of paperwork, demos and contacts to last me for two months ;-).

Maybe some European release dates then:
Divine Divinity has been pushed back to Q1 2002.
Spells of Gold will also be released Q1 2002.
Paradise Cracked should hit the shelfes Q1/Q2 2002.
Pool of Radiance will be released in November and
Valhalla Chronicles before christmas.
Shining Lore, one of the Korean online games will be reaching Europe in teh summer of 2002 and Kingdom Under Fire Gold, from the same publisher will be availabale soon.

Then the boothbabes! Well there aren't any. At least not in the way we know them from E3. Although there was one stand who was promoting the game Erotica Island. I don't have a clue what's it about, but if the girls in the game wear less clothes then the ones on the stand it must be pornographic..... To make you judge it for yourself be aware that I did take pictures so that you can judge for yourselfs.