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It was the month of ECTS 2001 and I was ofcourse there to see what such a show would be without the major players such as Nintendo and Sony, well mostly Nintendo on my account. A lot of last years exhibitors were gone, such as Disney, Konami, Bandai, 3DO and ofcourse Nintendo who had decided to host their own show which I heard was a huge success. Anyway this gave room for other companies such as Kemco to show off, they were rather invisible at last years show, with only a few GBC titles.

Kemco had, by far, the most interesting stand, showing of their GameCube game Universal Studios, and ofcourse a lot of GBA titles, most interesting was the port of the old SNES game Phalanx. But others such as TDK and Rage were also there with a quite large stand, Rage with Denki Blocks which won quite a few ECTS awards, TDK with their two GBA titles, Lady Sia and No Rules Get Phat, however both were non-playable, only a video was running. Besides the GBA titles, TDK had the Xbox Shrek game and Wendy the Every Witch Way for the GBC on their stand aswell.

Ubi soft was there too, with a large, very crowded, stand. But Ubi had no Nintendo products to show, instead it was all PS2 and PC., so I got my press kit, which had a few GBA titles, and quickly left their stand. Telegames was there again this year, showing off their first person shoot-em-up, Back Track and a few GBC titles.

In all ECTS was pretty boring this year though, very dissapointing and hopefully they can get a bit more companies to attend next year, or ECTS will be pretty much dead in a few years, if not already.

Gameboy Advance games are finally starting to flood the market, in the US atleast. We've even had 4 beta releases this month, which i believe is very cool, so thanks to Paracox or that. Konami is still going strong and delivered 7 of Septembers GBA releases, counting both Asia and the western world. Also Majesco is showing their face, or logo, by releasing the semi-good Turn 'N Burn spinoff F-14 Tomcat, but still the usual Majesco boring game style, did anyone say Fortress? THQ was all over with their kiddie Nikelodeon titles, I have to admit that I was looking forward to Rugrats, really, as early shots from the game looked very good, but the game just proved to be another bad platformer from THQ. Tetris World from THQ was finally out too, but I believe the PD game Tetr*s Advance still does the job better.

It's sad to see how THQ still believes that quantity counts more than quality as not one of their 9 games (incl. 3 betas) were actually worth playing. I can only hope that Moto GP will be a lot better in it's final version which is to be released in November, but MX 2K2 feat. Ricky Carmichael was probably the worst of the lot released this month, closely followed by Miday's NFL Blitz 2002.

BAM was back with another release, Dexter's Laboratory which I honestly didn't expect much of, except that it was made of Virtucraft and had to be somewhat ok. At first it looked more like a bad joke, but once the moves and actual idea of the game was learned, it proved to be a quite decent platformer.

Crave delivered another Men in Black which sure doesn't belong in the better end of the game scale, I know we're still at first-generation games, but still. Activision has a good reputation with their Tony Hawks title are number 3 on the all time sales charts, but only managed to come up with a decent X-Men Final Fight clone.

3DO was back, not with another Army Men title, but instead the delayed Baseball game developed by Möbius. The game looks ok, but very blurry in some places, and plays even worse i'm afraid, what happened to moving the batting player around, and why do you have to, as batting player, to press A before the pitcher throws the ball? If you're a baseball fan, i'd say wait and see what others can cook up.

We finally got our hands on the final version of TDK and RFX' Lady Sia and proved to play even as good and it looks, and must be the best game September could deliver, although golfers might say ESPN Final Round Golf 2002 as Konami finally translated JGTO Golf Master, and it is indeed a great game, but doesn't beat Lady Sia at all.

In all a busy month on the GBA and October looks to be even better, have fun.