TFI Friday at ECTS 2002
Awards, tournaments and more games than you can shake a particularly ornate stick at
Welcome to the second day of ECTS 2002 at London's Earls Court. As the PlayStation Experience thunders along next door, hoovering up and then spilling countless skaters and other PS2 goodie bag-toting youths happily into the streets by the hour, the trade show located behind closed doors continues to swell as journalists and other games industry folk wander up and down the aisles taking in the sights and sounds. Yesterday was home to the Broken Sword press conference and ECTS keynotes, and today is set to include the ECTS Awards presented by Gaz Top (whose claims to fame include everything from HOW2 and MTV VJing to a current TV series of Game Pad with wife Violet Berlin), and the second day of NVIDIA's Unreal Tournament 2003, er, tournament, amongst other things. UT2003 brought with it Epic's Mark Rein and Jay Wilbur, who took on yesterday's finalists and thoroughly defeated them to their mutual embarrassment. Presumably when the title hits the streets there will be some competition to stand up to the pair of them - unless of course they receive their comeuppance from today's combatants. As for the awards - there are plenty of games on display to vie for the judges' attention, from Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 2 and Acclaim's Vexx to Rage's Rocky and Ubi Soft's countless Clancy blockbusters. Pan-European awards sponsored by a number of publications will also be handed out, and of course publishers, innovative developers and peripheral manufacturers won't be left out either. We'll bring you the news as soon as we hear it from our perch just outside Pizza Express, when the ceremony finishes later this afternoon.