Video Game Fest Pune 2016 :: Noob at VGF

Video Games Fest 2016, a dream come true for Indian Gamers was organised at Seasons Mall Hadapsar on 31 Jan 16 . Organised by Video Game Fest in association with Damandu Games, Seasons, Pune Mirror and Ubisoft. It was an exciting event full of games. Just the way a gamer wants. The main emphasis of the event was Ubisoft and their Just Dance title. But a whole lot of stalls to buy T-shirts and Posters, along with DOTA2 championships, queues of PS4 and some PC modding; VGF ended up having something for every kind of gamer.

The event started at 11:00 AM against scheduled time of 09:00 AM. But, take it from me Gamers are, “Cool people, who never reach on time.” Once the ball started rolling though; the crowd was extremely enthusiastic and full of josh and energy. Most of them expectedly, were from schools and colleges. But interestingly I could see a few middle aged men and women taking part in the gaming activities. Now those are some really cool parents.

I took my time strolling around, and took in all the sights and sounds from the event. The highlights of the event follows.

Cezor

First stall on the right upon entering VGF had a bunch of really amazing gaming rigs. Cezor had their finest gaming machines worth more than Rs. 2 Lakhs on display and it looked awesome.I played Assassins Creed Syndicate and The Witcher 3 on Cezor Play X2. The CPUs not only were powerful but also beautiful.

Cezor makes Custom CPU cases as well on order. We had run into them at IGX and at Comic Con, we even visited their office once; so it was like meeting old friends. The Cezor guys were really helpful, kind and considerate for every gamer coming to their stall. They also had an awesome CPU case which was DOTA inspired. It had a skull coming out of it from one side. A SKULL!!!

Gaming Monk

Next up was Gaming Monk; and it was huge. 10-12 PS4s were queued up and just waiting to get played and competed on by the players. A huge line of fans could be seen dying to get themselves registered for Driveclub, FIFA-16 and Mortal Kombat X competitions. It was one of the most crowded stalls for obvious reasons.

Gaming Monk is a Delhi based company which holds competitions all around India, by setting their own gaming consoles and PCs. A new business model for India, but impressively growing and getting popular among Indian Gamers.

Kurukshetra

This was a big gaming event for a typical PC multiplayer. They held a competition for CS:GO and DOTA 2 in teams of five to six. People were just waiting for the gates to open for that. A very passionate atmosphere for competitive gaming, just as the name suggests, “Battle of KURUKSHETRA!!!”.

I talked to their event manager Ashish Dutta. Amazingly, this was being organised by students of Bhartiya Vidyapeeth University on volunteer basis. The students were hand-picked by Ubisoft for this particular event. BVP also worked as a e-sports partner for the event, and helped organize the e-sport leg of the event.

High Score Competition

Another stall organized by Bhartiya Vidyapeeth University students and this one was based on mobile gaming. They had 8 Ipads, which had light mobile games like Subway Surfers and Traffic Rider. The idea was to get the highest score in that particular hour and win a prize. Having talked to those guys, I found out that the Ipads had been provided by Dumadu. Dumadu is a game development studio based out of Bangalore which works on cross-platform game which includes Android, MAC OS, Windows and Blackberry OS.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL….

Ubisoft

Ubisoft won our hearts, at their own booth. They were holding free competitions on games like The Crew and Trials Fusion. The best thing was that we got access to a new game Assassins’s Creed Chronicles: India. Other games on display included Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and Rayman Adventures.

And when getting out of the booth, as a mark of remembrance, “UBI” was stamped on our wrists to show people that we had “gamed” here.

Just Dance

Yes I know Just Dance should’ve been in Ubisoft booth, but hey, its dancing and requires space to shake a leg. Loud music overpowering all other sounds in the event was totally an attention stealer from the other booths. Just Dance was the event taking all the thunder to its name. Most of the crowd was dancing or spectating the amazing dancers hired by Ubisoft. Playing awesome party song tracks like Blame, Get Low and many others. All that being performed on the mighty power of Xbox One with Kinnect.

VGF Pune was also the venue for the first ever Just Dance Competition in India with prize money of Rs. 20,000. So there is that.

Irrespective of the flak Ubisoft gets in the larger gaming community, it is commendable to see Ubisoft catering to the gamers and totally winning our hearts.

With all the things awesome in VGF, there were some things which could have been improved:

(a) Event started really late which is dampener as the crowd was impatiently waiting.
(b) Playstation network was not working for a long time.
(c) The event could have been advertised extensively in local newspapers, FM, word of mouth publicity. May be a few give aways like Tshirts, caps, tumblers, pen drives would have really attracted/increased the crowd substantially.

Having said that the FUN part definitely dominated the dampners and overall it was an amazing experience for Indian Gamers. In short I would like to say:

“Video Games Fest” makes me feel proud to be a Gamer.

UPDATE

This post was supposed to be published on Monday, but given the news of mismanagement at VGF Pune as reported by my colleagues at AsidCast, we decided to hold its publication, until we were sure we were not delivering the wrong message. Upon talking to our friends over at the website and after reading the article; it appears that their representative from AsidCast focused on e-Sports during the event. While they are completely justified and capable to present their opinion on the event, we can safely confirm that so can we.