I will start with a quote from the Edinburgh Interactive 2009 website - http://www.edinburghinteractivefestival.com/
"Welcome to the Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2009! The spirit of Edinburgh Interactive springs from the genuine passion for celebrating the creative aspects of games, technology, interactivity and community to enhance the enjoyment of learning and leisure. This year’s programme will entertain and excite as well as feed your aspirations."
With that said when I found out about EI 09, I was very excited. Hoping it would be packed full of great tech, people who knew what they were talking about & maybe some cool free stuff that anybody would be expecting from such an event.
I got two free tickets from Gamestation two weeks ago. I thought me & my older brother could go and enjoy the games & technology. It has arrived the day of the event, we get in the car and drive down to the Corn Exchange where it was being held. We walked in handed over our tickets & saw a giant inflatable samurai (I think that's what it was). Walked to our right through double doors & into the room. A huge room, in the middle was Wii Resort to its right a small area for Guitar Hero & to its left on the Main Stage was Eyepet for the PS3. Straight ahead pressed up against the wall were a bunch of X-Box 360's (only two games available to try). To our immediate left along the wall were two tables with laptops on them showing games.
Now i love games, its great to see people playing games and enjoying themselves. It just seems that they could have done alot more with the space available. Nintendo had the biggest area, they had so called Wii experts on hand to help people. Nintendo also had a steel band & ice creams but didn't really capture the imagination.
Sony had the main stage showing Eyepet on what seemed like a loop. It was from what i could gather one maybe two people from Sony, no real opportunity to talk to them if you wanted a conversation.
X-Box had a bank of about 20 consoles, allowing people to play 2 games Batman: Arkham Asylum (which i am very excited about) & Mini Ninjas (not sure what it is). I saw one guy from X-Box again same scenario would apply with them as I mentioned about Sony.
On a sidenote if your a member of the public and want to listen to the speeches, you have to register and pay £100. Do they realise there is a recession or did that bypass EI 09.
In conclusion you can spend about an hour maybe two their and see everything. Go home and think why was I so excited about that. A BIG let down.
