by Mathieu Goulet-Côté
Place Bonaventure in Montreal was host to one heck of a convention this weekend (8-10 September) Thousands of players attended DreamHack Montreal. From the moment you stepped inside the actual venue, it was easy to see the magnitude of the event. The place was illuminated only by light shows all around, and the atmosphere was set by the music coming from all the different stations.
Who says gaming also says computers and consoles, thus there was a competition between the biggest computer parts company to show off the best of their components in theme build computers, such as a donkey kong PC featuring the monkey on top of the cooling system. No need to say that these companies really put up some huge efforts to impress the crowd; and because quality is not the only thing that impresses, it was more than a hundred of extremely powerful computers that corsair brought for players to test the newest games with exceptional graphic quality as well as impressive fluidity.
Players also had the option to sleep on location and to bring their computer, and five hundreds players did! They were all playing in a single room, which gave way to an impressive show.
Giant monitors were installed across the room to display, in real time, the most impressive players competing against each other in tournaments of different games such as CS:GO, Starcraft II, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Hearthstone and finally Street Fighter V. All of these tournaments were “open,” which means anyone could enter, although only some of them were really accessible to everybody since some tournaments were host to the world’s best players.
They were the real stars of the convention, those E-sport players who all made their way to Montreal to compete in the two major competitions, Starcraft II world championship series & CS:GO DreamHack Montreal. With prizes of respectively 100 000$ and 50 000$, it was no surprise that the tension was palpable. The shows were really incredible and the games more than impressive.
But in all good conventions there’s a cosplay competition, and DreamHack was no different. We had the right to see players incarnate their favorite video game characters with impressive resemblance. The variety of costumes ranged from the new game of the year, overwatch, to Zelda’s characters passing by 7-foot tall transformers.
In the middle of all this hype and competition spirit was some few indie developers presenting their work in what was called the indie zone. Those independent developers had the chance to provide some visibility to their game and the players had the chance to try those games for free and speak with the development teams, which allowed me to give you the below interview with a member of the team behind The Darwin Project.
Comments
Post a Comment