On March 3rd, 2009 the CeBIT 2009 opened it gates in Hannover, Germany. Citing the official press release it’s the place “where 4,300 exhibiting firms from 69 countries are on hand at the No. 1 marketplace for digital solutions, trends and innovations”. This means there surely is some gaming, right? By attending the event in 2008 I knew I could expect at least something, as last year marked Rock Band’s European Premiere and the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) held it’s official qualifiers.

Well, that was last year. This year, everything’s different.

Arriving this morning, the exhibition halls seemed....empty. At least from the outside. A very unusual thing, considering the CeBIT is one of the world’s most important IT conferences. Cheking in at the counter I got my fancy little nameplate and entered the compound, which connects all the halls.



This building surely seems impressive (and useless) for an exhibition of this kind. You may notice something else, too. Yeah...it IS pretty empty. But this isn’t going to stop me, my goal is hall 22 where the gaming area is supposed to be. Of course it immediately started to rain 5 seconds after I took that picture. So let’s head to hall 22 quickly.



Entering hall 22, dubbed the “Intel Gaming Hall”, I had to show my ID card, confirming I am older than 16 years. Yeah, german laws and game ratings. At least this raised my hopes to see something worthwhile, which got quickly shattered as I took a look around.



“Gaming? What? WHERE!?”. I think these were my exact thoughts. Well, they were more like “Spiele? Häh? WO!?” but...that really doesn’t matter. All that matters is, that this is not what I expected. Yes, the CeBIT isn’t a gaming event but there has been a LOT more gaming in the last years. I don’t even know if there is something gaming related in that picture. Walking around the hall for a bit I spotted four games. Guitar Hero World Tour (for the PC, I was told by Activision that this is the world premiere. Is that true?), World In Conflict: Soviet Assault, Live For Speed and Unreal Tournament 3. You may notice that two of these games are old and one is a port of a console game. At first I tried my luck with Guitar Hero World Tour on the PC and played guitar on Coldplay’s “Shiver” (scrolling through the tracklist I couldn’t spot a new song that may be exclusive to the PC). Let me tell you that I’m not a bad Guitar Hero player. I play more Rock Band, but I know how GHWT works and own the game for the 360. “Shiver”, beeing an easy song, I chose Expert difficulty and...had quite a few problems. Not because of the song though, but there were some serious frame drops on the system we played on and the game was probably calibrated wrong as it was nearly impossible to hit more than 20 notes without failing one. It simply wasn’t fun and they need to optimize the framerate badly. That, or the system we played on just sucked....which would be embarrassing. Passing by the “Patriot Memory” booth I noticed it was....empty. Except one PC, which was running UT3. And one guy playing it.



I hope he had his fun. Going further into the hall I came across the World in Conflict: Soviet Assault booth (picture taking not allowed), entered it and watched somedoby else playing the game for about 10 minutes. It looked a lot like the regular World in Conflict (well, it’s just an addon) and you probably need to know WiC to really see the differences. I’ve got to say it looked very nice for an RTS, though. A shame the console versions got cancelled, it reminded me a lot of Tom Clancy’s EndWar, except...better. Leaving the booth I turned right and spotted some F1-simulators. As a big racing and F1 fan , I hoped this would be the best thing to happen on this day.



They had Live For Speed running on a fantasy track with five other players in a three round race. After getting into the cockpits we would get our steering wheels attached (Logitech’s G25), the functions explained (gas is right, brakes are left!) and they started the race. My competition was... pathetic. They crashed all over the place and after three rounds I finished 1st... Again, this was lacking the fun factor I hoped it would have.

I left the hall, headed back to the bus I came with and went on my way back home. This day truly was not worth it, but at least it build up some anticipation for this years “gamescom” in Cologne. I’m really looking forward to it now as it probably is the only gaming event I’m able to attend this year.