Pushing Buttons: The games event that's low on glamour, high on gossip

A slightly shorter missive this week as I'm on my way to Gamescom in Cologne, a convention I attended for the first time in 2006. I played the then-unreleased Nintendo Wii for the first time at my first Gamescom. A few years later, I got a look at Project Natal, Microsoft's mad motion-controlled game experiment that later became the Kinect. I once had the uncomfortable experience of being driven around Cologne in a limo for 20 minutes, while being shown dodgy footage of a licensed Stargate online game that was never released. For more than 15 years, I have honed my journalistic technique by plying tipsy, jetlagged American game developers for rumours after a few pints of Kölsch by the river.