Digiexpo 07 coverage

On games side in this years Digiexpo EA, Sony, Microsoft & Nintendo were strongly present. EA had the biggest expo area of all and second biggest was Sony's area.

I visited Digiexpo on Saturday mid-day and the place was packed full. You had to wait to play all the games, thus my coverage ended up pretty slim since my stay in Messukeskus mostly involved watching others play. Otherwise the event gets thumbs up in my book.

In Nintendo's expo area, people were playing Wii Sports and the usual stuff along with some new Wii & DS games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime - Corruption & Zelda - Phantom Hourglass. I got my hands on Mario Galaxy and i can tell you, the controls felt very intuitive and the visuals looked great as i expected.

Microsoft was displaying their latest games and i could not spot any pre-release games in a quick glance.

EA was running the show. Displaying tons of new games & even titles not released yet. Amongst the games there were, My Sims, The Simpsons games, Crysis, New sport titles & other coming soon titles. EA was showing off games on almost all gaming platforms.

In Sony's area Playstation 3 & PSP games were most prominent. Playstation's Home service was quite visible in their expo setup and decoration & was perhaps the most innovative set decoration in the whole expo area. Their set had different areas for different types of game genres and actually these areas were filled up with gamers typical of that genre. EDIT: Apparently Sony had some pre-release games that you could play also.

Some of the games magazines from Finland were also present, at least Pelit & Pelaaja. Near Pelaaja area the biggest attraction seemed to be Guitar Hero III.

Click here for photos from Digiexpo 07

GDC Scholarship Notification

It’s GDC Scholarship time again! All students interested in the game industry should really take a moment to check it out. On the surface the scholarship includes a main conference pass, a local studio visit, and an industry mentor. But what it really includes is access to a huge network of people with the same interests as you, chances to meet your favorite people in the industry, and loads of information to get your game industry career off the ground. As a 2007 scholarship recipient, I highly recommend students to take advantage of this opportunity. If you would like more information, you can check out the reports from previous winners or take a look at the article I wrote for IGDA Finland after my GDC visit.

-Liz Lehtonen, Chapter Coordinator

IGDA Finland in Helio Magazine!

IGDA Finland was made part of an article in Helio Magazine. I was interviewed for the article last December, almost a year ago. The magazine came out in Spring 2007 and has recently been made available in pdf form. IGDA article starts on page 33 (page 18/31 of the pdf), IGDA Finland gets mentioned on the next page.

- Jay, Lead Chapter Coordinator

November Gathering - Tuesday 13th

Greetings! It's that funky time of the month again! This time we will be packing the house full again with he help of Recoil Games sponsoring drink tickets and snacks for the first ones to arrive. Recoil Games will be presenting some concept art in the gathering from their upcoming next-gen action-adventure game "Earth No More"! Enough said, see you there! Remember, doors open at 19.00 sharp!

*IGDA FINLAND NOVEMBER GATHERING* Place: System Rock, Keskuskatu 4, 00100 Helsinki (map: http://igda.fi/?page_id=5) Time: Tuesday 13th November, doors open at 19.00

Recoil Games was established a year ago and since then we have come a long way. The development of "Earth No More" - a next-gen original IP action-adventure game - together with 3D Realms Entertainment has proceeded extremely well. We thought this would be a perfect time for us to show our friends in the Finnish games industry what we have been up to. But don't expect to see screenshots; we're not there yet :)

-Miikka Luotio, Chapter Coordinator

Mailing list engine update!

Yes, we updated our mailing list engine due to some problems people have been facing in the past! From now on all our invites will be coming from "admin" at "webmaster@igda.fi", so please make sure your spam filter knows to let it through. If you still don't get the next invite and you know you should, please mail to webmaster@igda.fi with your name and email, so we can check if your infos are correct in our lists. Alternatively, you can just update your infos at our monthly meetings at the door.