RAGE!
The Really Awesome Gaming Event that allows folks to not only check out the latest hotness on their favorite gaming tech, but also discover whats going on in the gaming world release wise.
We had the opportunity to wander the half spherical halls of the Coca Cola Dome and examine the exhibits back at the beginning of October, so we decided to give you a little feedback on some of the things you missed if you didn’t make it! Judging from the record figures of 33,000 visitors however, most folks who even showed a mild interest in the convention must have gone. So this article is mostly for those of you who couldn’t make it due to distance, budget or time constraints!
A Little Background
RAGE is a long running expo that was established several years ago by the folks over at New Age Gaming. Every year it takes place around the same time at the same venue, collecting together groups of gamers who want to take part in their large LAN as well as show off the latest in gaming innovations and ideas. It’s branched out into several other fields over the years, from boardgaming, to cosplay, 3D Printing and even game development, it’s a large collection of geeky pursuits, so you get a chance to view a large spectrum of South African gaming scene.
The usual suspects
Albeit with a bit of a time investment to get through the lines… so much lines…
As always, the convention was crammed full of tech vendors, all running various specials on their hardware in order to try pull customers in. This is often a great chance to grab amazing deals. In fact, I know several people who save their budgets up and then go crazy at RAGE, hovering from booth to booth, sniffing out the best deals in order to build their dream machines.
Other then that, the usual assortment of large game production companies had an assortment of large sections dedicated to displaying their latest products and games to soon be released. from the new Starwars battlefront to the upcoming Tomb raider title, for the price of a little bit of queue time you could get your hands on a demo display of the game and give it a spin.
Con Evolution
Adorable little Locally brewed Indie game involving not touching buttons
So one of the things I like to see at conventions is growth and Rage clearly showed this for me this year. Not only did the entire experience seem a bit more interactive for me. Perhaps this year the exhibits were just more in line with my interests, or perhaps it was even something as simple as a better layout, but overall I felt like I spent a lot more time looking over everything!
This coupled with the fact that this year they exhibited the Indie developers work so that everyone could give the top games a spin was great. The game development scene in South Africa is certainly growing, what with titles like Broforce and STASIS it’s clear that slowly but surely we’re catching up with our more affluent contemporaries.
Ferdinand cosplaying Gajeel from Fairytale.
Another major growth that Rage showed was in the field of cosplay, with hundreds of eager costume wearers flooding the floors. With record high numbers entering the Legion Ink cosplay competition on the main stage and some folks even wearing multiple costumes over every day of the event, it’s clear that the cosplay scene in SA is growing along with the rest of the “geek” related subcultures.
Old friends
Folks at Unplug yourself host a game of “On Her Majesty’s Service” An intriguing steam-punk themed resource management game
Rage also plays host to our old friends at GeekXP, Dark Carnival, Outer Limits and Sky Castle Games, who were there in force. GeekXP displaying some amazing augmented reality books which they managed to source from Gencon as well as giving away mind blowing awesome trips overseas, Outer Limits and Dark Carnival selling some of the latest and greatest geek loot and Sky Castle bringing in the latest boardgame hotness as the teamed up with Unplug yourself to host the Boardgame area, allowing folks to play and try out many of the great boardgames out both old and new. This is a great opportunity to try out a game before buying it, plus meet some cool new friends who share the same likes as you!
All in all, well worth the effort in attending. Sure the Queues were long and the air-con in the Dome a little overloaded. But RAGE is one of the few yearly events to showcase gaming to such a degree.
Even better, They are now expanding down to Capetown in March 2016. Will the southern sibling of the Expo have as much punch as it’s older brother? We’ll just have to wait and see! But with the folks over at NAG behind the wheel, I reckon their extended experience will allow things to sale just as smoothly for the new venture.
See you next year RAGE!
<script>// <![CDATA[
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i[‘GoogleAnalyticsObject’]=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,’script’,’//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js’,’ga’); ga(‘create’, ‘UA-30508910-2’, ‘auto’); ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
// ]]></script>