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We couldn’t actually make it to Gamescom this year, although the invite was there, we were doing other things like getting lap dances.  Still a good friend of mine did happen to be there and offered to share all the things she saw and people she spoke to.

In a guest post from English Mum (A person for whom the terms “yummy mummy” and “milf” were created) she dishes the dirt on Gamescom 2010.

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Admit it, you’ve all got a person in your mind when you think about a gamer. I wouldn’t say there was a ‘type’ exactly, but arriving at Gamescom 2010 in Cologne, there certainly seems to be an awful lot of Comic Book Guys around, plus it’s pretty hard to spot a woman (oh, unless she is dressed up as Lara Croft in tight leather, obviously).

First up, though, I do meet a woman. Not just any old woman, admittedly, but Shannon Loftis, Studio Manager at Xbox and co-creator of the new Xbox Kinect. Shannon is adamant that Kinect, being controller-free (it recognises your body movements from a sensor placed on the TV) will make gaming more inclusive ‘I trialled the Kinect in my home, and everyone from the kids to the grandparents were joining in and having fun – removing the controller means that anyone can walk up to the TV and join in the game.’

As my kids play river rafting on Kinect Adventures (the launch title going out with every Kinect console), we chat about online gaming, and how she feels that it is becoming less ‘niche’: ‘I hope there’ll be a time when it’s not just young men that have gamer tags. I want it to be a safe environment for kids and a welcoming environment for women, too. Hopefully the Kinect will play a part in that’.

I tell her of my own son’s addiction to Halo and ask whether there’ll be ‘shoot ‘em ups’ released on Kinect? ‘I think with technology this new, it deserves new concepts designed from scratch’, hence she doesn’t see a Kinect version of Halo or Fable in Xbox’s future, but is certain that the platform will embrace every genre of game.

And what about the competition? I ask if it bothers her that there’ll be people taking her design apart and trying to copy it the minute it hits the shops. ‘Bring it on. I’m here to inspire the industry. My team designed most of the major technology in the Kinect system, and if that technology starts appearing on the market, then I’ve done my job well’

So with Kinect ready to launch, and ‘most of the bugs’ ironed out (‘I offered my kids $1 a bug, confident they wouldn’t find any – they found 19!’, she laughs), what’s next for gamers? ‘I can’t say too much, but we’re looking at technology that reads facial expressions – potentially the game could react differently to different emotions, and there’s 3D too’. As we leave, and the next German film crew are ready to come in, she asks if we can stay a bit longer: ‘it’s not been like working at all!’ – too late, though, because Comic Book Guy is already in the room.

Kinect goes on general release in November.

Fable III

Next up, I’m introduced to Peter Molyneux, the enigmatic creator of Fable and legendary games designer. He’s rushing off but quickly wants to show me the new Fable III. As we’re playing, he tells me that he wanted Fable III to be completely different. ‘I talked to a lot of people who had played Fable II and they couldn’t really tell me the story of the game. This time, I wanted it to have a beginning, a middle and an end – to be a real ‘quest’.’ He shows me several areas of the game that he’s really proud of. As usual, the setting is atmospheric and beautifully detailed. Gone are the difficult to navigate menus, and a new area with a ‘personal butler’ is easy to navigate. We ‘walk through’ and he shows me how you can try on costumes, rather than see a flat image of them. He laughs when he says his team wanted him to voice one of the characters in the new game. He thought it would be ‘naff’, (they settled on John Cleese instead), but as he rushes off he tells me that if you look closely, you’ll see his name on a gravestone – ‘that’s enough for me’.

Fable III is out 29/10/10.

Halo Reach

Lastly, I meet Brian Jarrard who heads up the 100 strong team from Bungie that have been working on the new Halo Reach ‘unlike ODST which was really just a small project with a few people working on it’. Brian explains that Halo Reach is a prequel game – the ending of which takes you to the beginning on the first Halo – and walks me through several parts of the game. Although, like with Fable III, we can only view a tiny section of the as yet unreleased game, he shows me Firefight, which now has customisable skulls, meaning endless possibilities for game play, and co-op which is now engineered so that the more people play, the harder the game becomes.

As we’re looking at the new armoury (I choose pink armour for my Spartan – well you have to don’t you?), Brian shows me some of the new armour effects (look out for ‘inclement weather’, which although it costs about ten million credits, will make your Spartan crackle and pop with lightening). Money’s not everything though – you need to work your way through the ranks to unlock a lot of the new armour.

Brian is proud of the new vehicles in the game, and explains that with new ‘motion capture’ techniques, they are more realistic than ever. As we wrap things up, Brian mentions that the game will be released on September 14th, and although time differences mean that the game will actually ‘go live’ in Australia first, his team will all be online playing it. I might even join them.