Gamescom 2012: Day 0

Gamescom is "the world's largest trade fair and event highlight for interactive games and entertainment," according to the Gamescom website. The event runs from the 15th to the 19th.

As is the case with almost every major gaming show, a couple of companies jump the gun and have presentations a day or two early. Today sees press conferences by Capcom, EA, and Sony. Tomorrow, Activision/Treyarch show off Black Ops 2 Multiplayer, and Blizzard unveils the Mists of Pandaria opening cinematic on Thursday. Nvidia is also set to unveil the GTX 660 Ti on Thursday.

Verge/Polygon has a "StoryStream" post that they're updating live throughout the day with Gamescom information. The two updates that caught my eye so far are details about Dead Space 3 and the new SimCity. I bought both Dead Space and Dead Space 2 last year during the Amazon and Steam holiday sales, but I haven't played through either of them yet. I should probably get on that. As far as SimCity goes, I've been kind of itching to get my hands on a new SimCity game for a while now. I played the crap out of SimCity 2000 back in the early-to-mid 90's despite not really knowing what was going on since I was 9 or 10 at the time. The last SimCity game (SimCity 4) came out in 2003, which means we're ridiculously overdue for another installment - Maxis focused more on the Sims and Spore, neither of which I really got into. The big news from today revealed that there will be cross-platform play between Mac and PC and that there will be a PC beta that you can sign up for starting tomorrow. The site just started working for me a couple of minutes ago - the beta signup didn't work, but here's the link: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/beta/info

There should be a lot of interesting stuff coming in the next couple of days. Verge/Polygon has a good overview of the entire event that you can find here - stay tuned.